Not mice or poor animal control practices, but women could be the real reason behind the overburdening population of stray cats in parts of China, or so suggest five researchers at Nanjing University.

The findings, however, led to accusations of the study being “discriminatory”, resulting in it being pulled down Friday

“We found that the population density of free-ranging cats is linearly related to the proportion of female students in the university,” reads the abstract of the study ‘Where there are girls, there are cats’, which was published by the Biological Conservation.

“Are they suggesting controlling the density of human females as a strategy for managing free ranging (cat icon)?” asked one Twitter user.

“Extensive evidence suggests that free-ranging cats caused numerous localised population declines and extirpations (local extinction) of prey species,” reads the introduction.

The study then highlights that the “the proportion of human females may affect the cat population in a certain area”.

The researchers hypothesised that cat density could be negatively related to human sex ratio (human male/human female) i.e. the higher the number of cats, the more skewed the sex ratio is towards the females. It noted that human females are more concerned with stray cats and have a “higher tendency to feed them than human males”. It also said cats react “more positively to human females than human males”.

 

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