6 ms·

Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

75 points by elorant 3y ago

cloths 3y ago
I've read multiple times that there've been discussions in a few places around the world to ban cats, or certain breeding of cats to save wildlife, or birds specifically. But I haven't heard any law become real, anyone?
- watwut 3y ago
  Cats roamed free for hundreds and hundreds years now. It is not like their presence was a new change.
  - carstenhag 3y ago
    They used to only be outside, and were sometimes fed when they lived on a farm. Nowadays pretty much all roaming ones still get fed at home.
  - dano 3y ago
    A primary difference is that cats were introduced into environments as a non-native species and have become the apex predator. This is especially true in New Zealand and Australia. Unlike native carnivorous mammals such as the Tasmanian Devil, Quall's, and Bandicoots, cats hunt for food and sport rather than act as scavengers. Cats in Tasmania have no natural predators other than humans. I've had many cats for pets and yet in an unbalanced environment short of predators, they really can cause tremendous damage. Short of an all out ban, keeping them indoors or in a catery or controlled in some manner seems reasonable.
    - wtflick 3y ago
      This whole argument of 'non-native' irks me, with animals and plants. Most everything was non-native at some point. I mean of course it depends on (potentially huge) timelines but at some point in the past land bridges between continents didn't exist and then existed and then didn't exist. At some point some seed got lucky enough to be carried across a sea either by an animal or just wind. I know this is a naive point of view, but nature adapts pretty well to this, it's kinda _what it does_, even if in the short-term and from a human lens it causes damage. What does damage mean exactly.. a drop in population of some particular species or plant that we are used to having in an area. Are we sure that's damage and not just normal evolution of ecosystems? I certainly prefer that to happen than have local governments pass laws saying cats must be kept inside, lest they upset the environment that us humans are used to.
      - solardev 3y ago
        I dunno why you were flagged. It's a totally valid question IMO, and I asked it a lot in school too (environmental science undergrad). To me, the difference is the RATE of change and expansion. Nature and evolution can pretty easily deal with small changes in small areas happening over hundreds or thousands of years, which was normal before human population explosions. But when that change happens across multiple human settlements (large areas), quickly (industrialization and the green revolution in just a few decades), and at a huge scale (not just cats but climate change and deforestation and pollution all leading to habitat loss), it is very very hard for other species to cope. If a few individual wildcats crossed a land bridge, sure, they'll have a field day as they gorge on unsuspecting prey. They'll do well and reproduce, and their kittens will eat more prey. But eventually there are more wildcats than prey, a harsh winter or drought comes along, and a bunch of kittens die and the prey have a chance to recover over the next few years. It reaches a dynamic equilibrium. That's different than when humans settle a new place and suddenly introduce hordes of rats and start breeding pet cats, at numbers far above what the prey population can sustain (because we feed them pet food). The unwanted ones become feral and enter the system at a rate higher than they would've through normal migration, and then we keep breeding more and more of them with an outside input (more pet food). Pretty quickly the feral cats will kill off a lot of the unsuspecting prey (the dumber, more exotic birds, often) and leave a bunch of human-adopted species like rats and corvids and squirrels that can coexist with cats, often having immigrated with the humans for hundreds of years. So you end up swapping the local wildlife for the introduced ones in just a decade or two, way faster than the dozens or hundreds of years it usually takes. On islands or where settlements and road networks form unnatural barriers, this is especially bad because the escaping prey have nowhere to run to, being isolated to smaller non-contiguos pockets that can individually be trapped until the whole species is extinct or at least extricated (locally extinct). Of course there are gray areas. The Hawaiian Islands, for example, are a mix of species that ended up there naturally, some a long time ago, some more recently. They have different times of introduction, just like humans do. But because it's a young island chain (in geologic time), its whole timeline is compressed and the species there have different, eh, degrees of "native"-ness, I guess. And among the various introduced species, not all of them are considered invasive. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/ https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/ Anyway, it's not an exactly cutoff date or algorithmic formula for determining nativeness. It's just a case by case judgment call based on the relative time of introduction compared to the ecosystem age, and also the effects of the introduced species on other preexisting ones. It's a human judgment call subject to errors, like any others, but still a useful consideration in ecology. Sorry for the long post...
  - Euphorbium 3y ago
    Exactly. All of the species have adapted long ago. I let out my cats, they hunt lots and lots of mice and like less than 1% of prey is birds.
    - bartonfink 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - nicklecompte 3y ago
    Cats typically roamed free in Eurasia and Africa, where small wildcats were common millions of years before humans ever showed up. This means large populations of feral/semi-domestic cats aren't as disruptive to the ecosystem: birds and rodents have already evolved specifically in response to predation from small cats. This is not true in Oceania, and only barely true in the Americas: bobcats really aren't the same thing as small cats since they are much more widely dispersed. (Especially feral domestic cats, which mostly kill for fun, and live in big dense colonies.)
  - solardev 3y ago
    Only in limited areas, though, and in limited numbers. Introducing feral cats to new places in numbers supported by human breeding is totally different than a natural slow extension of their range. Wildcats that evolved in an ecosystem have their place within it, at numbers supported by the prey population there that co-evolved with them. When humans suddenly introduce housecats to a new environment where the prey never had the chance to co-evolve, the overnight influx (in evolutionary time) will rapidly decrease the prey populations. Some birds on long established migratory paths are especially vulnerable too, since they have limited options for resting grounds along the way.
- recursive 3y ago
  Seems very unlikely to happen. People like their cats.
  - knodi123 3y ago
    mandatory spay/neuter with steep/progressive fines, plus ban free-roaming cats? that's a lot more achievable, and nearly as good.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Then all we need is a cat detector van and we’re good to go.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - User23 3y ago
      How exactly do you expect to enforce the ban on feral cats? Having giant cat killing operations? Because spay and neuter isn’t going to cut it. Even if it didn’t just result in selecting for not getting caught, there would still be 10-15 years of depredation while you wait for the die out.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
        First of all they said free-roaming cats, not feral cats. You can't ban feral cats any more than you can ban rats or trees. And you're excluding the middle too. It's not as though any policy which isn't perfectly and totally enforced is completely ineffectual. And it's also not the case that policies that don't solve a problem completely should be discarded as pointless. In the end, to have any solution at all, you need something that a) works to some extent and b) can be agreed on by enough people to actually end up being executed. Far too often the discussion gets completely bogged down in a where a has to be accomplished utterly and completely or we shouldn't bother at all. But the only thing that's pointless is having the discussion that way, because the world just doesn't work like that.
- greazy 3y ago
  Unfortunately, no me neither. I think this issue extends beyond cats, it's the uncontrolled breeding of animals, which imo leads to all sorts of abuse. I find it amazing that anyone can decide I'm going to buy a breeding pair of cats with the end goal of making money. We need to phase out cats and dogs completely. This saddens me deeply because I love my dog but the damage these animals do to the environment is so large I don't think I can truly fathom. We can do this slowly, first pets needs to be desexed. For cats there's no exception. For dogs the exception would be breeding working dogs, or therapy/guide dogs. With cats they must be kept in doors at all times. These laws should extend to larger animals like horses. In Australia we have a huge problem with horses and camels. But the public do not support culls of horses, even if it's for their own benefit (eg to stop them from starving in winter). But the horse racing industry is huge here, they've got clout and political pressure. Uncontrolled breeding of animals for human enjoyment is amoral. Animal companionship is of course the exception but this comes with issues.
  - thousand_nights 3y ago
    is this satire?
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      Pretty sure it’s just bad logic informed by propaganda.
      - greazy 3y ago
        Excuse me what propaganda? This is informed opinion.
        nuxi 3y ago
        If one was to replace "cats/dogs/animals/horses" in your statements with "humans", one could get another informed opinion. A bit cynical perhaps, but informed nonetheless.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  I think at least one small town in New Zealand has banned domestic cats specifically because of the impact on flightless birds.
  - dj_gitmo 3y ago
    Cats also devour New Zealand’s indigenous ground bats. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_lesser_short-tailed_bat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_lesser_short-tai... > The bat roosts are very vulnerable, as they contain more potential prey within a single area. If these roosts were found by a predator, they could experience mass mortality events; in one incident, 102 lesser short-tailed bat deaths were caused by a single house cat in central North Island.
- throwaway87651 3y ago
  Canberra requires cats born from 1 July 2022 to be kept indoors. https://www.cityservices.act.gov.au/pets-and-wildlife/domestic-animals/cats/cat-containment https://www.cityservices.act.gov.au/pets-and-wildlife/domest...
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Many countries have been doing it for years. Seen a cat with a clipped ear? Those were caught and neutered to control cat population.
tiku 3y ago
There recently was a finding about power lines that also kill numerous birds. What I'd those are attributes to cats?
- greazy 3y ago
  As with all estimates, there's a degree of error. Even when factoring in death by other means, cats are murdering machines that should be locked up.
- croes 3y ago
  Wouldn't change much, cats kill a magnitude more than power lines.
lol768 3y ago
Cats have been domestic pets in the UK since at least the times of Roman civilisation, and have been allowed to roam free for much of that time. It's odd to me that there's such a contrast between attitudes towards cats roaming in Europe (which I would say is completely the norm, particularly in e.g. the UK) and the United States (and now Australia), though perhaps this is just down to different native fauna. > The EU’s executive said Thursday that it is “a strong defender of free movement rights — including of cats” and “categorically” denied it would ever force cats to be kept indoors or on a leash, as one scientific study suggests. The RSPB themselves have said: “While we know that cats do kill large numbers of birds in UK gardens, there’s no evidence this is affecting decline in the same way that these other issues are” (habitat/food loss from climate change) Research in the UK has suggested cats are mostly preying on the "doomed surplus": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1474-919X https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1474-919X.... > we (4) compared the condition of those birds killed by cats versus those killed in collisions, e.g. window strikes. Mean (± sd) cat density was 348 ± 86 cats/km2 (n = 10 sites); considering the eight species most commonly taken by cats, the mean ratios of adult birds/cats and juvenile birds/cats across the five sites were 1.17 ± 0.23 and 3.07 ± 0.74, respectively > > Across species, cat-killed birds were in significantly poorer condition than those killed following collisions; this is consistent with the notion that cat predation represents a compensatory rather than additive form of mortality.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  The UK is more resistant to change than even we Americans are (except for units of measurement). Just because something has been one way for a long time doesn’t mean it’s good. Cats kill lots of native wild animals, and whether those animal populations would be similar without them is entirely beside the point. In the same way it is inhumane to have dogs rip foxes apart for sport, it is inhumane to allow pet cats to do so too. That said, good luck stopping it. Feral breeding cat populations would be at best difficult to entirely eradicate.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    There is barely any "wilderness" in the UK. The landscape has been transformed, species have been introduced, other killed off, especially predators. In suburban areas there are also many birdfeeders in gardens. Does that mean additional birds without natural predators? I am sure that cats can have a negative impact in countries where they have been introduced more recently and where there is still true wilderness but to raise the alarm in a country like the UK seems baseless.
taimurkazmi 3y ago
I've always said if cats were the size of dogs they would be outlawed. I have 3
- isilofi 3y ago
  There are cats the size of dogs, and they are usually outlawed as pets. Look at cougars, lynx, panthers, tigers, etc.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    My understanding is that while wild and vicious, cheetahs and anything smaller doesn't try to attack / eat people.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      They are large enough to eat small kids. You might be safe from them on a hike but you wouldn't want those playing in the same park as your kids.
    - eddiewithzato 3y ago
      Adult people, cheetahs will eat kids
      - shiroiuma 3y ago
        For some kids, this might not be a bad thing...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- manmal 3y ago
  There are dogs smaller than my cats, technically.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  They are called tigers
andrewstuart 3y ago
After humans are gone it will be a cats world.
trhway 3y ago
cats is basically the only predator in all those places where until humans came a range of predators had been. The Nature is a cruel machine where everybody becomes old and ill and at that stage majority falls prey to predator (or somebody needs to take care of the carcass otherwise). Like billions of birds end their lifecycle in a year. Human civilization disturbs or breaks the ecosystems, decimating or completely eliminating species, pushes predators out. Humans also bring rats with them (beside many other things rats raid the bird nests for eggs decimating the bird population). In that picture I see the cats as corrective factor, controlling rats and carrying the role of predators pushed out by civilization.
jmclnx 3y ago
No kidding. Where I live, we had many different kinds of small birds and bunnies in our yard. A couple of years ago, 2 Neighbors got a cat and they let them out. After 6 months, no birds and no rabbits. Now all I see are crows and an occasional Blue Jay. All the small song birds are gone. IMO, there should be a $2000 USD tax per year on owning cats. If you do not register the cat, you get a hefty fine. Also dog catchers should be allowed to pick up cats roaming outside.
- siliconwrath 3y ago
  Even for indoor cats? Responsible indoor-only cat owners cause none of these problems
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    Cats get out, I know plenty of people who's cats escaped and they spend a day or two looking for them.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      This is the exception, not the rule. And if a cat that's escaped and spends a couple days outside is going to destroy a wildlife ecosystem, then that ecosystem was probably already on the verge of collapse anyway. I think we have much lower hanging (and more impactful) fruit than "ban even indoor-only cats because sometimes they escape".
- Foxhuls 3y ago
  I’d much rather see a tax on pitbulls before cats
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  I don’t know why it happened in your neighbourhood but when I lived in Monschau, I had a Freiganger and there were at least five other cats outdoor all the time. We had plenty of birds. But we took care of our gardens so there were so many insects. Bees, wasps, hornets, flies, mosquitoes of various kinds, ants, spiders, occasional hummingbird, everything. Not many rats. Some mice. Those cats kill a ton of mice. Now I live in the city. No cats but rats and people walking dogs dumping on the sidewalk. I take a suburb with cats. Edit: of course, I don’t deny that cats kill a staggering number of birds.
pengaru 3y ago
There's at least some hope of nature balancing this out, eventually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt-pB1R64mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt-pB1R64mI
gosub100 3y ago
Some bird populations are invasive. European starlings aren't from North America but there is estimated over 100 million. Feral pigeons too. So I only see it as a problem for threatened or endangered species of bird. Also as a tangent, some birds eat cats! Owls, hawks, birds of prey will absolutely snipe cats!
atmavatar 3y ago
This reminds me of an old comic from The Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill
BrandoElFollito 3y ago
This is why I am against feeding wild cats (usually by well-intentioned people). They are ruthless predators and enough of them are around. Cats can slaughter bird colonies (though somehow they never slaughter the ugly pigeons, nor the invasive parrots in the area I live in) so they are best left to themselves instead of going the "beautiful kitty that is starving" way and artificially growing their population. Finally, I have a stray/rescue cat at home that stays at home (not interested in going outside), just in case someone though I was promoting the dog league.
- joecool1029 3y ago
  > This is why I am against feeding wild cats (usually by well-intentioned people). They are ruthless predators and enough of them are around. Wouldn't feeding them reduce the amount they need to kill to feed themselves? I know of at least one cat colony that has a caretaker that feeds them, they have all been catch and release spayed/neutered so the colony can't grow. They try to get adoptions for some of them but the only other alternative is to kill them.
  - BrandoElFollito 3y ago
    Cats will kill for the "pleasure", not only for food. They would then leave the corpse behind after baking played with the victim before. We must not perceived them through our errors, it is not that they are psychopaths or something, this is just the way they are. It would not be a problem if they were not artificially sustained through our help. Sterilization is a good solution (in addition to not feeding them).
jandrese 3y ago
The flipside of these cat bans is that people suddenly discover they have a rodent problem that they didn't realize before. Mice start appearing everywhere, invading homes, chewing on wires, boring holes into buildings, etc...
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Seems like a testable hypothesis. Neighborhoods with more outdoor pet cats should have fewer rodent problems in homes.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    Humans have been testing this hypothesis for milennia. There jury is very much in.
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      I should be more specific that I'm talking about a modern residential neighborhood in an industrialized society.
      - conor- 3y ago
        There's a handful of programs around Chicago that involve TNRing feral cats[0] and providing them a caretaker so that they can hunt rats. You pretty much just provide the feral cat with food, water, and somewhere outside to sleep and let the cat be a cat. [0] e.g. https://treehouseanimals.org/programs/community-cats/catsatwork/ https://treehouseanimals.org/programs/community-cats/catsatw...
  - doug5446 3y ago
    We had a cat that would regularly leave on our doorstep all types of dead bodies: birds, rats, mice, moles. Mainly mice and rates. It got to the point where we re-homed him to a farm that needed a mouser. About two weeks after we re-homed him we noticed pest control vans outside of three of the homes on our street. We talked to the neighbors and they were now seeing mice and rats and needed to get them removed.
heisenbit 3y ago
The biggest issue for birds may very well not be predators but habitat and food. The volume of insects collapsed so why should birds thrive?
marojejian 3y ago
sterilizing community cats seems like a good solution, and there is some interesting progress here via gene therapy: https://www.science.org/content/article/hello-kitty-goodbye-kittens-gene-therapy-spays-cats-without-surgery https://www.science.org/content/article/hello-kitty-goodbye-... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-develop-new-birth-control-for-female-cats-no-surgery-necessary-180982319/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-develop...
drewcoo 3y ago
> Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world Says the human . . .
- r00fus 3y ago
  We kill entire ecosystems - truly massively efficient.
ProxCoques 3y ago
My aunt and uncle are ornithologists. They observe feral cats as often the number one threat to native species populations in some areas, and have been instrumental in efforts to remove feral cats from Gran Canaria and other islands. https://brb.sprep.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/A_Review_of_Feral_Cat_Eradication_on_Isl.pdf https://brb.sprep.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/A_Review_o...
- defrost 3y ago
  I imagine they'd like a few of these: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-device-felixer-tested-at-animal-reserve/12296874 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-... https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/felixer,-the-grooming-trap,-works-to-control-feral-cats https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/felixer,-the-grooming-trap,-... Cat specific, with photographic record of every animal targeted to verify working as expected.

75 points by elorant 3y ago

I've read multiple times that there've been discussions in a few places around the world to ban cats, or certain breeding of cats to save wildlife, or birds specifically. But I haven't heard any law become real, anyone?

watwut 3y ago
Cats roamed free for hundreds and hundreds years now. It is not like their presence was a new change.
- carstenhag 3y ago
  They used to only be outside, and were sometimes fed when they lived on a farm. Nowadays pretty much all roaming ones still get fed at home.
- dano 3y ago
  A primary difference is that cats were introduced into environments as a non-native species and have become the apex predator. This is especially true in New Zealand and Australia. Unlike native carnivorous mammals such as the Tasmanian Devil, Quall's, and Bandicoots, cats hunt for food and sport rather than act as scavengers. Cats in Tasmania have no natural predators other than humans. I've had many cats for pets and yet in an unbalanced environment short of predators, they really can cause tremendous damage. Short of an all out ban, keeping them indoors or in a catery or controlled in some manner seems reasonable.
  - wtflick 3y ago
    This whole argument of 'non-native' irks me, with animals and plants. Most everything was non-native at some point. I mean of course it depends on (potentially huge) timelines but at some point in the past land bridges between continents didn't exist and then existed and then didn't exist. At some point some seed got lucky enough to be carried across a sea either by an animal or just wind. I know this is a naive point of view, but nature adapts pretty well to this, it's kinda _what it does_, even if in the short-term and from a human lens it causes damage. What does damage mean exactly.. a drop in population of some particular species or plant that we are used to having in an area. Are we sure that's damage and not just normal evolution of ecosystems? I certainly prefer that to happen than have local governments pass laws saying cats must be kept inside, lest they upset the environment that us humans are used to.
    - solardev 3y ago
      I dunno why you were flagged. It's a totally valid question IMO, and I asked it a lot in school too (environmental science undergrad). To me, the difference is the RATE of change and expansion. Nature and evolution can pretty easily deal with small changes in small areas happening over hundreds or thousands of years, which was normal before human population explosions. But when that change happens across multiple human settlements (large areas), quickly (industrialization and the green revolution in just a few decades), and at a huge scale (not just cats but climate change and deforestation and pollution all leading to habitat loss), it is very very hard for other species to cope. If a few individual wildcats crossed a land bridge, sure, they'll have a field day as they gorge on unsuspecting prey. They'll do well and reproduce, and their kittens will eat more prey. But eventually there are more wildcats than prey, a harsh winter or drought comes along, and a bunch of kittens die and the prey have a chance to recover over the next few years. It reaches a dynamic equilibrium. That's different than when humans settle a new place and suddenly introduce hordes of rats and start breeding pet cats, at numbers far above what the prey population can sustain (because we feed them pet food). The unwanted ones become feral and enter the system at a rate higher than they would've through normal migration, and then we keep breeding more and more of them with an outside input (more pet food). Pretty quickly the feral cats will kill off a lot of the unsuspecting prey (the dumber, more exotic birds, often) and leave a bunch of human-adopted species like rats and corvids and squirrels that can coexist with cats, often having immigrated with the humans for hundreds of years. So you end up swapping the local wildlife for the introduced ones in just a decade or two, way faster than the dozens or hundreds of years it usually takes. On islands or where settlements and road networks form unnatural barriers, this is especially bad because the escaping prey have nowhere to run to, being isolated to smaller non-contiguos pockets that can individually be trapped until the whole species is extinct or at least extricated (locally extinct). Of course there are gray areas. The Hawaiian Islands, for example, are a mix of species that ended up there naturally, some a long time ago, some more recently. They have different times of introduction, just like humans do. But because it's a young island chain (in geologic time), its whole timeline is compressed and the species there have different, eh, degrees of "native"-ness, I guess. And among the various introduced species, not all of them are considered invasive. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/ https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/ Anyway, it's not an exactly cutoff date or algorithmic formula for determining nativeness. It's just a case by case judgment call based on the relative time of introduction compared to the ecosystem age, and also the effects of the introduced species on other preexisting ones. It's a human judgment call subject to errors, like any others, but still a useful consideration in ecology. Sorry for the long post...
- Euphorbium 3y ago
  Exactly. All of the species have adapted long ago. I let out my cats, they hunt lots and lots of mice and like less than 1% of prey is birds.
  - bartonfink 3y ago
    [flagged]
- nicklecompte 3y ago
  Cats typically roamed free in Eurasia and Africa, where small wildcats were common millions of years before humans ever showed up. This means large populations of feral/semi-domestic cats aren't as disruptive to the ecosystem: birds and rodents have already evolved specifically in response to predation from small cats. This is not true in Oceania, and only barely true in the Americas: bobcats really aren't the same thing as small cats since they are much more widely dispersed. (Especially feral domestic cats, which mostly kill for fun, and live in big dense colonies.)
- solardev 3y ago
  Only in limited areas, though, and in limited numbers. Introducing feral cats to new places in numbers supported by human breeding is totally different than a natural slow extension of their range. Wildcats that evolved in an ecosystem have their place within it, at numbers supported by the prey population there that co-evolved with them. When humans suddenly introduce housecats to a new environment where the prey never had the chance to co-evolve, the overnight influx (in evolutionary time) will rapidly decrease the prey populations. Some birds on long established migratory paths are especially vulnerable too, since they have limited options for resting grounds along the way.
recursive 3y ago
Seems very unlikely to happen. People like their cats.
- knodi123 3y ago
  mandatory spay/neuter with steep/progressive fines, plus ban free-roaming cats? that's a lot more achievable, and nearly as good.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Then all we need is a cat detector van and we’re good to go.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - User23 3y ago
    How exactly do you expect to enforce the ban on feral cats? Having giant cat killing operations? Because spay and neuter isn’t going to cut it. Even if it didn’t just result in selecting for not getting caught, there would still be 10-15 years of depredation while you wait for the die out.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      First of all they said free-roaming cats, not feral cats. You can't ban feral cats any more than you can ban rats or trees. And you're excluding the middle too. It's not as though any policy which isn't perfectly and totally enforced is completely ineffectual. And it's also not the case that policies that don't solve a problem completely should be discarded as pointless. In the end, to have any solution at all, you need something that a) works to some extent and b) can be agreed on by enough people to actually end up being executed. Far too often the discussion gets completely bogged down in a where a has to be accomplished utterly and completely or we shouldn't bother at all. But the only thing that's pointless is having the discussion that way, because the world just doesn't work like that.
greazy 3y ago
Unfortunately, no me neither. I think this issue extends beyond cats, it's the uncontrolled breeding of animals, which imo leads to all sorts of abuse. I find it amazing that anyone can decide I'm going to buy a breeding pair of cats with the end goal of making money. We need to phase out cats and dogs completely. This saddens me deeply because I love my dog but the damage these animals do to the environment is so large I don't think I can truly fathom. We can do this slowly, first pets needs to be desexed. For cats there's no exception. For dogs the exception would be breeding working dogs, or therapy/guide dogs. With cats they must be kept in doors at all times. These laws should extend to larger animals like horses. In Australia we have a huge problem with horses and camels. But the public do not support culls of horses, even if it's for their own benefit (eg to stop them from starving in winter). But the horse racing industry is huge here, they've got clout and political pressure. Uncontrolled breeding of animals for human enjoyment is amoral. Animal companionship is of course the exception but this comes with issues.
- thousand_nights 3y ago
  is this satire?
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    Pretty sure it’s just bad logic informed by propaganda.
    - greazy 3y ago
      Excuse me what propaganda? This is informed opinion.
      - nuxi 3y ago
        If one was to replace "cats/dogs/animals/horses" in your statements with "humans", one could get another informed opinion. A bit cynical perhaps, but informed nonetheless.
williamcotton 3y ago
I think at least one small town in New Zealand has banned domestic cats specifically because of the impact on flightless birds.
- dj_gitmo 3y ago
  Cats also devour New Zealand’s indigenous ground bats. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_lesser_short-tailed_bat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_lesser_short-tai... > The bat roosts are very vulnerable, as they contain more potential prey within a single area. If these roosts were found by a predator, they could experience mass mortality events; in one incident, 102 lesser short-tailed bat deaths were caused by a single house cat in central North Island.
throwaway87651 3y ago
Canberra requires cats born from 1 July 2022 to be kept indoors. https://www.cityservices.act.gov.au/pets-and-wildlife/domestic-animals/cats/cat-containment https://www.cityservices.act.gov.au/pets-and-wildlife/domest...
throwaway290 3y ago
Many countries have been doing it for years. Seen a cat with a clipped ear? Those were caught and neutered to control cat population.

tiku 3y ago

There recently was a finding about power lines that also kill numerous birds. What I'd those are attributes to cats?

greazy 3y ago
As with all estimates, there's a degree of error. Even when factoring in death by other means, cats are murdering machines that should be locked up.
croes 3y ago
Wouldn't change much, cats kill a magnitude more than power lines.

lol768 3y ago

Cats have been domestic pets in the UK since at least the times of Roman civilisation, and have been allowed to roam free for much of that time. It's odd to me that there's such a contrast between attitudes towards cats roaming in Europe (which I would say is completely the norm, particularly in e.g. the UK) and the United States (and now Australia), though perhaps this is just down to different native fauna. > The EU’s executive said Thursday that it is “a strong defender of free movement rights — including of cats” and “categorically” denied it would ever force cats to be kept indoors or on a leash, as one scientific study suggests. The RSPB themselves have said: “While we know that cats do kill large numbers of birds in UK gardens, there’s no evidence this is affecting decline in the same way that these other issues are” (habitat/food loss from climate change) Research in the UK has suggested cats are mostly preying on the "doomed surplus": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1474-919X https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1474-919X.... > we (4) compared the condition of those birds killed by cats versus those killed in collisions, e.g. window strikes. Mean (± sd) cat density was 348 ± 86 cats/km2 (n = 10 sites); considering the eight species most commonly taken by cats, the mean ratios of adult birds/cats and juvenile birds/cats across the five sites were 1.17 ± 0.23 and 3.07 ± 0.74, respectively > > Across species, cat-killed birds were in significantly poorer condition than those killed following collisions; this is consistent with the notion that cat predation represents a compensatory rather than additive form of mortality.

mattmaroon 3y ago
The UK is more resistant to change than even we Americans are (except for units of measurement). Just because something has been one way for a long time doesn’t mean it’s good. Cats kill lots of native wild animals, and whether those animal populations would be similar without them is entirely beside the point. In the same way it is inhumane to have dogs rip foxes apart for sport, it is inhumane to allow pet cats to do so too. That said, good luck stopping it. Feral breeding cat populations would be at best difficult to entirely eradicate.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  There is barely any "wilderness" in the UK. The landscape has been transformed, species have been introduced, other killed off, especially predators. In suburban areas there are also many birdfeeders in gardens. Does that mean additional birds without natural predators? I am sure that cats can have a negative impact in countries where they have been introduced more recently and where there is still true wilderness but to raise the alarm in a country like the UK seems baseless.

taimurkazmi 3y ago

I've always said if cats were the size of dogs they would be outlawed. I have 3

isilofi 3y ago
There are cats the size of dogs, and they are usually outlawed as pets. Look at cougars, lynx, panthers, tigers, etc.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  My understanding is that while wild and vicious, cheetahs and anything smaller doesn't try to attack / eat people.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    They are large enough to eat small kids. You might be safe from them on a hike but you wouldn't want those playing in the same park as your kids.
  - eddiewithzato 3y ago
    Adult people, cheetahs will eat kids
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      For some kids, this might not be a bad thing...
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manmal 3y ago
There are dogs smaller than my cats, technically.
m3kw9 3y ago
They are called tigers

andrewstuart 3y ago

After humans are gone it will be a cats world.

trhway 3y ago

cats is basically the only predator in all those places where until humans came a range of predators had been. The Nature is a cruel machine where everybody becomes old and ill and at that stage majority falls prey to predator (or somebody needs to take care of the carcass otherwise). Like billions of birds end their lifecycle in a year. Human civilization disturbs or breaks the ecosystems, decimating or completely eliminating species, pushes predators out. Humans also bring rats with them (beside many other things rats raid the bird nests for eggs decimating the bird population). In that picture I see the cats as corrective factor, controlling rats and carrying the role of predators pushed out by civilization.

jmclnx 3y ago

No kidding. Where I live, we had many different kinds of small birds and bunnies in our yard. A couple of years ago, 2 Neighbors got a cat and they let them out. After 6 months, no birds and no rabbits. Now all I see are crows and an occasional Blue Jay. All the small song birds are gone. IMO, there should be a $2000 USD tax per year on owning cats. If you do not register the cat, you get a hefty fine. Also dog catchers should be allowed to pick up cats roaming outside.

siliconwrath 3y ago
Even for indoor cats? Responsible indoor-only cat owners cause none of these problems
- jmclnx 3y ago
  Cats get out, I know plenty of people who's cats escaped and they spend a day or two looking for them.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    This is the exception, not the rule. And if a cat that's escaped and spends a couple days outside is going to destroy a wildlife ecosystem, then that ecosystem was probably already on the verge of collapse anyway. I think we have much lower hanging (and more impactful) fruit than "ban even indoor-only cats because sometimes they escape".
Foxhuls 3y ago
I’d much rather see a tax on pitbulls before cats
rad_gruchalski 3y ago
I don’t know why it happened in your neighbourhood but when I lived in Monschau, I had a Freiganger and there were at least five other cats outdoor all the time. We had plenty of birds. But we took care of our gardens so there were so many insects. Bees, wasps, hornets, flies, mosquitoes of various kinds, ants, spiders, occasional hummingbird, everything. Not many rats. Some mice. Those cats kill a ton of mice. Now I live in the city. No cats but rats and people walking dogs dumping on the sidewalk. I take a suburb with cats. Edit: of course, I don’t deny that cats kill a staggering number of birds.

pengaru 3y ago

There's at least some hope of nature balancing this out, eventually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt-pB1R64mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt-pB1R64mI

gosub100 3y ago

Some bird populations are invasive. European starlings aren't from North America but there is estimated over 100 million. Feral pigeons too. So I only see it as a problem for threatened or endangered species of bird. Also as a tangent, some birds eat cats! Owls, hawks, birds of prey will absolutely snipe cats!

atmavatar 3y ago

This reminds me of an old comic from The Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill

BrandoElFollito 3y ago

This is why I am against feeding wild cats (usually by well-intentioned people). They are ruthless predators and enough of them are around. Cats can slaughter bird colonies (though somehow they never slaughter the ugly pigeons, nor the invasive parrots in the area I live in) so they are best left to themselves instead of going the "beautiful kitty that is starving" way and artificially growing their population. Finally, I have a stray/rescue cat at home that stays at home (not interested in going outside), just in case someone though I was promoting the dog league.

joecool1029 3y ago
> This is why I am against feeding wild cats (usually by well-intentioned people). They are ruthless predators and enough of them are around. Wouldn't feeding them reduce the amount they need to kill to feed themselves? I know of at least one cat colony that has a caretaker that feeds them, they have all been catch and release spayed/neutered so the colony can't grow. They try to get adoptions for some of them but the only other alternative is to kill them.
- BrandoElFollito 3y ago
  Cats will kill for the "pleasure", not only for food. They would then leave the corpse behind after baking played with the victim before. We must not perceived them through our errors, it is not that they are psychopaths or something, this is just the way they are. It would not be a problem if they were not artificially sustained through our help. Sterilization is a good solution (in addition to not feeding them).

jandrese 3y ago

The flipside of these cat bans is that people suddenly discover they have a rodent problem that they didn't realize before. Mice start appearing everywhere, invading homes, chewing on wires, boring holes into buildings, etc...

nerdponx 3y ago
Seems like a testable hypothesis. Neighborhoods with more outdoor pet cats should have fewer rodent problems in homes.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Humans have been testing this hypothesis for milennia. There jury is very much in.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    I should be more specific that I'm talking about a modern residential neighborhood in an industrialized society.
    - conor- 3y ago
      There's a handful of programs around Chicago that involve TNRing feral cats[0] and providing them a caretaker so that they can hunt rats. You pretty much just provide the feral cat with food, water, and somewhere outside to sleep and let the cat be a cat. [0] e.g. https://treehouseanimals.org/programs/community-cats/catsatwork/ https://treehouseanimals.org/programs/community-cats/catsatw...
- doug5446 3y ago
  We had a cat that would regularly leave on our doorstep all types of dead bodies: birds, rats, mice, moles. Mainly mice and rates. It got to the point where we re-homed him to a farm that needed a mouser. About two weeks after we re-homed him we noticed pest control vans outside of three of the homes on our street. We talked to the neighbors and they were now seeing mice and rats and needed to get them removed.

heisenbit 3y ago

The biggest issue for birds may very well not be predators but habitat and food. The volume of insects collapsed so why should birds thrive?

marojejian 3y ago

sterilizing community cats seems like a good solution, and there is some interesting progress here via gene therapy: https://www.science.org/content/article/hello-kitty-goodbye-kittens-gene-therapy-spays-cats-without-surgery https://www.science.org/content/article/hello-kitty-goodbye-... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-develop-new-birth-control-for-female-cats-no-surgery-necessary-180982319/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-develop...

drewcoo 3y ago

> Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world Says the human . . .

r00fus 3y ago
We kill entire ecosystems - truly massively efficient.

ProxCoques 3y ago

My aunt and uncle are ornithologists. They observe feral cats as often the number one threat to native species populations in some areas, and have been instrumental in efforts to remove feral cats from Gran Canaria and other islands. https://brb.sprep.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/A_Review_of_Feral_Cat_Eradication_on_Isl.pdf https://brb.sprep.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/A_Review_o...

defrost 3y ago
I imagine they'd like a few of these: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-device-felixer-tested-at-animal-reserve/12296874 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-... https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/felixer,-the-grooming-trap,-works-to-control-feral-cats https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/felixer,-the-grooming-trap,-... Cat specific, with photographic record of every animal targeted to verify working as expected.