Word: churcher
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While fond of his cat, British biologist Peter Churcher looked askance at its practice of dragging small mammals and birds into his Bedfordshire house and devouring them under the kitchen table "to the sound of crunching bones." One of Churcher's associates, John Lawton, a professor of community ecology at the University of London, was similarly impressed by his own cat's predatory pursuits. With the natural curiosity of true scientists, they decided to look further into the depredations of felines. If all the domestic cats in Britain caught as much prey as theirs did, the two men reasoned, they...
Hyperbole? Not at all. Writing in the July issue of Natural History, Churcher and Lawton estimate that Britain's 5 million house cats wreak an annual toll of some 70 million animals and birds...
...reaching this astonishing conclusion, the intrepid investigators used only the most rigorous scientific methods. Choosing Churcher's small village as their test site, they conducted a feline census and found that 78 cats resided in the community's 173 houses, "a slightly higher incidence of cat owning than in Britain as a whole." Owners of 77 of the cats agreed to cooperate. Each was given a supply of consecutively numbered polyethylene bags labeled with his cat's code letter and asked to store whatever was left of any prey his pet brought home...