Kitty cams confirm crittercide
 

This is from the USA, but I presume our cats here have similar behaviour when allowed. Lightweight camera attached to pet cats, almost half were observed to successfully hunt and kill small creatures. Several cats adopted second families for extra noms.

Unfortunately I don't think this will do anything much to change public opinion about outdoor vs indoor cats in the USA, but it might help further the message over here?

http://www.kittycams.uga.edu/research.html

Only half successfully kill critters? Amazing.

I have very often wanted to attach a small video camera to our moggie's collar, to find out what it gets up to.

Our first cat was a hunter, but so far as I can tell never caught the same species twice - one frog, one mouse, one rat, one pigeon, one mynah, etc. We didn't mind it catching a rat and a mouse in the house.

Our latest cat has not yet been known to catch anything. But bird nests could be at risk.

PS. Our local "wildlife" isn't all that wild. Our local wildlife is more than 50% pets.

My family cat was definitely a killer. Mice, rats, birds, possums, snakes, and almost small children. A camera might have just increased the count.

I had a cat when I was young and we lived in the country at a place called Yellingbo which is now a reserve for the helmeted honeyeater. Lizzie would often bring back birds and critters including rabbits. I shudder to think of the body count it stacked up in its life. Different times then though, I dont think people were that aware, we certainly were not

Dads property reached a sort of equilibrium though, we had possums and wombats, and wallabys and big goannas plus foxes and rabbits. It might have been a saving grace that there were not too many houses around and so not that many pets and I dont recall feral cats being mentioned much as an issue.

There was also a Siamese but that was a lazy thing and spent most of its life inside on top of the TV basking by the window whilst lizzy was conducting its native genocide outside.

The research says that only

I don't have a cat, but most of the critters around my place deserve death anyway.