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That ranger's quote reminded me about a time I learned about the overlap in abilities between cats and raccoons. When I was a child my family had a cat that pr
by Cerium 4y ago
That ranger's quote reminded me about a time I learned about the overlap in abilities between cats and raccoons.
When I was a child my family had a cat that preferred to spend most of the time outside. When we went on vacation, we would leave it inside and come home to an annoyed cat. We couldn't leave it outside, since the raccoons would steal all the food. My dad had an idea that since we had a house on a hill with a wrap around balcony we could find a way to enable the cat to reach the balcony but not the raccoons.
First we tried putting a long narrow board between the ground and the balcony on the theory that cats have better balance than raccoons. False, raccoons are fine at climbing across a narrow bridge.
Then we decided that cats are smaller than raccoons, so we would make a gate with a cutout matching the exact dimensions of our cat's head and body. In some ways this worked, the adult raccoons could not access the food. Unfortunately raccoons are not stupid, they sent a child raccoon to fetch the food to the door and then scooped it through the small opening.
The cat remained indoors during our trip.
- Ma8ee 4y agoNowadays there are cat doors with micro chip readers to make sure that only your cat can get in.
- vijayr02 4y agoWait till the raccoons kidnap the cat and make it open the door :)
- graderjs 4y agoHahaha ..lol. oh that's hilarious. Please write a sci Fi.
- aitchnyu 4y agoMy half stray used to bring boyfriends and they ate after she did.
- BurningFrog 4y agoWhat's a "half stray"?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- redsummer 4y ago
- flukus 4y agoNowadays we shouldn't be allowing cats to be outside unsupervised in any case, they can be devastating to local wildlife, including these clever cockatoos.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Ma8ee 4y agoI know that cats eat a lot of birds, but I wonder how often cats really is the limiting factor of the population. Other things like scarcity of food or nesting places might often be more important.
- shakna 4y agoWhen you look at the numbers, it is very, very, hard to deny that free-ranging unowned cats are the largest limiting factor to the population. The size of the cat population causing a mortality swing of 24% in birds, is not some small number that might be masked by another closesly related statistic. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
- jimmydorry 4y agoThe number of cats in an area should be pretty closely related to the number of people living in the area. The more cats, the more people, and it would not be hard to believe that having more people in an area might lead to more environmental destruction and displaced habitats.
- shakna 4y agoThe control featured in the paper is Europe, where the domestic cat is younger and not as well adapted, environmentally, as that in America. There is significantly less environmental destruction, despite the controls featuring similar numbers of the animals. Simply having cities has not had a similar effect.
- narrator 4y agoHaving dealt with an owner away on vacation indoor/outdoor cat and racoon situation, I found the optimal way to handle it. It was a rental, so I couldn't install a microchip cat door. 1. Get feeders that run on a timer and release a fixed amount of food. 2. Duct tape the feeders very securely to a metal box. Put something very heavy in the box to keep the raccoons from flipping the box over. 3. Set the timers so they release enough food for the cat. Have them set to go off a few hours after sunrise. Raccoons hate going out during the day. 4. The cat eats all the food and when the raccoons come at night there is nothing for them. 5. Point a motion activated camera at the feeders so you can fix and make improvements to the duct taping to respond to those clever raccoons and to make sure the cat has enough to eat.
- tzs 4y ago> Raccoons hate going out during the day. Correct. A lot of people freak out when the do see one out during the day because for some reason it is widely believed that they only come out during the day if they are rabid. Where I am (western Washington) rabies has never been found in the wild raccoon population (or in any wild terrestrial mammal population--it's all bats and domestic animals), but still some people see a raccoon in the daytime and freak out over rabies. In fact if a raccoon is out during the day the most likely reason is that there is a food shortage and it can't forage enough just at night. Sometimes there is a shortage because something decreased the food supply, and sometimes it is because the raccoon is pregnant and needs more food due to that. Daytime outings due to rabies is way way way below that even in places like the eastern US where rabies is widespread in their raccoon populations. Every year around here we'll see the neighborhood raccoon start coming around in the daytime for a while, getting plumper and plumper, then she stops coming at all for a while, and then she shows up at night much thinner and with 2 to 5 little ones.
- wiredfool 4y agoIn Western Washington, I had a raccoon knock over a 55 gallon trash can (mostly) full of glass bottles. That made a hell of a noise.