This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

Got a minute?

The business world is sometimes described figuratively as dog eat dog. In the state of Maharashtra in Western India the situation is

literally cat eat dog where the cats are leopards and the dogs are well dogs. That's the

finding of a wildlife conservation society study

published in the journal Oricks.

The paper points out that big cat ecology

and predator prey interactions in tropical regions

are typically studied in natural systems.

The majority of the prey in those cases are ungulates,

think zebra's or deer.

But in human-dominated areas, especially agricultural ones,

you can have large populations of domesticated animals,

a big attraction for any hungry wildlife.

Researchers examined 85 leopard scats, because that's how you do this kind of research,

and 87% of the prey biomass they recovered was from domestic animals,

with nearly half of that coming from dogs, many of them presumably feral.

Livestock make up only a small part of the leopard diet.

For example, goats outnumber dogs 7-1, but are just 11% of meals for the cats, probably because they're penned in at night.

Those numbers are good news because they may calm farmers' fears about heavy losses of

agriculturally valuable species. Of course, it's not good news for them. losses of

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