A unified questionnaire and methodology to evaluate social perception of cats on inhabited islands

The eradication of invasive feral cats is one of the most effective ways of preventing cat negative impacts on island biota. However, its success on inhabited islands can be hampered by the opposition from various sectors of society. Surveys can be used to gather information on social perceptions on cat management, but the wide variety of survey types currently available hampers their applicability. In this context, we first reviewed cat surveys worldwide up to 2016 with a view to later informing and developing a unified survey that retains information of recurring interest and identifies the methodology with a higher response rate. We developed a questionnaire with five sections and 25 questions (increased to 26 after a pre-test phase) and identified the self-administered, hand-delivered method as the one with higher response rates. In addition, we tested both the questionnaire and the methodology on the inhabited European island of La Graciosa, successfully collecting valuable information for all sections of the questionnaire and obtaining a very high response rate (71.3 %). We argue that this questionnaire and methodology, slightly adapted to the local context if necessary, could be considered as a baseline and standardized tool that could allow managers worldwide to incorporate social perceptions on cat control and eradication planning on inhabited islands.