Chris Lepczyk

They engage a lot of other animals in ways that we don't always think, including other cats.

And we found a lot of information, you know, over the years now with cats eating just a wide variety of different animals or killing those animals, but not necessarily eating them just from putting cameras on.

I mean, if we think about how they're distributed in the world, they are because they've really been one of the most widespread animals that people have moved around on the planet.

And they exist in many locations that we would not think very feasible.

That doesn't mean they're living well, but they are surviving.

And so you can go to pretty remote places on the planet and find that a cat can survive.

You know, they just need animal protein.

They don't have to.

They can go a long time without water.

They don't need people around.

You may not have a large population of cats, but they can certainly persist a lot longer than I think most of people think ordinarily they would.

Yeah, there's pretty large risks.

I mean, I think as we noted in the paper that just came out, you know, cats are moving across roads three, four, five times a day.

And, you know, those are cats that we've tracked and watched.

But I think we could back that up with a lot of other studies.

Now, there was a really good paper that came out last month looking at just roadkill around the world.

And the amount of animals, not just cats that are hit by cars regularly is very high.

So road mortality is, you know, animals don't perceive vehicles the way humans do.

And it's a pretty, I mean, it's something we've known about for a long time, but I think we didn't really have this understanding until a few of the studies, how many cats are crossing roads on a regular basis.

But yeah, that's a great source of mortality.