... All the cats in the world died?

Many people love cats, not because they are extremely useful, but rather because they are so adorable. We mostly see them lying around and sleeping and therefore think that cats have to be really lazy. Maybe you might even think it would not make a difference at all if all the cats in the world suddenly died. But let us now have a look at what would actually happen if all of them died.

Almost all cat owners feed their cats every day thinking their beloved pet would not survive without their help. But cats are of course quite effective predators of small animals. They can even survive pretty good by their own when the prey is limited.

And that is actually why also people who do not like cats at all would miss them. They kill the mice and rats in barns and grain storages. So, they play a significant role in lessening the amount of grain we loose due to rodents, either caused by eating all the grain or infecting it.

Now you can see that it is not the cats that are dependent on us humans because we feed them. But it is rather the other way around. We ourselves would have less food if there were no cats left to keep the rodents in check.

But how dramatic would it be after all? There happen to be studies about this exact topic. There has for example been a study in New Zealand in 1979, investigating what would happen if they removed all the cats from a small island. They found out that the rat population got four times as big quite fast.

And even if you only change a little bit in an ecosystem, the effects can be really huge. Because all of the rats in the study needed more food and ate a lot of birds’ eggs the population of seabirds declined.

So, as you can see now, even though cats seem to be lazy and useless they are actually important for our ecosystem and help us loosing less food to rodents.