These days, private consumer drones are all over the news. Suspicious unidentified drones popping up in airfields. Drones making elaborate lighted formations to celebrate the New Year. A drone even recently grounded one of the firefighting planes working on the Los Angeles wildfires.
Usage of the machines have soared, as people realize their usefulness in film and photography, especially in areas like real estate and surveying. But although drones sound super high-tech, most are nothing more than tiny machines with a camera attached, hardly more elaborate or sturdy than your average radio-controlled toy car.
Which means that they might not survive a casual encounter with even a small predatorβlike a house cat. View the original article to see embedded media. The drone pilot in this video is a surveyor who uses the machinery to take aerial pictures of the properties and heritage landmarks that he works on. But in this clip, we see a possible pitfall, in the form of a feline who does not like this odd, buzzing machine in his space.
Drones can be invasive of privacyβthough obviously in this case, the surveyor was supposed to be there. Cats, however, may not understand the technical difference. Cats are small but efficient predators who were domesticated entirely for their ability to hunt. Pest control is the reason that cats have lived alongside humans for thousands of years, and it is still one of their main activities.
But where pests are few, outdoor cats will gladly hunt birds, and are responsible for killing millions of native songbirds every year. One must not be surprised to learn they take down the occasional drone as well. In fact, cats are classified as invasive species due to their intense predation on a small area around their home when allowed to roam free. It is thought that their hunting skills are so concentrated because that is how they were used for thousands of yearsβas pest control around barns and granaries, keeping out mice, rats, and other animals which may prove a problem for agricultural humans.
