Feral cats can and do eat squirrels, but squirrels are far from a preferred or common prey item. Feral cats are opportunistic predators that will hunt almost any small animal they encounter, yet studies of their diets consistently show they favor easier targets like mice, rats, birds, and even frogs over squirrels. When a feral cat does take a squirrel, it’s typically a case of opportunity rather than routine hunting.
Where Squirrels Rank in the Feral Cat Diet
Feral cats eat a wide range of animals, but small rodents and rabbits dominate. A study of feral cat diets on the Canary Islands found that introduced mammals, especially rabbits and mice, made up more than 90% of the vertebrate prey biomass. Mice were the single most common mammal caught, while rabbits contributed roughly 58% of the total prey weight consumed.
Squirrels, despite being abundant on the island, were “scarcely exploited at all.” The researchers noted this was striking because Barbary ground squirrels were easy to find in the environment. Cats simply passed them over in favor of smaller, less challenging prey. This pattern holds broadly: feral cats tend to go after whatever is easiest to catch, and squirrels are faster, more alert, and better at escaping than a typical mouse.
Why Squirrels Are Harder to Catch
Squirrels have several advantages over the small rodents that make up most feral cat kills. They’re larger, faster, and can climb vertically up trees in seconds. Tree squirrels in particular spend much of their time off the ground, and their sharp claws let them scale bark far more efficiently than a cat can follow. Squirrels also have excellent vision and use alarm calls to warn each other of predators, making a stealthy approach difficult.
Habitat matters enormously for cat hunting success. Research using cameras mounted on feral cats found that hunts in open areas succeeded about 70% of the time, while hunts in complex environments with dense cover or obstacles dropped to just 17%. Squirrels typically live around trees, rocks, and other structures that give them escape routes and hiding spots. That complexity works against the cat. A feral cat’s overall hunting success rate across all prey types sits around 30%, and squirrels almost certainly fall well below that average.
Feral Cats Can Kill Adult Squirrels
While squirrels aren’t easy prey, feral cats are capable of killing fully grown adults, not just juveniles. Researchers on the Greek island of Lesvos documented a feral cat ambushing, killing, and partially eating a full-grown Persian squirrel, grabbing it by the neck. This was published as a notable event precisely because it had never been formally recorded for that squirrel species before. The fact that it made headlines in a scientific journal tells you something about how uncommon the behavior is.
That said, juvenile and young squirrels are almost certainly more vulnerable. They’re slower, less experienced at identifying predators, and spend more time on the ground before they’ve mastered climbing. In areas where feral cat colonies overlap with squirrel populations, young squirrels face the greatest risk.
How Feral Cats Hunt
Feral cats are ambush predators. They rely on stealth, patience, and a short explosive pounce rather than sustained chasing. Video footage from cat-mounted cameras shows a consistent pattern: the cat spots prey, crouches low, stalks forward slowly, then launches a pounce from close range. When it works, the kill is fast, typically a bite to the neck or head.
Feral cats are remarkably active hunters. One study recorded an average kill rate of about 7 animals per cat per 24-hour period, though most of these kills were small, easy targets like frogs, mice, and ground-nesting birds. Cats don’t always eat what they kill either. Frogs made up 44% of observed kills in one study but were only eaten half the time. When cats did catch small mammals like mice, they typically ate the entire animal on the spot.
Health Risks From Eating Squirrels
Squirrels carry parasites and infections that can affect cats. The most significant is Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite for which cats are the primary host. Squirrels are highly susceptible to this parasite. In one outbreak among wild red squirrels in the Netherlands, 20 out of 37 examined squirrels had died from disseminated Toxoplasma infection, with the parasite found in their lungs, liver, and spleen.
When a feral cat eats an infected squirrel, the parasite completes its life cycle inside the cat’s gut. The cat then sheds the parasite’s eggs in its feces, spreading them into the environment where they can infect other animals and humans. Squirrels also commonly carry intestinal parasites, external parasites like fleas and ticks, and bacterial infections. A cat that regularly hunts squirrels picks up whatever those squirrels are carrying.
Island Ecosystems Face the Biggest Impact
The ecological concern around feral cats eating squirrels is greatest on islands, where squirrel populations are small and isolated. The documented kill of a Persian squirrel on Lesvos was flagged as a conservation issue because that squirrel species is regionally near-threatened. On an island, even occasional predation by feral cats can pressure a vulnerable population that has no way to replenish its numbers from elsewhere.
On mainland continents where common species like eastern gray squirrels number in the hundreds of millions, feral cat predation doesn’t pose a meaningful population-level threat to squirrels. Cats simply don’t catch them often enough. The bigger picture for feral cat impact on wildlife involves birds, small rodents, and reptiles, species that are caught in far greater numbers and are less able to escape.