While fond of his cat, British biologist Peter Churcher looked askance at its practice of dragging small mammals and birds into his Bedfordshire house and devouring them under the kitchen table "to the sound of crunching bones." One of Churcher's associates, 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...
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