Some cat owners may have noticed their kitty has particular tastes when it comes to the half-eaten presents left on the doorstep.
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Be it mouse, rat, bird or lizard, a survey of house cats living in Sydney's eastern suburbs has found a good proportion focus their hunts on specific targets.
Professor Chris Dickman, the research leader, said some felines were such determined killers they would hunt their prey of choice until they had vanished from the area.
This obsessive behaviour, also documented in feral cats, was having a noticeable effect on prey populations, said Professor Dickman, from the University of Sydney.
"It's quite likely that we'll get localised extinctions of native small mammals," he said.
It was unclear how cats developed their dietary preferences but observations of tigers, jaguars and other members of the felid family have reported similar behaviours.
Professor Dickman suggested kittens could be taught what to kill by their mothers, or they may have had a chance encounter with an easy kill early in their life.
In the ACT, residents who live in defined cat containment areas are required to ensure their felines do not stray from their property or face a $1400 fine.
Professor Dickman said studying house cats helped scientists understand some of the behaviours that feral cats used to decimate populations of native animals across the country.
His latest results are published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
While no one has calculated the number of feral cats in Australia, conservative estimates suggest there are about 15 million feral felines killing an estimated 75 million native animals every night.
When it comes to managing the impact of cats, Professor Dickman said unless the specialists were caught, the survival chances of rare and endangered animals was unlikely to improve.
According to the Victorian Department of Environment and Primary Industries website approximately 80 endangered and threatened species are at risk from feral cat predation in Australia.
Professor Dickson said feral cats were extremely wily, and broad-scale eradication programs such as baiting, shooting and trapping did not have a significant effect on their populations.
"If they all behaved in the same way we might be able to come up with something that would take them all out or reduce their impact," he said.
