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Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
- acaird 3y agopssp pssp pssp x 500,000
- codeslave13 3y agoThanks for that. I cracked up
- prawn 3y agoThey need a new Pssp Tsar.
- mrDmrTmrJ 3y agoThe article is paywalled - but why would you ever want to do that?
- tgv 3y agoTo pay the journalist, perhaps?
- MisterTea 3y agoDuring the pandemic irresponsible morons adopted cats to alleviate the loneliness only to abandon their new friends on the street once the restrictions waned. This inhumane treatment has resulted in thousands of feral cats added to city streets. This is not good for the city or the cats.
- justrealist 3y agoThis smells like a moralism that has very little real impact on the population (which is driven by food supply and neutering efforts). My guess is that the lockdown halting spaying/neutering operations was 100x as impactful as additional abandoned cats.
- taneq 3y agoDepends whether the abandoned pets had already been desexed. If not then each additional fertile animal could outpace any linear effort by humans.
- Insanity 3y agoWhich is also something I can just not comprehend as a pet owner (cat / dog). I already feel bad leaving my dog alone for a few hours a week lol. (With a cat, less so. They are less dramatic about being left alone.. :) ) EDIT: forgot to close a parenthesis and the LISPer in me panicked.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoI’m not alone in rereading for mismatched parens!
- bombcar 3y agoI need a plugin for the browser that adds closing parens when you type an opening one like many code editors do.
- MisterTea 3y ago
- x86x87 3y agoTo keep the cats out
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoCat content is a human right. https://archive.ph/rBadP https://archive.ph/rBadP
- vbezhenar 3y agoTo enjoy more rats, I guess. Dogs must be eradicated. They're dangerous for human. Cats are not and should be tolerated.
- asdajksah2123 3y agoCats on the streets suffer. Badly. Cats on the streets are a disaster for the bird population. And contrary to what cartoons have taught us, cats are not an effective way at keeping rats at bay (in fact, the threat of dead cats makes rat poisoning efforts far more difficult to implement).
- katbyte 3y ago> Cats on the streets are a disaster for the bird population and still pale in comparison to the effect us and our cities have on their populations. cats are not the big problem, we are, people just don't like to admit it and would rather blame them. As is likely us destroying the insect populations many species depend on. > threat of dead cats makes rat poisoning efforts far more difficult to implement the reality of dead owls and other small natural predators is a more real issue here, and why rat poison should not be used and be banned. It just was in my city Vancouver because it was doing more damage to owl populations then cats were.
- throwaway_99999 3y agoIn contrary. It is you who doesn't like to admit it. Makes sense in a way, as cats are our cute pets and thus emotionally much closer to us than random wild birds. Ironically, those huge cat populations are caused by humans, so in the end humans indeed are to blame. From https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 "Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals."
- katbyte 3y agoor you are just eating up one random study the media went wild with because it made good headlines? windows - https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/ https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mor... Habitat Loss, pesticides and other chemicals, then invasive species not just cats (including plants), then windows https://www.birdscanada.org/conserve-birds/major-threats-to-birds https://www.birdscanada.org/conserve-birds/major-threats-to-... and i could go on. this will of course change with the country you are in, cats in a country like australia or small island are going to have a much different effect then NA/UK/EU and thus lots of organizations and scientists for these areas do not put cats as the number one cause because it really is not established fact. I knew exactly what paper you were linking because it is always the one people trot out, as the only one making such wild claims with numbers that big from some imho wild assumptions. There are others who also correctly pointed out that it is alarmist paper that needs to be taken with a large grain of salt: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9794845/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9794845/ some of the choice quotes: "both implied or were interpreted by others to indicate alarming predation of house cats on prey populations." Churcher and Lawton (2) investigated predation by ca. 70 cats in one English village over a 1-year period, .... The authors estimated that 30% of the sparrow deaths in the village were due to cats, but stated that the village sparrow population was much higher than the average in other British villages. Although the authors were cautious in their interpretation, the media took off with alarming extrapolations of these very limited data across all of the UK." "Loss et al. (3), .... stated that the magnitude of mortality in mainland areas was largely speculative. .... stated that un-owned cats (as opposed to owned pets) cause the majority of this mortality and concluded that free-ranging cats are likely to be the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals. However, most of the field studies in their literature review and in their data extrapolation have not taken the above-mentioned known facts about cat predatory behavior into account, .... Among the various studies they considered many lacked a correction for prey eaten or left when away from home, different methods of gut analysis, no control for habitat where the data were collected (suburban, city, farmland), or other causes of prey decimation (e.g., habitat destruction). " "But the most serious criticism of all such studies is that none of them even mentions a rough estimate of the total population size of a prey species (supposedly being threatened by cat predation) or of the yearly reproduction and replacement of lost individuals. What good does it do to headline that “Cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds annually” if the estimated total population of birds in the USA is at a minimum 10 billion pairs breeding every year and that as many as 20 billion are in the country during the fall migratory season [US Fish and Wildlife Service (18), cited January 19, 2011]? Free-ranging cats might be taking about 10–15% of the population of birds annually, but that is not exceptional for a normal predator-prey relationship and is insufficient to eliminate a prey species. Further, estimates of the owned and non-owned free-ranging cat populations are just that–rough estimates." "Fitzgerald (7) and with the addition of even more field studies (28) have countered that there is simply no evidence that free-ranging cats on the continents are the main cause of species disappearance (and biodiversity reduction) since there is usually a suite of predators utilizing the same prey species and other causes can be cited"
- runjake 3y ago1. Create a bookmark, name it anything, and put this code in its URL field: javascript:location.href = '//archive.ph/newest/' + location.href.split('?')[0]; 2. When you encounter a paywalled page, click the bookmark. 3. Read article.
- shermozle 3y agoDidn't New York just create a "Rat Tsar"? Surely you solve both problems by stopping feeding the cats.
- swarnie 3y agoGo one step higher on the chain and develop a refuge system appropriate for the 21st century then you can knock out three in one go. I dont know who this depressed but throwing trash bags on the street is something the modern world solved many years ago.
- bluedino 3y agoSome of those rats are the same size of the cats.
- asdajksah2123 3y agoAs the article points out, cats are not very good rat predators. They will find other food far more easily.
- Animats 3y agoSort of. You have to feed them about half what they need to get them to hunt. That was the official policy of the General Post Office in the UK at one time. Stanford once had something known as the Stanford Cat Network, now called the Feral Friends Network, which sounds like something from the Camp Wedontwantcha comic. This group caught feral cats left on campus and tried to find them homes. Some of the cats that were too feral to become cats ended up at the Stanford horse barn. Some of the barn cats would hunt. I've been presented with a dead mouse. Others managed to get people to overfeed them, and they'd get fat and lazy. Once I saw a mouse, found a cat, and put the cat down near the mouse. The cat did nothing. Useless cats accustomed to free food were sometimes placed as house cats and replaced with new hunters. About four good hunting cats could clear the entire property of vermin. You have to manage the cats to get results.
- adsfgiodsnrio 3y ago
- k2enemy 3y agoGiven that the article is also kind of a PSA for New Yorkers, I'm surprised that it didn't mention ear clipping. If a feral cat has already been spayed or neutered, its left ear is clipped so that people know to leave it alone and not trap it again.
- taffronaut 3y agoTNR with ear clipping is done in the UK by the Cat Protection League. They loan you a trap and neuter the cat. Our house cat is an ex stray with a clipped ear from CPL.
- Beached 3y agothis is not always the case this is only done by public service organizations. if you have you pet taken into the vet to get fixed, the ear clip is optional and many choose not to get it clipped
- romwell 3y agoWhile neutered cats don't always have their ears clipped, a cat with a clipped ear is near-guaranteed to be neutered. This is why it makes sense to mention it. NYT, which called TNR (trap-enuter-release) "controversial", isn't interested in informing people about it, it seems.
- unethical_ban 3y agoWell, yeah, it'd done for TNR so people know they don't have to catch the cat again.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoIf this is successful, I wonder how long it would be before we see a cat that is born with ears that look like they are clipped as it would be a pretty big reproductive advantage.
- clairity 3y agohere, they now give neutered cats a tattoo on the belly (~1cm green line) instead of clipping. this is a bit more humane and becoming more the standard nowadays i believe.
- im_down_w_otp 3y agoOne meeeeeeeellion stray dogs.
- interlinked 3y agoLet them fight
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago> Rattling off statistics that she has internalized as a volunteer, Ms. Adams points out that eight out of 10 street kittens die within their first six months. Those that survive are often disease-ridden. Winters here can be deadly for a species that originated in the Mediterranean climate of North Africa. And traffic takes a big toll. I wonder if those kitties show genetical adaptions specific to their challenging environment? Is their population and breeding speed enough to allow for useful (micro) mutations to appear?
- londons_explore 3y agoI would guess yes. A species can change pretty quickly when you have a new generation every year, a population of thousands, and some factor that kills ~50%. After all, these moths[1] evolved their markings to match polluted industrial cities in just a few decades (and just 7 years in a follow up experiment) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
- canjobear 3y agoGiven the push to sterilize and kill them, their best bet is to evolve away from being friendly to humans.
- throwaway_99999 3y agoThat would be counter-productive. The main driver of cat population are humans. Cats evolving to being hostile to humans might in the end diminish public opposition to extermination programs.
- leviathant 3y agoWhen I lived in a, erm, more eventful part of Philadelphia, three kittens popped out of my neighbor's shed. We kept one, brought another into the office, and the third one was too wild for us to manage. We've since moved, but when we lived there, we did trap and release for dozens of cats. The one kitten we kept has distinctive fear reactions to sirens and gunshot type sounds (we live next to 95 and deliberately backfiring your exhaust is, for some reason, a popular choice) in ways that our other cats don't. It's noticeable enough that we've joked about it being epigenetic.
- pcurve 3y agohttps://archive.is/rBadP https://archive.is/rBadP
- aiisahik 3y agohow about they start earning their keep and start hunting the 5M rats out there.
- londons_explore 3y agoI'm gonna guess the main problem is the rats are smart and will stay in sewers and other places cats can't get to them.
- andrewmutz 3y agoHeadline sounds like a google interview question
- morley 3y agoThe article is making it seem like trap-neuter-release is a completely new strategy, but groups in NYC and elsewhere have been employing it for a long time. What's new is that Flatbush Cats is building a new vet clinic to provide more spaying / neutering capacity.
- romwell 3y agoNYT seems to be running an anti-cat agenda. This article calls trap-neuter-release (TNR) a "controversial" practice, whereas it's well established and proven to be effective (something even this article says). A few years back, they ran a full-blown frontal assault[1] on Google's volunteer-ran TNR program, gCat, blaming the TNR program (and only the TNR program) for the decline of the local burrowing owl population. This led to Google forcing the shut-down of the employee-ran TNR program, and extermination of the remaining neutered cats that couldn't be immediately adopted. To say that this was devastating to people involved is an understatement. Of course, this was utter nonsense. The decline of the burrowing owl population is well-studied, and in all cases I know of has been attributed to destruction of habitat - both in the Mountain View area and beyond it [2][3][4][5]. Preservation plans - when they even mention cats - put them dead last on the list of reasons. The cause for extinction is simple. Burrowing owls need two things for their habitat: (1) soft ground for the holes; (2) other animals, like squirrels or prairie dogs, to dig holes for owls to burrow in. I have a hunch that a certain Mountain View company rapidly expanding its campus circa 2018 wasn't conducive to preservation of the said habitat, and "kill all cats" was a simpler solution to the problem than halting construction[6] (also see: [7]). But having an indignant NYT article as a justification for felicide has sealed the fate of the cats who got used to coming to the same place for food. In the aftermath of the shutdown, the local feral cat population predictably exploded[8], and the burrowing owl population at Shoreline Park went down to zero[9]. The report says: >Habitat loss and direct human disturbance have been the main observable factors for the population decline at this site. Cats - feral or TNR'd - are not mentioned in the report. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/technology/google-cats-owls.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/technology/google-cats-ow... [2]http://www.elkhornsloughctp.org/uploads/files/1408724962Mountain%20View%20Burrowing%20owl%20management%20plan.pdf http://www.elkhornsloughctp.org/uploads/files/1408724962Moun... [3] https://mv-voice.com/news/2016/11/15/worries-over-dwindling-burrowing-owl-population https://mv-voice.com/news/2016/11/15/worries-over-dwindling-... [4]https://mv-voice.com/news/2012/04/06/new-hope-for-citys-burrowing-owls https://mv-voice.com/news/2012/04/06/new-hope-for-citys-burr... [5]https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5226899.pdf https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb52268... [6]https://www.whiskersproject.org/latest-news https://www.whiskersproject.org/latest-news [7]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36235779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36235779 [8]https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2021/11/16/feral-cats-in-mountain-views-north-bayshore-prompt-surge-of-complaints-raising-tough-questions-about-cat-colonies https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2021/11/16/feral-cats-in-mount... [9]Page 11, https://www.scv-habitatagency.org/DocumentCenter/View/1387/SCVHA-BUOW-Report-2020_Dec-8 https://www.scv-habitatagency.org/DocumentCenter/View/1387/S... ---- TL;DR: NYT made Google kill all cats on Google campus.
- joemaller1 3y agoCan we give the cats a few months to take down the rat problem first?
- lofaszvanitt 3y agoBring in a cat and you get a burger! After a while the hamburger's will taste different. That's the point when you will surely know the program became self sufficient... lol
- dwhitney 3y agoI was under the impression that expressing a sense of humor was not allowed on this site. Can someone clarify :)
- gaucheries 3y agoI’ve noticed it depends on your karma score and reputation
- kayodelycaon 3y agoI don’t think people check karma scores. (I never do.) More likely it’s a factor of being on the site long enough to learn what jokes you can slip in without getting downvoted. That would correlate strongly with karma and good reputation.
- thrill 3y agoGenerally correct, especially if it's too subtle for the varied age groupings and interests - everyone's hair-triggered to get butthurt about some triviality. Eventually the adults will show up in most threads and will occasionally be bothered to correct the karma injustice.
- jjgreen 3y agoIt is not, the appropriate response to this post is to downvote and reply with a terse comment on the misuse of the apostrophe.
- JoBrad 3y agoThat’s how you get more kitty mills.
- bluedino 3y agoPet ownership needs more regulation. And it needs to be enforced. Our neighborhood social media pages are full of stray animals roaming the streets, piles of newborn kittens in crawlspaces and dumpsters, emaciated dogs found everywhere... And then at the same time you have people trying to give away or even sell puppy after puppy and kitten after kitten. If you own an animal, it needs to be spayed or neutered.
- bombcar 3y agoUnless you are willing to throw poor people in prison over kittens, you can't really effectively enforce pet ownership laws, because the judgement-proof will keep pets. I suppose you could have roving cat detector vans that would spay and neuter any cat they could get their hands on unless it had approved breeding chips embedded inside. I've heard a documentary on such a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOonOtyoplY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOonOtyoplY
- LarsAlereon 3y agoPoor people aren't the problem here, it's the relatively wealthy who feel that responsible pet ownership laws don't apply to them.
- EricE 3y agoSo we'll solve it with more laws. Brilliant! Just outlaw murder while you are at it too!
- throwaway_99999 3y agoBrilliant! If murder was legal, we'd see a lot more of it, don't you think?
- Dylan16807 3y agoIf murder was almost unmonitored, you could definitely improve the situation with some laws and some enforcement of those laws. I don't understand your mockery here.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoMy neighbor is involved with a local program that does exactly this. It takes a long time, but is effective, and fairly humane. Cats breed like crazy. Even with a high mortality rate, they can still end up dominating their food chain. Now ... NYC also has a bad rat problem ...
- jmull 3y ago> the Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology oppose [trap, neuter, release], holding that cats are a highly destructive invasive species that should not be allowed to live outdoors at all The only option that leaves, really, is extermination. But nobody is going to do that (not on a scale to have an impact, anyway) because (1) it costs money and (2) people would flip out because they love cats. Is the the Audubon Society society going to step up to pay the bill and take the blame? Will local government agencies? I don't see it happening. Meanwhile, TNR runs on very lean budgets because it's all cat-loving volunteers. Of course, I'm not sure it's actually effective. But, so far, no one is proposing an alternative that could actually be tried. The Audubon Society's position is effectively identical to ignoring the issue entirely.
- rcpt 3y ago> it costs money I can't imagine that euthanasia is more expensive than TNR.
- jmull 3y agoExterminators cost money. TNR runs on volunteers and a lot of donated services. (Nobody volunteers to kill cats, and if they do, you don’t want them.) And the overall effort isn’t that different. With TNR you trap, neuter, release. With extermination you trap, kill, dispose. (I don’t think you can leave a bunch of dead cats and poison traps laying around). Neutering is a lot more effort than killing, but disposing is more effort than releasing (you can’t just throw piles and piles of dead cats in a dumpster).
- enobrev 3y agoThis definitely isn't new. I had an apartment in Bushwick through the 2000s, and due to construction in the surrounding area, the rats on our block and occasionally in our building were huge and relentless. Then my neighbor moved in. She was a pet photographer by trade, but also cared for all the neighborhood cats as well as all the area bodega cats - making sure they all had their shots and were spayed / neutered. She also traps around the city when needed. We had 4 street cats that just hung out on our block because she would leave food for them. I would occasionally feed her own three cats and whatever stray she had locked in the bathroom when she had to go out of town. That's how I got my cantankerous orange tabby. He was abandoned on the streets of Bushwick and was fortunate for my neighbor. He hates everyone but my wife and I, and tolerates our young son. But he sleeps with us every night and rubs on our feet when he needs attention. There's no way he would have made it this far (13 years and counting) without my neighbor bringing him in as a kitten. I was hoping to see her show up in the article.
- fsckboy 3y ago> the rats on our block and occasionally in our building were huge and relentless and...? I was hoping to see the rats show up on your comment but you never mentioned them again
- davchana 3y agoRats didn't show up in comment again because cats came.
- CryptoBanker 3y agoThen his neighbor moved in...
- dvh 3y agoThere was a commenter, I'm not sure if it was here, slashot or reddit, he would start with interesting premise but then halfway he got distracted and finished different story with something mundane never finishing the interesting story. He was famous for it.
- johnnydoe9 3y agoAbsolutely love their youtube channel, would highly recommend it.
- molticrystal 3y ago>Popular notions aside, cats rarely attack rats, though rodents do avoid nesting near often-pungent cat colonies. So the amount of places that rats nest will increase. Does increased nesting come with increased disease? Do they breed significantly more when they have found nesting places they are comfortable with, and if so, by what factor?
- adsfgiodsnrio 3y agoI wondered about this myself. Cats don't often attack rats, but rats apparently change their behavior dramatically when cats are around. Just making rats afraid to come out of hiding would surely make them less efficient scavengers and would reduce their population.
- justmaybeeezz 3y ago[flagged]
- raylad 3y agoKill the feral cats and you end up with rats becoming the overlords.
- swayvil 3y agoDidn't the zika virus cause sterility? We just need a cat variant. And a vax of course.
- bhewes 3y agoNYC should learn from Istanbul and accept their rodent cleaners.
- 23B1 3y agohttps://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/249-23/mayor-adams-anoints-kathleen-corradi-nyc-s-first-ever-rat-czar https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/249-23/mayor-ad...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- Ozzie_osman 3y agoI've seen NYC subway rats and I'd wager most cats wouldn't take them on.
- htag 3y agoThis really depends on how hungry the cat is. Feral cats commonly kill mammals larger than NYC rats, although they prefer smaller game. In general, you can expect a feline to be able to kill prey over twice it's body weight. In many habitats felines are the apex predator, and even feral cats are apex predators of some habitats. The biggest issue is that NYC rats, the non-native species that have evolved in urban environments, have evolved with cats as a predator for a long period of time and are better than native birds/small mammals at evading cats. Cats eat the native population at a higher rate, which means the invasive and hated 'NYC rats' have less competition from native populations.
- whartung 3y agoMy cat used to bring home Jack Rabbits. No small feat. That cat was an amazing cat in so many ways.
- flybrand 3y agoThis is just propaganda by the Pro-Rat lobby.
- wellthisisgreat 3y agoRaccoons playing 5D chess to get on top of the agenda in a generation or two
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- weeksie 3y agoI'm reminded of the Gay Talese essay that opens with an account of vast numbers of feral cats waking up all over New York. I'm surprised the story didn't mention that the city used to be full of them.
- ajaimk 3y agoDon’t we have a rat problem too? I live in Manhattan, send us some of these cats!
- lambdasquirrel 3y agoHaving had (pet) rats as well as a cat (briefly), I don’t think that cats are generally sufficient for rats. Fully grown adult rats are too big for cats to handle and they only take 10 weeks to reach a size that will make them troublesome for average cat. Remember that a feral cat does not have access to health services. If they are injured trying to take down prey, they will probably be dead shortly after. That having been said, if NYC has a rat problem, then it should also have a mouse problem. The problem here though is that trying to use feral cats to tame mice in the places where they’d be stubborn would be either troublesome, inhumane, or just disgusting (e.g. subway tracks).
- MrOwnPut 3y agoTo expand, cats also can't (don't prefer to) take on a lot of fully grown birds. What they can do easily is kill young, like most predators.
- midoridensha 3y agoIt's simple: NYC just needs to introduce lots of mountain lions or panthers to deal with the rat problem.
- nirse 3y ago2030 NYTimes headline: Clearing 500k mountain lions from New York’s streets
- astura 3y agoRats generally avoid areas where cats live, though.
- ahoy 3y agoMost rats are too big for the average cat to prey on. Mice sure. Rats get quite large. Imagine trying to fight a medium sized dog. You'd probably win, but after 2 or 3 encounters like that you'd probably get hurt. That's a bad proposition when there's smaller, easier prey. And just like, human garbage full of food too.
- KETpXDDzR 3y agoI'm totally fine with at-home cats. However, cats that roam outdoors are, by definition, an invasive species. Australia acknowledges this problem and kills outdoor cats to protect native species.
- hackernewds 3y agoNo one is culling house pets. However feral cats are culling cockroaches and rats in New York which are huge pests.
- yabatopia 3y agoBe careful what you wish for. It reminds me of the Four Pests campaign in China around 1960, especially the extermination of sparrows, one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine. 500k feral cats: that's a lot of mice, pigeons and young rats! Without predators like feral cats, NY's rat problem could become even more, well, interesting.
- vjk800 3y agoThat's what I was also thinking. The cats have been there for some time now (I assume there were lots of feral cats even before the pandemic) and the local ecosystem has somehow adapted to/with them. Getting rid of them is probably going to have unwanted consequences. Who's to say cats can't live independently among humans (and rats and other animals) in cities? Someone is probably going to bring up the argument that the cats are not taken care of and have diseases, parasites, injuries, etc., but so do all animals living in the wild. The only difference is that you don't see the parasite infested malnourished stoats in the woods every day like you see your neighbourhood cat colony.
- gjulianm 3y ago> Who's to say cats can't live independently among humans (and rats and other animals) in cities? I knew about this nonprofit via a cat colony caretaker, @poetssquarecats (I follow her on Tiktok and she's amazing) that talks about the struggles of feral cats and uncontrolled cat colonies. Yes, of course animals in the wild also suffer from diseases, parasites, and injuries. But these animals aren't in the wild. They're far more constrained than in the wild, with a lot more access to food, and with a lot more dangers. One of the problems is that, in those conditions, the number of cats can and does explode (female cats can become pregnant at 4-6 months old already, and they have on average 16 kittens a year in multiple litters). And yes, of course getting rid of them is going to have unwanted consequences, but having them has other unwanted consequences. For example, as the article mentions, birdlife is severely affected, which can also have other unwanted consequences. I think that in that case it's better to have the cause under control: either way it's going to have unwanted consequences, but at least when you control it you know that it's happening.
- Tiktaalik 3y agoFlatbush cats and other organizations like them are real heroes, stepping in to help fix an important issue that is completely and utterly ignored by the government, and if anything exacerbated by some of their rental policies. As rental scarcity has only become more severe, and no pet clauses have become more restrictive, the amount of pets unfortunately abandoned on the streets has increased. The government has shrugged its shoulders and these volunteers have showed up to clean up the mess. The negative attitude of the birder organizations expressed in this article is wild to me. These TNR orgs are keeping a lid on the feral cat population that would absolutely explode otherwise. The impacts on birds would be dramatically worse if these cat trappers weren’t out there helping working to reduce the population of feral cats.
- e40 3y agoBeen donating to Flatbush Cats for years and I will continue to do so, even though I am 3000 miles from Brooklyn. They are truly angels.
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- rossdavidh 3y ago"Popular notions aside, cats rarely attack rats..." I stopped reading at that point. I have, on numerous occasions, witnessed cats kill rats (sometimes taking a while doing it, mind you, but always finishing the job). I am not usually outside, and I'm sure there's a lot more going on than I see. I live in a neighborhood that has had feral dogs, then when they went away (because more houses were built, I'm guessing, and there wasn't as much space for them to roam), feral cats moved in. The drop in rat problems was precipitous. When (due to coyotes or cars or whatever) the cat population drops, we get rat problems, and then when we get new feral cats in the neighborhood, they go away. Now, perhaps Texas rats are smaller than New York City rats, or else Texas cats are bigger than NYC cats, or something, but the idea that "cats rarely attack rats" is laughably incorrect.
- freddie_mercury 3y agoYou stopped reading because they said something that is widely known by disease ecologists and the result of an actual scientific study? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cats-are-surprisingly-ineffective-keeping-urban-rat-populations-check-180970428/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cats-are-surprisin... "Researchers led by Fordham University’s Michael Parsons spent five months observing a rat colony housed at a Brooklyn waste management facility [...] Over the course of the 79-day testing period, local cats ambushed just three of the facility’s roughly 150 rat—killing only two. [...] A potential explanation for the felines’ unexpectedly low kill rate is the size and ferocity of city rats, Tanya Loos writes for Cosmos. New York’s infamous brown rats generally weigh around 330 grams, or roughly 10 times the weight of the average mouse. Given the choice between attacking a monstrous rat, a 15-gram bird and a 30-gram mouse, cats tend to opt for the less challenging prey. [...] But cats and rats are more likely to ignore or avoid each other than engage in outright conflict, University of Florida disease ecologist Gregory Glass, who was not involved in the study, tells Chen. “Once that rat hits puberty, [it’s] way too big and nasty for the cat to deal with,” he says. “You can watch a lot of cats and rats accommodating one another, easing by one another, eating out of the same trash bag.”
- x86_64Ubuntu 3y ago
- mochaki 3y ago[dead]
- throwaway14356 3y agoyou cant have that many cats without a decent number of mice and rats. I doubt they are aware of the level of sophistication in rodent reproductive capabilities. As it's nyc one should probably think of it as 800% compound interest every other week.
- m463 3y agoI hate that cats kill birds. "We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3-4.0 billion birds and 6.3-22.3 billion mammals annually." https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 Honestly, birds are pretty much the only surviving wildlife in many areas and I wonder what our children and grandchildren will encounter.
- trhway 3y agoIn any discussion of cats that study is mentioned and usually mentioned several times at that, and that is not surprising giving that it is published in Nature and comes from Smithsonian - it immediately generates a lot of trust in it. 2 things are notable about that study: 1. the researchers didn't specify the proportion of ill and old birds and mammals in those billions of killed. It is a glaring deficiency for such a scientific study. Billions of mammals and birds reach end of life each year. In natural settings natural predators take care about that. In developed areas basically only cats and rats are such predators who is available to perform that duty. When it comes to the ill birds and mammals - we have already been through such situation with deers and wolves. Thus, if the proportion of ill and old is high then it would mean completely opposite conclusion than the one the study reaches - it would mean that cats predation is beneficial for those birds and mammals. Now, why the study has such a glaring deficiency? One can make an informed guess when one learns the 2nd notable thing: 2. a researcher in that department that produced the study was convicted of animal cruelty committed toward cats and that researcher is cited in that study. Some other things to note wrt. cats and birds : 1. rats, a human civilization companion, raid birds nests and eat eggs, i.e. causing massive damage to population during the most fragile stage in the birds lifecycle 2. cats don't eat eggs 3. cats control rats population Anekdotally - my grandmother's farm (farmhouse and 2 large barns) had always had a bustling population of barnswallows, and it also had always had a pack of feral cats living there. Sometimes we'd find a small pile of feathers - all what is left of an ill or stupid barnswallow as the cats would have no chance of getting a healthy flying bird. The farm had naturally had a lot of various food stuff - cattle feed, pig feed, chicken feed as well as human food - pretty much everywhere, ie. in storages as well as being actually fed in the barns and outside ranges to the cows, pigs, chicken. Despite all that food stuff present in large amount in many places, there had never been any traces of any mice or rats (note: no artificial pest control measures - like traps or poison - had ever been taken on the farm). So to me the cats are necessary companion of our civilization, and as far as i see they are beneficial - by protecting from rats and by taking out ill birds - to whatever birds population still surviving the stress of development already imposed on it by the humans.
- prvc 3y agoAt least 15 of the current posts in this thread (>1/10) repeat the misconception dispelled in the article that cats reduce rat populations.
- kbelder 3y agoOr they don't believe it. I don't.
- bagels 3y agohttps://archive.is/cVOJk https://archive.is/cVOJk
- napier 3y agoA gift for soon to be many multiples of the currently estimated 2 million rats in NYC.
- jacquesm 3y agoIn other news: Mysterious rats & mice plague in NYC...
- woodruffw 3y agoSince nobody else has mentioned it: rats in NYC are frequently poisoned and are dangerous for predators to eat. The city has had a number of famous hawks and owls die over the years due to poisoned rats, most recently Pale Male[1]. I have a feral cat that lives under my stoop, and I like it. But I’m also not under a bucolic daydream about a closed ecosystem between this city’s cats and rats. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/nyregion/pale-male-hawk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/nyregion/pale-male-hawk.h...