The predation of wildlife by domestic cats (Felis catus) is a complex problem: Cats are popular companion animals in modern society but are also acknowledged predators of birds, herpetofauna, invertebrates, and small mammals. A comprehensive understanding of this conservation issue demands an understanding of both the ecological consequence of owning a domestic cat and the attitudes of cat owners. Here, we determine whether cat owners are aware of the predatory behavior of their cats, using data collected from 86 cats in two UK villages. We examine whether the amount of prey their cat returns influences the attitudes of 45 cat owners toward the broader issue of domestic cat predation. We also contribute to the wider understanding of physiological, spatial, and behavioral drivers of prey returns among cats. We find an association between actual prey returns and owner predictions at the coarse scale of predatory/nonpredatory behavior, but no correlation between the observed and predicted prey-return rates among predatory cats. Cat owners generally disagreed with the statement that cats are harmful to wildlife, and disfavored all mitigation options apart from neutering. These attitudes were uncorrelated with the predatory behavior of their cats. Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats’ impacts on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information. Management options for the mitigation of cat predation appear unlikely to work if they focus on “predation awareness” campaigns or restrictions of cat freedom.

Sensitivity analyses of population projection matrix (PPM) models are often used to identify life-history perturbations that will most influence a population's future dynamics. Sensitivities are linear extrapolations of the relationship between a population's growth rate and perturbations to its demographic parameters. Their effectiveness depends on the validity of the assumption of linearity. Here we assess whether sensitivity analysis is an appropriate tool to investigate the effect of predation by cats on the population growth rates of their avian prey. We assess whether predation by cats leads to non-linear effects on population growth and compare population growth rates predicted by sensitivity analysis with those predicted by a non-linear simulation. For a two-stage, age-classified House Sparrow Passer domesticus PPM slight non-linearity arose when PPM elements were perturbed, but perturbation to the vital rates underlying the matrix elements had a linear impact on population growth rate. We found a similar effect with a slightly larger three-stage, age-classified PPM for a Winter Wren Troglodytes troglodytes population perturbed by cat predation. For some avian species, predation by cats may cause linear or only slightly nonlinear impacts on population growth rates. For these species, sensitivity analysis appears to be a useful conservation tool. However, further work on multiple perturbations to avian prey species with more complicated life histories and higher-dimension PPM models is required.