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What cats do when we’re not looking
- berkes 5y agoAre there any god GPS trackers for cats that people would advice? The article mentions nothing about the setup or tech, and I'd love to find out what my cats are up to before they come home with another rabbit or bird (probably sleeping).
- Traubenfuchs 5y agoIt does. > To answer this, I contacted Tractive, manufacturers of GPS trackers for cats and dogs.
- ourcat 5y agoHow about an Apple Air Tag on a collar?
- implements 5y agoThey’re not very ‘fine grained’, and only show last known location rather than a way-pointed path. Handy for finding a lost pet, though.
- moehm 5y agoI've actually had a tracker from Tractive for my cat for a year. It works.. okay-ish? Well enough? It lost connection pretty regular, probably because she crawled thru some bushes or undergrowth. The battery lasted only 1 day, so every day we needed to catch her (In summer she doesn't come home except for maybe 1 hour a day or so?) and recharge the collar. The battery is not removable, so you have to take the whole collar from the cat and put it on again later. This was pretty annoying and we definitely got some scratches from her. Though now I have a KML file with over 1mm data points, so this is very cool. But in the end the battery capacity was annoying and the daily recharge was too much of a hassle, so we didn't renewed our subscription. They seem to have a new tracker generation, maybe the battery problem is already fixed? I don't know.
- alphanumeric0 5y agoI've had a pretty good experience with Pawtrack (https://pawtrack.com/ https://pawtrack.com/). It's the smallest tracker I've found.
- xkcd-sucks 5y agoI'm prototyping a very small LoRa tracker because I don't want to pay for cell service and commercial lora trackers are too large. However it is more for tracking itself as the cat removes its collar at every opportunity
- eric4smith 5y agoNo need for GPS or cameras. Cats are stone cold hunter killers. Almost brainless too. They kill anything that moves and is edible. We all know cats that sometimes just kill for the sake of killing (practice??) and don’t even eat the prey. It’s like the cats brain is just made for hunting and killing and very little else. Just watch how stupid cats are in cat videos — except when they are hunting. I have a cat at one of my homes and one day I went up on the roof for some maintenance stuff. The roof was littered with the partially eaten bodies of almost every kind of animal that was edible and smaller than the cat. Then when you come home she curls up in your lap and purr for your next cat video. Yes, even your docile house cat - put her outside and bam! Death and destruction. Thank god they don’t hunt us. Don’t get me wrong - I love cats.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoThey are predators, but not brainless. I was working on my truck one summer night, and a cat introduced himself by meowing. I immediately thought he was abandoned. I took him to a vet, and no chip. He arrived a few days later with a breakaway collar, and tag. It turned out he was from a wealthy family, but didn't lije the dog. I am very allergic to cats, but this guy tried everything in order to live in my house. Every day for a week, I would wake up to a mouse on the porch, or in the house. (He figured out the dog door) I later heard that he had at least 5 hones on the block that we're feeding him. One home bought fresh sardines. One was buying fresh Salmon. Anyways---he was far from brainless. I think a mountian lion got him? I do miss him.
- rishikeshs 5y agoI have 2 cats in the past, but I still think letting them out is the best way to have them!
- slfnflctd 5y agoThis is highly dependent on your location. From what I've been told, in the UK, shelters won't let you adopt a cat unless you agree that it will be allowed outside. In the US, many/most shelters won't let you adopt a cat unless you agree that it will NOT be allowed outside. Part of this is likely due to more cars being driven at higher speeds by inattentive people in the States (that's the main reason I don't let my cats out, I have seen way too much roadkill in my life and it sucks every time, those deaths are not always quick). Some other reasons not to let them out would be increased chance of disease, unwanted interactions with neighbors and the needless decimation of local wildlife.
- idiotsecant 5y agoYour neighbourhood didn't get a cat. You did. I don't enjoy your cat shitting in my bushes, scratching my car climbing up it, killing birds in my yard, or any of the other million annoying things cats do. You don't have an automatic right to make the entire neighborhood a playground for the pet you decided to have. If I find one in my yard I catch it and turn it into the humane society.
- hombre_fatal 5y agoYour attitude reminds me of when I briefly used that Nextdoor social network until someone in my neighborhood started bitching at me for running past their house every morning, somehow ruining their day.
- poisonarena 5y agodid you also key his car, shit in his yard, and kill all the birds and squirrels?
- exolymph 5y ago
- dwd 5y agoThere was a number of BBC articles years back on the tracking of cats. The maps of their ranges is quite fascinating: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22567526 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22567526 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22821639 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22821639
- dspillett 5y agoThere were other interesting findings too: in areas with high populations of cats they seem to settle into time-share arrangements with parts of their territory, they are not just purely "this is mine all the time". This all gets messed up when new animals arrive or the habits if existing ones change, but it seems back into a new mostly stable pattern eventually. I wonder what difference more human slaves being home all day over the last 18 months has made to all this, and how much disruption there is as we slip back into something more like older patterns.
- dwd 5y agoThe cats got shitty with us being in their territory all the time! We figure into their time-sharing as well, whether we know it or not. They're not likely to care for us to not be there unless you change their meal time, reduce attention they want or go back to sending them outside all day. Our new feline took a particular liking to one of my boys when he was home from Uni and seemed put out when he left - she took to meowing in his room for the first week. Dogs however love having the pack always there, and will be really put out as people go back to full-time office work.
- dspillett 5y agoMy boss definitely missed her favourite slave being around when I went back to the office after lockdown 1. There have been a couple of long weekends for endurance running events in the last month or so, and she definitely puts on the "where have you been, I've been looking for you, look at me being cute, don't go away again" each time when I get back.
- notRobot 5y agoIf anyone here decides to put a collar (with or without a tracker) on a cat, please remember to use a breakaway collar! These are designed to break off (as opposed to choking the cat) if they get caught on a fence or branch or something. They cost next to nothing - and can save your outdoor cat's life. https://www.petmate.com/the-importance-of-quick-release-cat-collars/article/a90060 https://www.petmate.com/the-importance-of-quick-release-cat-...
- gadders 5y agoOur outdoor cat wanders the fields round our house, and loses a collar every couple of months. Occasionally the neighbours find them and return them. One of them looked like it had passed through a cow first.
- eatbitseveryday 5y agoNecessary for indoor cats? I also don’t really understand why they are wearing a collar when it can break off - info gets lost and you may never find them.
- BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y agoIt's a safety mechanism, not an intended outcome. If your cat gets lost ideally you end up with a wandering collared cat. But of the other possibilities, a wandering uncollared cat is preferable to the snagged alternative.
- notRobot 5y agoIndeed. Cat with no collar > cat who choked when their collar got caught on a fence.
- peanut_worm 5y agoPlease keep your cats inside. Most ecosystems aren’t supposed to have near-apex predators running around killing everything. Outdoor cats kill over 2 billion birds a year.
- ratww 5y agoKeeping the cat inside also dramatically increases the life expectancy of the cat. And it also decreases to almost zero the chance of it catching toxoplasmosis. Indoor cats don't really care about the outside, so no, it's not cruelty, as long as it's well fed and properly stimulated.
- hombre_fatal 5y agoThat’s a bit cruel. One compromise is to put a small bell on their collar.
- myroon5 5y agoThey mention a couple others in the article as well: Bells on collars work, as does switching cats on to a premium, high-protein food diet, and giving them mental stimulation by playing with them in the morning. “Changing the cat’s food can reduce the amount of wildlife they kill by over a third,” says McDonald. “And playing with your cat, more than a quarter. These are positive actions for the cat that also have a positive outcome on their behaviour.”
- skhr0680 5y agoIt depends on the cat. One of mine figured out her bell was noisy and broke it off every time.
- tmountain 5y agoFor those that want to let their cats outside, bird safe collars are a good compromise. https://www.birdsbesafe.com/ https://www.birdsbesafe.com/ I have a cat that's an expert hunter, and he now wears one of those collars daily. The collar has reduced his catch to essentially zero (maybe 1-2 birds / year).
- simion314 5y agoI can't understand how such intelligent animals get killed by cars. I had young cats killed by cars but also one that was old with years of outside experience.
- BrianOnHN 5y agoHumans? I mean, pedestrians get killed by cars all the time. So I wouldn't expect cats to be immune to them.
- simion314 5y agoCould be, but in my village nobody was hit by a car, and many of my family cats were hit by cars. So the chances for cats to get hit are higher, so we could maybe think that is because of the small size ? The thing is cats have good senses so I am wondering if they have an attention issue where something else distract them or they have a perception issue so they don't realize how closer a car is. My current cat is afraid of cars, so I hope she stays away from the roads.
- skhr0680 5y agoLike a larger bipedal mammal, they forget to look both ways, or think that that they can make it across in time
- h2odragon 5y ago"Don't let your cats out" people are too citified for me to imagine. I'd have to walk a half mile to get a neighbor in rifle range; we need outdoor catS, plural, to keep the rodent population dented around the house. It doesn't "keep mice out" to have 3 cats around, but it noticeably reduces their numbers and comfort level when they come after the sacks of feed. We're down to one cat this summer, and she's aged past much hunting but is too dignified and settled for us to upset her with new kittens.
- 7402 5y agoIt's not just city people that keep their cats indoors. Almost no one where I live (suburban area in northern California) lets their cats out any more, because the cats get eaten by coyotes.
- h2odragon 5y agoWe have a pack of hounds, part of their job is to keep the coyotes off the livestock. We used to keep ~10 acres but have pulled back to about 1ac in the last couple of years. It's been hard on the grey foxes, they've actually moved up closer to our house so our hounds can cover their den; I dunno but they might not be to blame for the loss of at least one of the cats, too.
- gumby 5y agoI can tell you what my cat is doing when I’m not looking: peeing in the bed. We’re trying to figure out what she’s trying to tell us — it’s a deliberate and abnormal signal from an aging cat.* My experience with this cat is quite different from the article’s author’s. She is very sweet and meek and cuddly. But she has free access to the outdoors and until she was about 14 yo it was quite common to wake up to a cat asleep next to me but with half a rat or such in the bed. Now she doesn’t go outside I’ve discovered that there are other cats in the neighborhood. The good news is we have fresh bed linens every night. But I don’t think all that washing is good for the environment.
- jquast 5y agoIt is common for a cat with urinary tract infection (UTI) to pee outside of the litter box, it may be trying to communicate, "it hurts when I pee", and choosing your bed because it thinks that's the best place to communicate with you https://bluecrossvethospital.com/cat-urinary-tract-infection/ https://bluecrossvethospital.com/cat-urinary-tract-infection...
- gumby 5y agoYeah, that’s the most common situation but she tested negative. We had been away and the cat sitter changed the food and litter so we reverted those, but it’s been a couple of weeks and she’s still suffering from something. We just can’t figure out what it is. At least the good news is it’s deliberate. The plumbing is otherwise operating properly
- Iwan-Zotow 5y agoWhat kind of question is it? What our feline friends do when we’re not looking - they are ruling the world!