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- Hacker News
- Wait until you hear about humans.by ferrouswheel
- Wait until they hear about bacteria and viruses
- From the abstract:
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.
I.e. cats might kill more birds and mammals than humans.
- Lovely murder machines.by snvzz
- Cats are probably the ideal biological machines. Evolution keeps casting them in many form factors from the smallest (house cats) to the largest (bengal tigers?).
- This fact will be used by climate change deniers, when you point out the deaths caused by climate change: "Cats cause infinitely more death, we do nothing about it, can't do nothing about it, climate change may also cause death, but we can't do anything about. Do you want (us) to kill your cat just because it does some mischief?"
- Felixer feral cat grooming traps:
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-...
by defrost - According to current US Admin, wind turbines kill most of the birds and must be banned. I'm not sure whom to believe.
- I'm pretty sure who not to believe.
- And how many do wild cats kill? And how many would wild cats kill, if we allowed them to multiply as they want?by karlkloss
- Noth America had cats before the Europeans came, just not any in the niche that house cats fill. Think less barn cat more bob cat or mountain lion.by DerArzt
- The paper is about the species of "domestic cats", which includes feral cats, strays, etc, with unowned cats making up the majority of the kills as compared to owned cats/pets
- I love cats, and ours are indoor-only. They are happy, simulated, and in good health. I expect their life expectancy is longer than if they were outdoor cats.
They don't have the opportunity to kill birds or other animals.
On the other hand, cats reducing rodent populations sounds like a very good thing. If only we could get them to ignore species we want to keep around...
by kelnos - > a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually.
This is US only. I wonder what the numbers would be world wide.
- And how can we tell for sure if it's good or bad? Does killing these birds and mammals help maintain the ecosystem balance (due to these birds and mammals not killing billions other animals down the food chain, or not spreading infections and viruses), or the other way around?by aldanor
- What a ridiculous gaslighting question.
Asking us to prove that cats killing wildlife is a bad thing.
A guy once told me that they remove the fallen logs from the Canadian forests because fallen trees are messy and ruin the forest. How do you even respond to such a stupid concept?
by andrewstuart - Very bad. Cats are fluffy little psychos. They'll clear out anything that moves for funby homeonthemtn
- Sometimes I feel like people on this website act to be as obtuse and ignorant as possible to prove some kind of point. This is a great example
- A prerequisite for there to even be a chance of cats being involved in ecosystem balance would be for the cats to exist purely as part of the ecosystem, as in being exposed to negative feedback effects to it (e.g. starvation due to overhunting). As it stands, they are being fed by humans and mostly exist outside the ecosystem, and every kill by them only drains resources from the ecosystem.by hobofan
- Bad. There are Pacific islands where birds have become extinct due to cat predation.
In the US, I went to a university (sarcastically referred to as find another university) where the mascot was the burrowing owl. They build nests in the sandy soil in Southern Florida. They are becoming endangered due to feral cats hunting them. And there is always some battle between preservationists and crazy cat lovers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrowing_owl
Cats have a hunting instinct. No matter how well fed, they will continue to hunt. I remember living with a woman who rescued ex-breeder cats, which were all very fat. They still tried hunting lizards even being so fat that their belly hair rubbed off on the carpeting. Cats are not quite as bad as adult raccoons (who will kill every chicken in your coop just to eat one), but are not capable of hunting only what they need to eat.
by Tangurena2 - Istanbul has very few rats compared to other major global cities, largely because hundreds of thousands of community street cats keep the rodent population under strict control.
- For cat lovers, I recommend the film Kedi about the cats of Istanbul.by JKCalhoun
- As a cat lover this only strengthens my opinion that they should stay inside the house, humans cause enough damage to the ecosystem without needlessly unleashing pretty efficient predators for no gain.
- > Cats should stay inside they house
Isn't putting them on a leash, or having them wear a bell around their neck outside, enough for all parties?
- by that logic, humans should stay inside too
- Most cats do tend to stay inside the house, or briefly go outside before coming back in again. Some animal-protection org here once published a story about the number of birds killed by cats which worked out to each cat in the country killing something like three birds a day, including all the cats who never go outdoors or who are way to comfortable to ever chase anything more mobile than a food bowl. After that I stopped paying attention to claims about bird numbers.
Not to mention that the cats who aren't too lazy to chase things are far more likely to go for ground-based animals like rats and mice than birds. As in, the rats that would be raiding bird nests if the cats didn't keep their numbers down.