Overview:

With urban wildlife already being an all too understudied field, research into dangers to these animals remains a pressing matter. One focus centralizes on how both domesticated and feral cats pose a threat to urban wildlife and the few species that can survive in a harsher environment separated from nature. When released into an outdoor environment, cats are skilled predators and will take on a wide variety of urban prey. When deciding on management to reduce further widescale loss of urban wildlife, many factor must be considered in how people will accept policies regarding restrictions on cats.

Methods:

In this article they only compiled findings of other studies to create a general guide for going about creating future policies. They listed 4 steps that outlined what should be considered before making any actions. First, ensure there are measures that need to be taken through scientific evidence. Without proof of a significant issue, large-scale policy changes shouldn’t be pushed out to the public. They stated that issues may arise with cat management as many instances are localized dangers and may not have the same effects in one area compared to another. Their second step was to determine how precautious they should be given the current state of the issue. Since there are so many risks in drawing conclusions combined with limited data, they deemed the study to demonstrate the need for strong precaution in all studies. Third, discuss what measures could be applied to aid in solving the problem. Ways to reduce urban wildlife kills by cats include predation deterrents like bells or electronic noises to give away stalking cats. There is also the method of sterilization or euthanasian of feral cats to prevent further spread of danger. Finally, the last step is to decide on what measures should be applied. This is where the most conflict occurs as the public will have a strong sway in what measures they can accept and what takes things too far past their comfort zone. Lethal measures for feral cats will generally be heavily fought as well as complete restrictions to the indoors. Finding ways to reduce the issue while not angering cat owners too much is the balance studies need to strive for.

Discussion:

Without much evidence in the study on cats interacting with urban wildlife, it can be very difficult to secure an approved plan that will greatly affect the number of predation attacks cats create. This is why the importance of precautionary measures can provide a plan of action using plausible reasoning from which scientists can then take action with more freedom to aid in predation prevention. By then framing these actions as small scale experiments, we can gain more data and evidence that can then help push for wider regulations that will do more good for urban species protection. Finally they find that consultation with the public is one of the last important steps. By talking with residents, they can see what limits are acceptable such as sterilization and warning noises. Using this they can also find where they’ll encounter heavier resistance in areas like euthanasia and limiting the space in which cats can roam. So while citizens’ opinions may not accurately represent cats’ impact on urban wildlife, we can use it to see what projects we should focus on for highest success of prevention alongside public support.

Critique:

Overall, the article does present good counterpoints to all their suggestions and recognizes where their methods will encounter public backlash. The use of precautionary methods is important in the studies of scientific research and an important topic to address when creating policies. However, the main issue I find with the article is that it possesses very little data of its own. The methods section has been heavily altered into more of a guide on scientific research based on results of other experiments. The article has no data of its own experimentation and no graphs to provide visual results that can be used to easily see changes in population from cat predation. The article has a solid understanding of the issue cats present to both diurnal and nocturnal forms of wildlife and provides methods to solve them. But like I stated before, it does not provide any substantial data showing how these changes have a material effect on the urban wildlife. While the article was written at a time where there was not much research on the subject it could have been greatly improved with data of its own to contribute to studies and its own claims. Alongside this addition of their own research study I would suggest adding graphs to convey their data as their only figure in the article is just a summary of the whole ‘methods’ section.

Reference:

Michael C. Calver, Jacky Grayson, Maggie Lilith, Christopher R. Dickman, Applying the precautionary principle to the issue of impacts by pet cats on urban wildlife, Biological Conservation, Volume 144, Issue 6, 2011, Pages 1895-1901, ISSN 0006-3207, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2011.04.015.