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Comment by tyjen | Hacker News Reader

Kill all feral and free roaming invasive, domestic cat species. Domestic cats belong indoors and not outside.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. A topic this is emotional enough as it is, with people hating other people's favorite animals and other people hating back. If you post something cheap and nasty like this, you're dropping a lit match into a petrol tank. We need better than that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I apologize for starting a stirring the pot, that was not my intent. It's more serious issue than people give it credit. Anyone who spent significant time in the Hawaiian islands may be able to speak to large herds of domestic cats roaming the islands.

The comment is not designed to take a thread into a flamewar, it's a legitimate grievance based on living in habitats destroyed by released domestic cats. I don't hate cats, I own an indoor cat. Removing them from a habitat they do not belong to is no different than government agencies encouraging the removal of snakehead fish from U.S. waterways. They're both destructive, predatory species hurting native species, the only underlying difference is that cats garner the irrational support of humans to exist in a feral/outdoor state and destroy with impunity (cuteness bias?).

As often happens, your later comment contains material that would have made for a more substantive comment originally.

This is one reason the guidelines include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." Cats are one hell of a divisive topic. (So are dogs, but I think less so.) It maybe doesn't quite sink to the pit of flamewar hell with cyclists vs. drivers but it's close.

I'll keep this in mind when engaging in emotionally divisive topics in the future. Thanks.

You surely don't mean other people's properly identifiable pets, do you?

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