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Wildlife conservation in the urban environment: are pets a threat?
Summary
If the maintenance of natural biodiversity is the key to a sustainable, healthy environment, then wildlife conservation is as important in the urban and peri-urban environment as it is anywhere else.
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Whilst "wildlife" in its best meaning includes all life forms in both the plant and animal kingdoms, in reality it is the vertebrates which attract the most attention. Recently there has been a greatly increased concern about the threat to vertebrate wildlife from domestic pets, in particular predation by domestic cats and dogs. Whilst predation by cats and dogs is shown here to be reasonably widespread both in terms of species and numbers, this study tends to indicate that, from a strictly conservation point of view, the predatory effect of cats and dogs is of less significance than has previously been portrayed. It also seems likely that land management practices necessary for the keeping of pet horses constitutes a far greater threat to wildlife conservation than the more obvious toll extracted by the behaviour of the essentially carnivorous cat and dog. Aside from this largely academic consideration of species conservation however, there is the equally legitimate issue of wildlife welfare and from this point of view any reasonable measures designed to reduce or eliminate wildlife predation by domestic dogs and cats must be encouraged.
