A stray cat wiped out an entire European ground squirrel colony, also known as European souslik, that had found refuge on the agricultural farm of the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Macedonia.
Lyda Rammou, a postgraduate researcher in biology studying the species in Greece, told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA) that the university’s farm, spanning 180 hectares, had become the home of the squirrel family since 2021, but a stray cat decimated its population in just two years.
As Rammou explained, while other stray cats roaming the compounds posed no threat to the European ground squirrels, which are on the Red List of endangered species of the IUCN (The International Union for Conservation of Nature), a specific female cat mastered the way of ferreting out the rodents, eventually killing them all off.
The population of the European ground squirrel, which is approximately 20 cm in length and, unlike tree squirrels, burrows underground in large fields at night, appearing during the day in search of food like seeds, has declined significantly across the continent.
Over the past decade alone, the population of European squirrels is estimated to have dropped by 30%.
The main reasons for the precipitous drop in its numbers are the loss of habitat, fragmentation, and degradation, primarily caused by agricultural land-use changes and urbanization.
Stray cats pose a serious threat to wildlife and have been implicated in the extinction of at least 63 species worldwide, according to Elias Strachinis, a PhD candidate in biology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH).
“To be clear, we’re not demonizing cats by presenting real data and an internationally documented issue,” Strachinis told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA). “The blame does not lie with the cats, but with us humans, who allow uncontrolled breeding and abandonment.”
A 2013 study published in Nature Communications estimated that cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion small mammals annually, underscoring the widespread ecological impact of feral and outdoor domestic cats.
