08/26/2026
Fishers are blamed for killing more pets in New England than any predator except the coyote, and the data says they are almost never guilty. In New Hampshire, researchers examined the stomach contents of 1,000 dead fishers collected between 1979 and 1980. One stomach contained cat hair. One out of a thousand.
In Massachusetts, a study examined 169 scats and 57 gastrointestinal tracts collected from a semi-rural area where outdoor cats were common. Cat remains appeared in 2 percent of the samples. Eric Orff, who spent 30 years with New Hampshire Fish and Game, put it directly: fisher cats are blamed for dozens of missing cats each year. The blame almost never comes with evidence.
Fishers produce a high-pitched shriek that carries through the woods at night. People hear it and assume something is dying. When a cat does not come home the next morning, the fisher gets the blame because the sound was there and the cat was not. The connection feels obvious. It is almost always wrong. Red foxes produce a similar scream. So do barred owls, raccoons in conflict, and cats themselves. The fisher is blamed for the sound because the fisher is the animal people have heard is dangerous, and once the reputation exists, every missing cat and every nighttime scream confirms it.
Roland Kays, a wildlife biologist at the New York State Museum, wrote in the New York Times that the fisher's reputation as a cat killer was an exaggeration driven by anecdote rather than evidence. He pointed out that the reappearance of fishers across the northeastern United States during the 1990s and 2000s coincided almost exactly with the colonization of the same areas by coyotes, an animal that actually does kill cats regularly. The fisher took the blame. The coyote did the killing. Both arrived at the same time. Only one of them was already famous for it.
The question then is not whether fishers kill cats. They can. Fishers kill Canada lynx in Maine. About a dozen cases were documented over 12 years in a single four-township study area. A lynx is bigger than a bobcat. A bobcat is bigger than a house cat. An animal that kills lynx by going straight for the neck could finish a house cat in seconds. The capability has never been in doubt.
What the data shows is that they almost never use it on pets. And when fishers do interact with domestic animals, the encounters look nothing like the calculated neck attacks they use on lynx.
A fisher in East Hampstead, New Hampshire, grabbed a 22-pound Cockapoo puppy while the owner was taking out the trash. The owner kicked the fisher, it did not stop, and he had to pry its jaws off the dog. Bentley survived. In Rhode Island in 2007, a fisher attacked a German Shepherd, digging its claws into the dog's neck and gnawing at its face until the owner chased it off with a broom.
In Massachusetts, a fisher cornered on a porch attacked a 7-pound Shih Tzu. The dog survived with puncture wounds. Wildlife officials concluded the fisher had acted defensively.
Every documented pet attack involved a fisher that was cornered, startled, or protecting kits. A 10-pound animal that kills lynx by precise neck targeting does not fail to kill a Shih Tzu by accident. It was not trying to kill it. It was trying to get away from it.
The animals that actually kill outdoor cats in the northeastern United States are, in order of frequency: coyotes, cars, disease, great horned owls, and secondary poisoning from rodenticides that cats ingest by eating poisoned mice. A cat that goes outside at night in fisher country faces every one of those threats before a fisher enters the equation. The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department noted that the average life expectancy of an outdoor cat is two to five years. An indoor cat may survive 17 years or more. The fisher is not the reason.
Source: Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department / New Hampshire Fish and Game / Kays, The New York Times (2011) / McLellan et al., Maine lynx predation study / National Geographic / Genuine Mustelids / Adirondack Explorer / CBS Boston / All That's Interesting.
