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Comment by darkmighty | Hacker News Reader

Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction

The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss, pesticide use (associated decline in insect population), and large scale change in available food and climate.

I think the easiest to address would be pesticide and herbicide use -- widely known to have other negative side effects, such as effect on bees, possible human effects, biodiversity loss, etc. Hopefully it can be replaced by techniques like crop diversification and maybe robotic/biological pest control.

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Cats, as cute as they are, are a major contributor as well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-bird...

> Feral cats on islands are responsible for at least 14% global bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions and are the principal threat to almost 8% of critically endangered birds, mammals, and reptiles.

https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

While that paper singles out cats, any introduced mammal species (rats, foxes, dogs etc.) on an island with ground-nesting and/or flightless birds is a huge problem...

Yes, that's a massive issue in New Zealand. We have a programme called Predator Free 2050 aiming to address it. There are some very interesting organisations working on solutions, such as the Cacophony Project (https://cacophony.org.nz/)

I added this up the thread, but here again so you don't miss it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-end...

What a madman. Cats > birds.

Not just mammals. Fireants got most of the quail when they arrived in the woods I grew up in. Neighbors lost most of their guinea hens too. And rabbits got pretty scarce.

This. People in suburban and urban areas should be banned from having outdoor cats, period.

Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds...

As if the problem is the loss of birds in Manhattan or Queens, and not the loss of birds in millions of acres of rural USA (where cats are not really the problem), for example...

I guess if those are our options then better for all if your cat is inside safe from cars and predators and yay we get birds!

>Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds...

Responsible people don't let their dogs roam the streets as they can be a threat to strangers, children etc.

why should we treat cat's any differently especially when cats kill far more.

The reason you gave for not allowing dogs to roam does not apply to cats.

We shouldn't be making like for pets more miserable. We should be explaining to people the damage that cats to to the local ecology and dissuading them from having them. A fun talk I had with my kids.

Kids are far more destructive for the environment than cats, though.

Allowing one damaging thing isn't a good enough reason for allowing another damaging thing. In both cases the costs and benefits need to stand on their own merits.

Sure, but it still reads like a guy idling his Hummer so he can explain the environmental effects of someone's bicycle.

Actually, no, I don't agree with that. It's more of a balancing act than a piecemeal analysis. Being generally frugal leaves you more space to waste a few resources on specific things. Now, some things are over the limit regardless of how frugal you are generally, and pet cats may or may not be one of those.

It seems like here you’re arguing that banning some damaging things might make some others allowable. That’s the inverse of the argument I was discussing.

I understand the argument and it’s reasonable, but in the case if each activity under consideration, they have to be assessed relative to the total harm to the environment, not to directly against each other individually. But there could be a hierarchy of comparison.

Still, as I said this is the inverse case to the one I was replying to, which I still think is completely unreasonable.

Source on that? Most kids don't make a habit of killing local wildlife. Or are you using "kids" as a proxy for "habitat loss from rising human population"?

I'm including indirect kills over their lifetime, not just direct kills over the childhood (kittens aren't capable of killing that much either), but otherwise, it's a fairly 1:1 comparison, nothing to do with whether the human population is rising or not.

What are you calling "indirect kills"?

Anything that we consume and whose production method kills some number of birds. The number is immense, and it includes all kinds of stuff that most people do, particularly those in wealthier areas of the world.

And nuclear weapons are more destructive than my 16 year old. So that's all good then.

Sorry, what point were you trying to make?

If you were a producer of nuclear weapons and were warning people of the destructiveness dangers of having 16 year olds, I'd find it absurd. Wouldn't you?

Essentially, it's hypocritical to talk about environmental dangers on one activity when performing a much more environmentally destructive activity.

Well, an urban centre doesn't have much "local ecology" to begin with...

The only birds in my city are pidgeons (that defecate everywhere), sparrows and crows. At least the only ones I actually see.

Which city would that be? Because I suspect you would be surprised by the levels of diversity that are clinging on.

I'm pretty sure there are more birds in the parks, where there are trees and stuff. But in my street I don't see those kind of birds.

Or, you know, don't enslave cats in miserable settings.

I am fine with cats being miserable. That is an acceptable outcome.

Cats are very useful for removing rats. Cat ban is considered harmful.

Hawks, owls and snakes are much more useful for removing rats, and cats are about as useful for removing those as they are for removing rats.

I do not support a cat ban, but that argument is not a good one.

Is there a way for me to reliably employ a hawk, owl, or snake around my property?

Two more from The Atlantic:

- How Cats Used Humans to Conquer the World - -- Ancient DNA from 209 cats over 9,000 years tell the story of their dispersal. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/cat-domi...

- The End of Cats: An Interview With the New Zealand Economist Calling to Eliminate All Kitties -- "The cat lobby here is just as feral, self-centered and as balmy as your gun lobby is" https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-end...

> "The cat lobby here is just as feral, self-centered and as balmy as your gun lobby is"

Damn, that is quite the quote. I imagine he's not quite being fair (though I admittedly have little exposure to the pet politics of New Zealand", but I have noticed a strong and immediate current of defensiveness among cat owners whenever anything negative about cats is brought up (in a way that's absent when say, domestic dogs as a vector for disease are brought up). Though it's perhaps a little understandable that cat lovers would be a little thin-skinned due to the general bad rap that cats get.

Don't only blame cats:

https://www.livescience.com/27330-dogs-disrupt-wildlife.html

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-...

There's a bit of a difference here: the staggering figures for wildlife killed by cats that they cite is for the US:

> the felines kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds and between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion small mammals, such as meadow voles and chipmunks, each year.

But since free-roaming dogs are very uncommon in the US (and most of the developed world), they have to jump to strays and owned free-roaming dogs across the world to make their comparison.

To be clear, the latter is on point relative to what we're discussing in this thread (eg the feral cats statistic). But there are solutions in reach that would be acceptable for dealing with strays (eg, what we do for dogs in the US), that apply to both dogs and cats. The difference is that this would cause dogs' threat to the local environment to nearly vanish, while cats would still pose a massive threat to local wildlife due to owners that let their cats roam.

Just by using pesticides and herbicides more precisely you can have a major remedial impact. Many farmers would apply either the wrong pesticide against an insect or at a stage that makes it less effective against its target. However, we have a myriad of weather data available, and together with insect life cycle data you can create a model that tells you 1) when to spray 2) the epicenter if applicable and 3) dynamic feedback as the weather changes.

I have a early stage startup that has this as one of its long term goals. But to be honest there are other lower hanging fruit in agriculture that makes more sense to start with—the startup is more of an "idea" bank than a business at this point—and I won't be quitting a job in finance for a risky "smart farm" idea any time soon.

EDIT: By the way, Johannesburg and Pretoria are bird paradises. There are even feral populations of lovebirds (indigenous to Namibia) that fly around outside my office as we speak.

> The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss

Fragmentation is also an issue people don't think enough about. You see percentages of forested ground and think "well that looks pretty good" but when you go check it out it's disparate strands with fields inbetween, or thin rows of trees a few meters wide. This means only "edge" species have a habitat, and even for them their domain is not really a boundary with a flux between different ecosystems anymore, they've got identical open areas on both sides. It also means the bigger species don't have the room to live there anymore.

Going to public school in Wisconsin, I remember being taught about fragmentation and how it let brood parasites like cowbirds have better access to the nests they sneak their eggs into, which leads to the death of lots of chicks from other species. Wisconsin still has lots of forest, but with so many roads and fields cutting through them, they just can't support the same level of wildlife.

Biological pest control has always been practiced historically. It's always good to have frogs in the paddy fields. Insect eating birds for the most part tend to be omnivores, hence dangerous for crops as well, unfortunately. I'm not aware of any existing solutions that benefit both birds and farming. I would love to be proven wrong about this statement, but under most cases Farming and Birds are antithetical to each other.

Habitat loss may be reversing now due to urbanization, as population growth has slowed (and largely stabilized or even declined in the developed world).

I'm guessing as those little rural towns in Japan become increasingly abandoned, animals are moving in.

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