Word: preys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 could be having a "very significant" impact on the environment...
...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...
Tallying and analyzing their data at the end of a year, the investigators found that the cats had claimed almost 1,100 items of prey, 64% consisting of small mammals: mostly wood mice, field voles and common shrews, interspersed with an occasional rabbit, weasel or pipistrelle bat. The remaining victims, all birds, included sparrows, song thrushes, blackbirds and robins...
Will cat fanciers find these conclusions unsettling? Evidently not. When the authors' work was published earlier in a scientific journal, including the fact that a few Bedfordshire cats had each contributed as many as 100 items of prey to the study, they received letters from other cat owners boasting of their own pets' prowess. The record, they report, is currently held by a cat from Dorset that dragged in more than 400 little creatures in one year. The scientists are aghast. "These proud owners," they report, "seem quite unperturbed by the slaughter...
...worst. "Private people are not prepared to be torn apart like this under the public microscope," warns Colorado physician Eugene O'Neill, an old friend of Hazelwood's. "I've seen patients on the verge of suicide over things like this. How much longer are we going to prey on this human being...