Imagine that in an instant all domestic cats on the planet disappeared! No more disgruntled “meows” at night, fur on dark clothing, or allergies. Unfortunately, cute pictures will also vanish along with the lazy fluffballs. Will you miss the cats or, on the contrary, be glad? In fact, it doesn’t matter much, as these animals have a significant impact on the life of our planet.
Cats, both domestic and feral, may seem quite defenseless. They love to sweetly beg for food, make sad eyes when they are ignored for too long, and snuggle up to warm radiators. However, according to Alan Beck, a professor of veterinary medicine and director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University, cats are just pretending! In reality, they are excellent predators with adaptive hunting behavior and can survive even on their own.
That is why the Earth would undergo significant changes without them. By eliminating mice and rats in barns, grain storage facilities, and various industries, cats play a vital role in controlling pest populations. In India, cats serve as the main “guardians” of grain, the loss of which constantly occurs due to a large number of rodents. In other words, without cats, people could have significantly less food.
Undoubtedly, the disappearance of these furry predators would lead to a sharp increase in pest populations. A study conducted in 1997 in the UK showed that an average domestic cat brings home more than 11 dead animals (including mice, birds, frogs, etc.) in six months. This means that 9 million British cats kill about 200 million wild animals each year. At the same time, work done in New Zealand in 1979 showed that when cats nearly disappeared from a small local island, the rat population on it quickly increased fourfold.
If the rodent population sharply increases, it will undoubtedly trigger a chain of other consequences. For example, on the same island in New Zealand, ecologists noticed that as the rat population grew, the population of seabirds, whose eggs are eaten by rodents, rapidly declined. If cats disappeared worldwide, the number of birds on the planet would significantly drop. At the same time, populations of predators that also hunt rodents would, on the contrary, increase.
However, despite the significant impact cats have on the ecosystem, some countries have faced issues with the cat population becoming so large that it now threatens local endangered species. For instance, in Australia, stray and domestic cats kill about 390 million animals each year. These figures raise serious concerns among local ecologists, prompting them to urge authorities to pay attention to controlling the population of these pets.
