I hear a lot of people say that fishers — six-to-13-pound members of the weasel family — eat house cats, but I’m not yet 100 percent convinced. As a professional zoologist I have to be careful about accepting animal stories as facts without seeing the evidence myself. I hear stories of mountain lions in the hill towns and even a population of Bigfoots in the Adirondacks. Tell me you saw a deer today and I have no reason to doubt you, but if you make a claim that has never been verified, I want to see the data. Since cats fight each other all the time, and a black cat would look an awful lot like a fisher, witnesses’ accounts take us only so far.Let’s review the evidence on this one.
Our research in Albany has shown that fishers certainly have the opportunity to eat cats. They are hunting the woods between subdivisions at night, which is prime cat time. I have followed their tracks through the snow crossing dozens of cat tracks, sometimes even smelling the cat latrines nearby.
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