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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

Why do I care about the bird population over the cat population? Who's playing god?

Because there's a real danger of losing some of these bird species, and absolutely zero danger of losing domestic cats as a species?

Let's do this. And when we're done killing all the cats and the rat problem becomes worse and somehow the birds don't seem to return to the filthy and noisy concrete jungle with no trees we can just pretend it never happened.

> and the rat problem becomes worse

Cats usually won't tackle rats, this is even mentioned in the article.

The rats dont just pop out fully grown, the young rats are an easy prey.

Haven't you read any James Herbert?

Joking aside, cats aren't going to be very inclined to head into a lair to pick off their young.

Species are lost all the time, it's just an arbitrary cut from an infinitely expanding evolutionary tree. So it's about as many different of them as possible? Does that strike you as an odd metric?

Nothing matters and we're just a speck of dust hurtling through the infinite so who cares what happens about anything right?

In my view, yes, nihilism sucks. But making the point that evolution means change is fair. Trying to keep everything as-is forever is fundamentally unnatural and impossible and I don't think that is what conservation should be about.

This is absolutely untrue. Most studies on cat impact on bird species are ridden with incomplete and bad data. In Germany, estimates are around 200 million birds killed by cats every year. But since the total population of birds is estimated at 400 million that would be every second bird! That's insane and grounds for immediate skepticism. Well, it turns out that extrapolating local results to global scenarios does not at all represent what is going on in reality.

For example, while cats might kill a lot of animals in settled areas like NYC that doesn't at all mean that species are endangered as a result of it. Birds don't exclusively live in human settlements and their continental populations might barely be affected by cats as there are sufficient areas outside of human settlements where feral cats are simply non-existent or at least not a problem.

Furthermore, the decline of birds is almost entirely human made - no one doubts this. Habitat loss and insect decline. Reducing the cat problem will simply not have a notable impact at all. Yes, millions of birds are killed by cats but what does that mean in the grand context if billions and billions of birds are killed by humans? It's a drop in the bucket and not worth the effort and I would ask ornithologists to name species that have been wiped out by wild cats in a continental context and not just from Smallstown, Minnesota.

Disclaimer: island scenarios like New Zealand are different due to the locality of the problem.

It's like trying to save ants from some dude stepping on their streets once a day while ignoring a ravaging fungus that is destroying the colony from the inside. But here you are, saying "not stepping on the ant street is also helpful!". Congrats to saving 10 ants while the colony is being decimated by a fungus.

You can come clear up the weekly dead birds in our garden throughout nesting season, killed by the local cats, then.

You apparently haven't read my comment then. I already included your concern about birds being killed in and around human settlement. That says nothing about total populations since birds dont exclusively live in your garden. Conversely, cats DO live mostly in and around human settlements.

Choosing not to do anything is just as much of a choice as choosing to do something, and is "playing God" in equal amount.

We are way past this point. This huge population of cats exists solely because we are breeding cats. Besides that, we are killing lots of other, apparently lesser animals, in order to feed them to our cats. What do you call this, if not playing god?

Cats don't need help breeding. GP even said "feral cat".

I don't know of any "cat breeders". They are just a resilient species.

I suppose we could make some sort of "equity" system for species based on an arbitrary metric, but that's closer to playing God.

Domestic cats as a species had been introduced to America by humans, and still are explicitly kept and feed by humans. I'd call that breeding. This also sets an easy and natural metric of how many cats should be there: 0.

So your metric is how an animal got to a location?

Birds can fly, not really fair to the feline species concerning which places it's allowed, eh?

Zero cats should be allowed to exist in NA?

No open borders for cats!?

> Zero cats should be allowed to exist in NA?

Zero non neutered cat should be allowed to exist in North America, correct.

>Domestic cats as a species had been introduced to America by humans, and still are explicitly kept and feed by humans. I'd call that breeding. This also sets an easy and natural metric of how many cats should be there: 0.

Same applies to humans of non-native descent, I presume?

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