A study shows that the creature in your house is very violent

The Animals that Cats Eat: How Did Lepczyk and Christopher Learn to Eat Their First Four Years of Life? A Commentary on Professor Peter Marra

More research shows that letting your sweet angel leave the confines of your house is not good for the environment.

Compiling evidence from a century of research from across the globe, Lepczyk’s team identified over 2,000 animal species eaten by cats—and that’s only what scientists have recorded so far. The 347 species that are at risk of extinction have since been listed as extinct in the wild. Peter Marra is dean of the Earth Commons Institute and biology professor at Georgetown University, who was not involved in the study, and he said that scientists have known for ages that felines are an ecological nightmare.

What are the people talking about? Christopher is a co-author of the paper and spoke with NPR to help expand on the findings.

They are eating insects and small animals in their diet. They eat insects. That wasn’t necessarily new, but we didn’t really have an idea that they were eating so many things. Our concern is that most scientists that have done these studies in the past weren’t looking for insects and they weren’t taxonomists.

I think also just the totality, we really at some point, we started to get more and more individual species picked up in our study, and it kind of seemed almost endless.

Why cats aren’t opportunists: How do cats get their lives, and how can they make ends meet? A case study of Marra

When you see something like a whole lot of juveniles hatch out of eggs, it’s an opportunity for predators to obtain pretty easy … The prey. And so I think if we contextualize it that way, it’s probably not surprising.

That doesn’t mean a cat has no effect on the environment. A lot of the time, we don’t observe what cats eat, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t actually eating outside.

Since they were domesticated in the Middle East nearly 10,000 years ago, cats have traveled pretty much everywhere humans have. To thrive in so many different environments, felines became opportunists. While some animals, like pandas and koalas, stick to a limited menu of specific foods, “cats are not diet specialists,” says Marra. They are just trying to make ends meet.

My cat slept through Marra’s video call, barely out of frame, blissfully ignorant of the ecological damage she caused in her wayward youth. She’s a sweet, perfect angel baby, and many doting cat parents feel the same about their own kitties. Is it really possible to get rid of them? Marra believes that cats are in our culture. “It gets confusing when we start to talk about taking one life to save another.”

Your cat was built for murder, so you should not let their fluff fool you. Felines, no matter how chonky, eepy, or boopable, are remarkably adaptable obligate carnivores, down to eat just about anything that fits in their mouth.