Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats

Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats.

Feral cats are normally territorial in Australia's tropical savannahs, and hunt intensively with home-ranges only two to three kilometres across. Here we report that they also undertake expeditions of up to 12.5 km from their home ranges to hunt for short periods over recently burned areas. Cats are especially likely to travel to areas burned at high intensity, probably in response to vulnerabi...

Landscape Management of Fire and Grazing Regimes Alters the Fine-Scale Habitat Utilisation by Feral Cats

Intensification of fires and grazing by large herbivores has caused population declines in small vertebrates in many ecosystems worldwide. Impacts are rarely direct, and usually appear driven via indirect pathways, such as changes to predator-prey dynamics. Fire events and grazing may improve habitat and/or hunting success for the predators of small mammals, however, such impacts have not been ...

Intense selective hunting leads to artificial evolution in horn size

The potential for selective harvests to induce rapid evolutionary change is an important question for conservation and evolutionary biology, with numerous biological, social and economic implications. We analyze 39 years of phenotypic data on horn size in bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) subject to intense trophy hunting for 23 years, after which harvests nearly ceased. Our analyses revealed a s...

The welfare of feral cats and wildlife.

T are an estimated 60 to 100 million feral and abandoned cats in the United States. By any measure, this is an important welfare issue, and the many bodies of free-roaming cats visible along roadsides across the country are mute testimony to the tragedy of their unhappy lives. Many people of goodwill want to see this situation improved. Some believe that feeding feral cats; trapping, neutering,...

Feral Cats: Too Long a Threat to Hawaiian Wildlife