Student Opinion | How Well Do You Know Your Pet? - NYTimes.com

We lap up those adorable videos of Fluffy playing the piano or flushing the toilet. But cats, dogs and other popular pets also have wild-animal instincts we don?t always see when we?re cuddling with them on the couch.

How well do you know your pet? Have you ever had an interaction with a pet, either your own or someone else?s, when you saw firsthand its wild-animal nature?

In ?That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think,? Natalie Angier writes about the serious problem of domestic cats killing native wildlife.

For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new truth: cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States ? both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it ? kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.

Students: Tell us ?

• How important are pets in your life? What role do they play?
• How well do you know your pet? Do you know what your pet is doing when you?re not around?
• Have you ever had an interaction with a pet, either your own or someone else?s, when you saw firsthand its wild-animal nature?
• Have you ever witnessed a pet injure or kill wildlife?
• Two Times articles this month have highlighted how pets released into the wild ? house cats and snakes ? have multiplied exponentially and threatened native wildlife, like songbirds. What should our society do with unwanted or stray pets?

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NOTE: Students, please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

Source: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/how-well-do-you-know-your-pet/

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