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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

> Cats are amazing creatures.

This is it. It makes me so sad seeing online people claiming cats are vengeful, aggressive, selfish animals. Cats have a huge variety of personality and so, yes, some of them are vengeful, aggressive and/or selfish. However, once an average cat trusts you there is a very special kind of bond between you guys that I only experienced with a long term human partner. Cats are amazing, amazing creatures. Obviously I don't know what's going inside my cat's brain, whether he actually experiences what we label "love", but his behavior is oftentimes consistent with it. Every morning I wake up my cat next to me and I feel so lucky to have experienced a cat's love in my lifetime. I'm so thankful to our neolithic ancestors to have domesticated and introduced these quirky, lovely little mammals in our lives.

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I love cats but some of them absolutely do decimate local bird populations in the local neighborhood when they are left out unsupervised.

My grandparents’ cat was like this. Very friendly to all people but when left outside would usually have a bird killed within a half hour.

>I love cats but some of them absolutely do decimate local bird populations in the local neighborhood when they are left out unsupervised.

Not disagreeing per se, but every time this comes up on HN or in other public discourse, I ask for sources. Specifically, there is a statement that I see used regularly (including from the Audubon Society) that makes claims on the order of "billions" of birds killed every year by domestic cats.

The question isn't whether cats will hunt a bird or rodent, but to my thinking whether their impact is any greater than say the risk of birds running into windows, etc. Feels a bit like when we blame the cow for burping (IE: doing what it does naturally) as the cause of global warming while we continue to drive around in our carbon-belching cars.

https://blogs.umass.edu/natsci397a-eross/the-environmental-a...

We've had 3 birds hit our windows in the 12 years I've owned this home. To combat that, I made sure all the windows had blinds. It hasn't happened since.

My one neighbor's cat kills more than 3 birds per month in the warm seasons. I haven't been able to combat that unfortunately.

But I did build a dry stack retaining wall that has allowed the chipmunk population to have a bit of refuge. They are slowly growing in numbers. We had scores of them until the neighbors moved in next door. Within months they dwindled to less than a dozen. My wife and I used to love to sit at our breakfast table and watch them scurry around the yard and patio. Our neighbor's cat ruined that for us.

I shouldn't have to spend $5k+ to prevent cats from killing chipmunks, but I'm always willing to do whatever I can to improve something rather than just complaining about it.

The first result on Google for "how many birds are killed by domesticated cats" is a scientific article from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

An article is as good as the data that supports the research.

We have to keep in mind that this is an article based in google search and bibliography and is just a very raw estimate. Bibliography studies mostly the worse and special cases. There is a risk into taking the worse cases as a sample of the global situation.

Is a guess, much better than having none, but still a guess. Don't overthink it

https://abcbirds.org/article/study-documents-dramatic-new-im...

https://abcbirds.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Medina-et-al...

https://abcbirds.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Loss_et_al._...

https://abcbirds.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Doherty-et-a...

The thing I always wonder is, in habitats where birds would normally have to deal with feline predators, how is the domestic cat worse than that? Any birds in environments that have feline predators would already be adapted to avoidng cats, unlike say, small Australian fauna.

I can understand the damage inflicted by cats in environments that never had a very efficient bird predator like cats (e.g. New Zealand and other islands). But in North America there's the Bobcat, Lynx, Ocelot, Margay, and Jaguarundi. Even without the domestic cat, birds would still get eaten in sizable numbers by cats. Sure there are a lot more domestic cats out there, but without civilization there would be a lot more wildcats out there eating birds.

Maybe the impact is simply that outside house cats exist in numbers that are not supportable for a normal wild predator due to the fact that house cats have meals provided by humans to sustain them. So house cat numbers don't reach an equilibrium with their prey the way a wild cat could. Either way I suspect that the impact on bird populations by domestic cats is often overstated.

>Maybe the impact is simply that outside house cats exist in numbers that are not supportable for a normal wild predator due to the fact that house cats have meals provided by humans to sustain them. So house cat numbers don't reach an equilibrium with their prey the way a wild cat could.

That's exactly it. The density of house cats is orders of magnitude larger than the density of wildcats would be.

> Either way I suspect that the impact on bird populations by domestic cats is often overstated.

Why?

Last time I looked, which was a while ago, there were over 9 million cats in the UK. I suspect a similar number for the US, proportionally, so I can't see any way that the wildcat population could ever rise that high. Domestication brings safety and an ever increasing population, not just for humans.

> We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. 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.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

Probably depends on the individual's tendencies. My cat's kill stats for year to date, not too many birds:

    Total          106
    --------------------
    Bird           3
    Red Squirrel   1
    Chipmunk       9
    Rabbit         11
    Vole           59
    Deer Mouse     23

My garden and house really appreciate the vole/mouse/chipmunk control

How did you produce these numbers?

You sound way too confident in it's validity unless you've put a camera on the cat and check the full recording every day...

My educated guess would be that the gato presents them with these offerings.

So these numbers are lower bounds.

Lower bound but pretty confident in accuracy - Have eyes on all catflap traffic, some accelerometer/position data (a cat collar tracker, not a cat tracker!), and observation thus far supports the conclusion that he stages all kills in his "abattoir" area unfortunately underneath the couch regardless of their eventual disposition - pretty common behavior

Goodness. How big are the rabbits in your area? The ones here are so large that I imagine that A) a cat could not catch them and B) the rabbit would disembowel the cat with its rear feet. I've seen rabbits do impressive things to small dogs and snakes. I wouldn't want one near my cats.

I have seen cats catch rabbits as big as themselves.

That’s impressive. On my mothers farm, the turkeys run the show followed by the geese. But neither one of them will ever bother the rabbits. It’s interesting watching the hierarchy.

She has numerous 150lb+ dogs and they all defer to the turkey and geese. Even the donkeys don’t go near the turkeys and geese The geese can’t really hurt you, but I’d rather fight a 150lb dog than a 60lb turkey.

My grandfather used to keep a couple of rabbits in the barn to run off the rats! He swore that rabbits naturally hated rats and would fuck them up if they could get near them.

Rabbits can be fierce. They aren’t as intimidating as wild turkeys or the boars around here, but I wouldn’t want to try to handle a wild rabbit.

Smaller cats will catch the baby rabbits, but a larger cat has no trouble catching and eating adult rabbits in my experience. The largest thing I've seen a cat catch was a grouse. Turkeys are too large. Weasel like things seem to be too fierce.

They don’t want to catch a turkey. We’ve had turkeys kill medium sized dogs and they’ve put holes in the side of the feed man’s truck with their claws.

Living on a farm, I've seen some fairly impressive semi feral tom cats. When they're young and they hunt a lot they develop muscle on every inch of their body, once had one who was quite tame, his back muscles felt like a bag of marbles, they were that well developed.

I'd have no doubt he could've taken a rabbit especially given the ambush nature of their hunting.

I watched a documentary many years ago on cats (in the UK). It featured a study looking to measure the number of animals killed by house cats (or just "cats" in British English, strays are incredibly rare, "house cats" are those that never leave the house). One house cat, in Devon if I remember correctly, had the most kills in the study - an order of magnitude above or something like that - and so the cameras paid his owner a visit.

They introduced the cat with a shot of him on what looked like a hill with a ledge and him looking over it, and a town out of focus below in the distance. One moment he was there, next moment he just dropped over the ledge, no jump, just dropped. Cut to the owner talking about his cat.

Next shot, the cat is back on the ledge holding a giant rabbit (or perhaps hare) in its jaws, that was comparable to the size of the cat, if not bigger. It was like watching a big cat kill. I'll never forget it, so striking.

My cat only very rarely manages to get chipmunks and mice, but he doesn't usually kill them, generally alternating between cuddles and grooming and beating them savagely to make them jump and run. He's scared of birds after being mobbed by robins and crows.

Is he interrupted in his cuddles and beatings? Cats are much like the kind of psychopaths you'll find in the intelligence services, as portrayed in movies. They'll torture their captive, play with them to train themselves (and possibly for fun, who knows?), and it seems your cat likes to play good cop too. At the end, if the captive's heart hasn't already given out, they'll kill it.

The last rabbit we had at home ran around on its own.

I developed a friendship with our horse, but did not seem to be on friendly terms with the neighbors cat. One time I saw them running across the driveway: the cat first, panicking, the rabbit a meter or two behind chasing it.

At one point, we had a cat, a dog, and a rabbit. The rabbit and the dog bonded over eating the cat's food.

Our neighbors had bunnies escaping because they developed a friendship with wild hares. Seems similar when a dog develops a friendship with a coyote and start misbehaving going on the hunts with them.

This behavior always reminds me of book "The World Without Us"[0] in which the author points out that, of all our domesticated animals, cats would definitely survive due to their excellent hunting skills in a world without humans. — [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us

>cats would definitely survive due to their excellent hunting skills in a world without humans.

I don't know about yours, but my cats would not adjust well.

> absolutely do decimate local bird populations

Which is why it's best to keep them indoors or perhaps have a catio so they can experience the outdoors without impacting the local wildlife. It's also better for the cats as indoor cats tend to live longer.

We adopted two kittens late last year, and thought it would be nice to let them outside to run around and explore nature. We used to have an indoor cat that lived in apartments his whole life, and I always felt a bit guilty since he wasn't very happy and would always try to get outside.

Our kittens learned to hunt very quickly and would bring animals into the house. Lots of lizards, mice, and birds. We got tired of burying dead animals and vacuuming up feathers. Then one of our cats got into a fight and got bitten. The vets think that the bite must have punctured a vein or artery in their shoulder, which caused a huge hematoma that swelled up their chest. They had severe anemia and almost died from internal bleeding, so they had to give them a blood transfusion. They didn't have any cat blood available, so they used dog blood instead. (Apparently that's quite common!) He's almost fully recovered now, but still has a limp that is slowly getting better. The vet bills ended up being over $6,000. Fortunately we had pet insurance, so we only had to pay $1,300.

So we don't let them outside anymore. We were surprised to see that they don't seem to mind too much. They're not begging to go outside and they still seem perfectly happy. We've put a little bit of grass on an internal balcony, and we might try to build a catio enclosure so they can still have a little area to go outside. Maybe some netting like this: https://catnets.co.nz

EDIT: Cat tax: https://imgur.com/a/umQpcvK

I think people tend to overestimate the desire of most cats to spend time outdoors, because as humans we ascribe human motivations to cat behaviors. So we see the cat repeatedly try to go through the door, and we think of this as persistent behavior that reflects a high degree of motivation to go "outside". But "outside" is not a concept that a cat really understands. They understand doors well enough, and they might be frustrated and upset by not being allowed to go through them. But, as you mentioned, there's actually a lot more for them to be frustrated, upset, scared, and injured by outside than there is inside.

> "outside" is not a concept that a cat really understands.

This seems like unfounded speculation. Why would they understand doors but not inside/outside?

Just put a jingle bell on their collar. Seems too cruel to force them indoors.

difference of live length can reach ten years, this is half life of cat.

So why shouldn't felus catus be part of general ecosystem? Species have emerged for any number of reasons, including symbiotic relationship with other species. And sometimes new species hunt birds.

Generally we try to avoid bringing invasive species into an environment.

Why does people having different opinion upset you? People claim dogs are also unfavourable. I personally do not like cats but the personality effect is more pronounced among cats because they do not express themselves as much as dogs.

In general I do not like pets or children. If you think they are amazing, great! but know others may not share your opinions.

Not the person you're replying to, but I don't think I'd characterize myself as being "upset", just... disappointed? Annoyed? Most people's opinions of cats as pets are informed by inaccurate, negative stereotypes, while most people's opinions of dogs (even if they don't have one or rarely interact with one) are positively influenced by the "Man's Best Friend" stereotype.

Opinions are fine, if they're informed by actual experience, or at least secondhand experience by trusted parties. But I think most opinions about cats are not that, and it's unfortunate. They do the entire species a disservice.

It's cool if you don't like cats but I think the op was pointing out that some people think cats are just vengeful little maniacs. Which some of them are but they have a very wide range of personalities and classifying them all as such is a bit unfair.

Also, cats express themselves just as much as dogs if not more. They just do it much differently. I can tell what my cat wants just by the way she meows.

Well, it's not because they have different opinions. It's because to me it feels like one of the greatest things life can offer. Just like most people would consider intimacy with a partner, having children, finding a satisfying career/hobby as great things life offers to us humans, I tend to think having a bond with an animal (cat or dog I suppose, but they're very different kind of bonds) is another thing life has to offer to us. Of course, I don't mean to imply a human is less valid without the love of an animal (or less valid without the love of a partner, child, job etc) but I still do think that some people are missing out on this. This is part that makes me sad. If you truly gave cats a shot and you dislike them, I don't give a shit how you feel about them.

You can make the same argument about "love" with cats as with dogs. They're both projections of a human emotion onto a much less intelligent and altruistic creature.

think it's an absurd toxic masculinity "dogs for men cats for women" thing.

totally agree, with one thought : if you've seen people with rescued pumas (who also purr) they're _exactly_ like "domestic" cats...just much bigger.

Amy's Baking Company.

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