Anyone who has watched her cat hunker down on its haunches, lock eyes on a moving target — a twitching toe or finger, a laser-pointer dot, a songbird — and pounce, knows that she is cohabitating with a predator. But while we might have felt the consequences of our pets' teeth and claws, cats owners are often in denial about the damage their beloved feline friends are wrecking on the environment:
[Cats] are "cuddly killers" that butcher tens of billions of songbirds, small mammals, reptiles, and lizards each year and push vulnerable species toward extinction. Cats hunt when they are hungry and hunt when they are full. "In the United States," [Peter P. Marra and Chris Santella write in Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer], "more birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats than from wind turbines, automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windows, and other so-called direct anthropogenic causes combined." [The New York Review of Books]
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