4 ms·

I've never understood why cats are allowed to roam the world unsupervised to kill birds and poop in my tomato garden.

mcv 7y ago
Cats are cuter. A clever strategy for any animal, but especially so for a murderous predator.
Nasrudith 7y ago
History - pre litter boxes they were put out for the night. Plus their role has long been "grainery guard" and rats have caused major health problems. Even if cats aren't actively hunting them barring toxoplasmosis their scent scares mice. They auto-domesticated because agriculture made massive food reserves and the ones who didn't have the "Furless quadrupeds who constantly walk like angry bears, are about ten times your mass, have claws the size of your head and kill far bigger things! Run away!" sensible response to humans like most animals and had a reducded scatter distance which let them raid our grainery raidera were favored. The fact of the matter is we have long /wanted/ their response be to kill all the scurrying rats and tiny birds weren't exactly a concern compared to not dying.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Cats are for killing birds - that's their niche. No more wrong than birds doing what birds do. And face it, every bird pair has half a dozen chicks each year. Next year the bird population is about the same. That means, most new birds are going to die in the first year. Cats are just a part of that.
- Harvey-Specter 7y ago
  Domestic cats are an invasive species. They're not a natural part of the food chain, they're not doing any good by killing or even eating what they kill, they just do it for fun. They basically have no predators because they live where we live, and we chase off or kill predators.
  - jrace 7y ago
    Depending where you live cats have multiple predators. Same can be said for humans.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    There were some 500 species of cat, spread all over the world, when humans arrived. You cannot find a niche where cats are 'invasive'. How they kill, and what they eat or don't eat, is entirely up to the cat, not some misplaced human emotion about right and wrong.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Because, along with birds, cats kill a lot of rodents. Rodents both carry disease and eat stored human food. Thus humans have, historically, been better off with cats around, and may in fact still be better off.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  Cats are trash for rodent control. They spend too much time playing with their 'food' and not enough time actually killing it. Dogs are much better at killing rats yet we don't let dogs roam around outside willy nilly. Most rodent control in the modern era comes from modern building techniques and materials, as well as waste disposal networks, that keep rodents out of our buildings and away from human sources of food. Go to a neighborhood with well maintained buildings but no cats and you'll find fuck-all rodents. Go to a neighborhood with run down buildings and a million cats, and you'll find a billion rodents.
  - tareqak 7y ago
    Some dogs chase and harm human beings. Dogs also leave behind their feces, out in the open whereas cats try to bury theirs away.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      And cats leave gory corpses of small animals in front of doorways. At least, they do whenever they're actually doing their supposed job of killing rodents. In practice it's enough corpses to make a mess but not enough corpses to actually hamper the rodent population. The excuses made for cats seem to nearly always be characterized by a lack of critical thought. Saying that is probably considered controversial, but so is the toxoplasmosis hypothesis.
      - tareqak 7y ago
        I was trying to answer "Dogs are much better at killing rats yet we don't let dogs roam around outside willy nilly.", but I was not as precise as I could be in retrospect. The objective function that most human beings use is not "what animal kills rodents most efficiently", but "what animal kills rodents most efficiently and poses little harm to human beings most of the time". In my experience, most stray cats will likely run away from children and most stray cats will likely not initiate attacks against children. On the other hand, most stray dogs are more likely to do both of those things. As a result, cats get a pass for being less efficient rodent killers than dogs because they are also less likely to harm human beings.

mcv 7y ago

Cats are cuter. A clever strategy for any animal, but especially so for a murderous predator.

History - pre litter boxes they were put out for the night. Plus their role has long been "grainery guard" and rats have caused major health problems. Even if cats aren't actively hunting them barring toxoplasmosis their scent scares mice. They auto-domesticated because agriculture made massive food reserves and the ones who didn't have the "Furless quadrupeds who constantly walk like angry bears, are about ten times your mass, have claws the size of your head and kill far bigger things! Run away!" sensible response to humans like most animals and had a reducded scatter distance which let them raid our grainery raidera were favored. The fact of the matter is we have long /wanted/ their response be to kill all the scurrying rats and tiny birds weren't exactly a concern compared to not dying.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

Cats are for killing birds - that's their niche. No more wrong than birds doing what birds do. And face it, every bird pair has half a dozen chicks each year. Next year the bird population is about the same. That means, most new birds are going to die in the first year. Cats are just a part of that.

Harvey-Specter 7y ago
Domestic cats are an invasive species. They're not a natural part of the food chain, they're not doing any good by killing or even eating what they kill, they just do it for fun. They basically have no predators because they live where we live, and we chase off or kill predators.
- jrace 7y ago
  Depending where you live cats have multiple predators. Same can be said for humans.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  There were some 500 species of cat, spread all over the world, when humans arrived. You cannot find a niche where cats are 'invasive'. How they kill, and what they eat or don't eat, is entirely up to the cat, not some misplaced human emotion about right and wrong.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

Because, along with birds, cats kill a lot of rodents. Rodents both carry disease and eat stored human food. Thus humans have, historically, been better off with cats around, and may in fact still be better off.

darkpuma 7y ago
Cats are trash for rodent control. They spend too much time playing with their 'food' and not enough time actually killing it. Dogs are much better at killing rats yet we don't let dogs roam around outside willy nilly. Most rodent control in the modern era comes from modern building techniques and materials, as well as waste disposal networks, that keep rodents out of our buildings and away from human sources of food. Go to a neighborhood with well maintained buildings but no cats and you'll find fuck-all rodents. Go to a neighborhood with run down buildings and a million cats, and you'll find a billion rodents.
- tareqak 7y ago
  Some dogs chase and harm human beings. Dogs also leave behind their feces, out in the open whereas cats try to bury theirs away.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    And cats leave gory corpses of small animals in front of doorways. At least, they do whenever they're actually doing their supposed job of killing rodents. In practice it's enough corpses to make a mess but not enough corpses to actually hamper the rodent population. The excuses made for cats seem to nearly always be characterized by a lack of critical thought. Saying that is probably considered controversial, but so is the toxoplasmosis hypothesis.
    - tareqak 7y ago
      I was trying to answer "Dogs are much better at killing rats yet we don't let dogs roam around outside willy nilly.", but I was not as precise as I could be in retrospect. The objective function that most human beings use is not "what animal kills rodents most efficiently", but "what animal kills rodents most efficiently and poses little harm to human beings most of the time". In my experience, most stray cats will likely run away from children and most stray cats will likely not initiate attacks against children. On the other hand, most stray dogs are more likely to do both of those things. As a result, cats get a pass for being less efficient rodent killers than dogs because they are also less likely to harm human beings.