4 ms·

Feline friends always love it when humans put out nice new warm beds for them! Certainly a warm heated spot in the cold could serve no higher purpose :): https

• Aeolun 4y ago
  > the American Veterinary Medical Association recommends keeping cats indoors to avoid dangers associated with diseases, parasites, cars, attacks from other animals, poisons and extreme weather Now it’s not only children but cats too? I grew up in a location where cats could go anywhere they pleased (in or outside), and it’s really strange to me that some countries recommend or require them to always be inside.
  • bigbillheck 4y ago
    Outdoor cats live much shorter lives than indoor ones.
    • concordDance 4y ago
      But are they happier ones?
      • schiffern 4y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. But they're definitely happier lives for the 10-50 wild birds and 50-200 wild mammals a cat would kill each year. Domestic housecats will hunt even when well-fed. "The greatest good for the greatest number of [sentient organisms]." https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/keep-cats-indoors.pdf https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/keep-cats-... https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/moral-cost-of-cats-180960505/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/moral-cost-of-...
  • whamlastxmas 4y ago
    Cats destroy wildlife on a massive scale.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Tuna-Fish 4y ago
    Outdoor cats are a menace to birds and other wildlife on a scale that's hard to describe. It would be hard for an individual homeowner to do anything else that is even nearly as destructive to their local wildlife than keeping an outdoor cat.
    • kuschku 4y ago
      Not in locations where wild cats exist anyway. If wild cats exist in your area, the bird life has already adapted to them over the past millions of years. Obviously, if cats in your region have been introduced by humans, that's an entirely different situation.
      • schiffern 4y ago
        Human feeding of cats can increase their population far above the predator-prey limits that existed for millions of years. As they say in ecology: "What you feed succeeds." All felines aren't exactly interchangeable either. Domestic housecats are naturally extant only in the Middle East, but everywhere else they have been introduced by humans.
        • kuschku 4y ago
          > Domestic housecats are naturally extant only in the Middle East That's not really true - in most of europe, the native wild cats and domestic housecats are closely related and interbreed. see e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wildcat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wildcat (Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Central and Eastern Europe to the Caucasus). Many of the types of domestic cat found across europe were already bred in antiquity as well. So it's not that clear-cut, and local wildlife has adapted quite well to it.
  • weregiraffe 4y ago
    >I grew up in a location where cats could go anywhere they pleased And some people grew up in a location where women were not allowed to vote.