I was surprised to recently learn that as many as 30% of people acquire their cats because they were found as strays or abandoned or “just showed up” (New et al. 2004) This does not include cats adopted from shelters, which accounted for another 13% of cats acquired, or those adopted from rescue groups, friends […]
Adoption of Stray Cats and the Importance of Lost Pet Posters Read More »
Trail cameras (also called wildlife, game, scouting, motion-sensitive, surveillance or remote cameras) can be highly effective tools for helping locate and recover displaced cats (including escaped indoor-only cats) and skittish lost dogs. They can help provide evidence that the lost pet is in the area and whether s/he will enter a humane trap if one
Online Resources for Selecting and Using a Trail Camera Read More »
Road traffic accidents (RTAs) are a common cause of injury and death for outdoor-access cats. Olsen and Allen (2001) found that 51% of outdoor-access cats that suddenly and unexpectedly died were the result of RTAs, and Rochlitz et al. (2001) found that RTAs were the forth most common cause of death for cats after old
Factors that May Predispose Cats to Road Traffic Accidents Read More »
When an outdoor-access cat goes missing from its home range, this frequently means that something has happened to the cat to prevent it from returning home. Death, injury or illness may all prevent a cat from returning home. When sick or injured, a cat may hide within its home range and may die if not
The Cooke County, Illinois, Coyote Project provides some interesting research on observations of coyote attacks on dogs in the Chicago metropolitan area. Using a search of newspaper databases from 1990-2004, they found 70 articles of coyote attacks on dogs. The average number of attacks per year increased from 0-2/yr in 1990 up to 6-14/yr in
Many lost cats will react in fear when they are approached by any person including their owner. This well documented behavior is frequently confusing and even heart-breaking to the lost cat’s owner who cannot understand why their cat would act this way. I think that former pet detective Donna Holsten described this phenomenon best when
Owners’ of lost cats are frequently concerned with whether their cat might be hiding or lost somewhere in the woods. This is a valid concern since 1) the probability of detection may be very low in the woods depending on the density and type of vegetation; 2) there may be many miles of woods surrounding
Habitat Use of Suburban Cats: do they travel in the woods? Read More »
Most studies of urban/suburban coyotes have found that coyotes in these areas relied predominantly on natural food sources rather than human generated food such as trash, domestic animals, pet food, and domestic fruit (Gerht and Riley 2010; Morey et al. 2007). The most common food items were leporids (rabbits) and rodents and occasionally deer or
While the behavior of lost cats is likely to differ from that of outdoor-access or free-ranging (stray, feral or farm) cats, we can still learn something from studying their normal movement patterns. In this post, I want to focus on research studies that measured how far cats normally traveled within their home ranges and the
Before covering additional topics on cat behavior, I wanted to take a moment to review cat research in general. Although the cat is the most popular pet in the US, there is surprisingly little research on its natural behavior. So far I have only been able to find five research studies that focus on the
This post relates to the earlier post “Observations of Coyote Predation on Cats.” Although it may sound like I’m criticizing Grubbs and Krausman’s (2009) study, I’m not saying that we should disregard the results entirely. As I said earlier, this is a fascinating research study and the only published study on observations of coyote-cat interactions.
More Observations on Coyote-Cat Interactions: What Can We Learn? Read More »
In 2009 Grubbs and Krausman published a study on “Observations of Coyote-Cat Interactions,” which was then dubbed “Coyotes Eat Cats!” by the media. This is a very interesting study since it is the only published research on direct observations of coyote-cat interactions. However, I’m skeptical that this high level of coyote predation on cats is
