About those killer cats -

[Festivito]

24. The assumption that cats are spread uniformly across the lower US seems unlikely.

For example, our mountainous regions probably do not have that uniform distribution of cats, feral or other.

Yet, they use this uniform distribution to then get these high predation estimates.

We defined a uniform distribution rather than a normal distribution because the lack of rigorously derived estimates of un-owned cat population size precludes assignment of greater probability to a particular value. This range of abundance is conservative given local U.S. studies that estimate densities of 0.06-0.16 un-owned cats per ha 51 52 53 which extrapolates to 46-123 million un-owned cats across the land area of the contiguous U.S. The validity of extrapolating three density values to a national-scale abundance estimate is questionable.

They use the roughly 3-million square miles of the lower US and get one number range.

Not to say the evidence is not mounting. I think more will be coming on this subject. But, I think our real problem with loss of animals in nature is from other causes that we need to address first. GMOs, pesticides/herbicides, CO2, ... before we get to cats.