Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
[0] e.g. https://treehouseanimals.org/programs/community-cats/catsatw...
About two weeks after we re-homed him we noticed pest control vans outside of three of the homes on our street. We talked to the neighbors and they were now seeing mice and rats and needed to get them removed.
https://brb.sprep.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/A_Review_o...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-...
https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/felixer,-the-grooming-trap,-...
Cat specific, with photographic record of every animal targeted to verify working as expected.
You can't ban feral cats any more than you can ban rats or trees.
And you're excluding the middle too. It's not as though any policy which isn't perfectly and totally enforced is completely ineffectual. And it's also not the case that policies that don't solve a problem completely should be discarded as pointless.
In the end, to have any solution at all, you need something that a) works to some extent and b) can be agreed on by enough people to actually end up being executed.
Far too often the discussion gets completely bogged down in a where a has to be accomplished utterly and completely or we shouldn't bother at all. But the only thing that's pointless is having the discussion that way, because the world just doesn't work like that.
The key issue is controlling feral populations in a cultural context where large-scale hunting programs would never be tolerated by the public for obvious reasons.
To do this we need to a) control the supply of fertile human-bred cats into the feral population and b) remove and neuter extant feral cats from the environment.
We can accomplish both of these goals by mandating neutering and ID chips as you suggested, and temporarily banning or placing heavy restrictions on cat breeding.
This will shift all the demand for pet cats onto rescued feral cats, which will finally provide the funding needed to put a dent in feral populations. In addition it should stop the flow of lost fertile cats into the environment.
Now, it's not necessarily doable to train a formerly feral cat to spend the rest of its life inside. My cat lived most his life in the woods, and he completely loses his mind if he's stuck inside. No amount of toys and catnip can compensate for the ability to roam freely. And it's obvious that a feral cat kills orders of magnitude more wildlife than an outside cat with a cat flap and consistent access to food.
There are also plenty of measures that can be taken like restricting outside cat ownership in areas with vulnerable animal populations, mandates for cats to wear bells etc.
(Genuine question) source?
My impression from our neighbourhood is that outside cats - who also come and sit in our garden - are interested in birds because that's part of who they are, not just because they are hungry.
I think he hunted considerably more before the flap because it was often hard to tell for me he wanted to come inside. So he'd get stuck outside for longer and get hungry/bored.
If you want some hard data, this seems like a good starting point: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
I find it amazing that anyone can decide I'm going to buy a breeding pair of cats with the end goal of making money.
We need to phase out cats and dogs completely. This saddens me deeply because I love my dog but the damage these animals do to the environment is so large I don't think I can truly fathom.
We can do this slowly, first pets needs to be desexed. For cats there's no exception. For dogs the exception would be breeding working dogs, or therapy/guide dogs. With cats they must be kept in doors at all times. These laws should extend to larger animals like horses.
In Australia we have a huge problem with horses and camels. But the public do not support culls of horses, even if it's for their own benefit (eg to stop them from starving in winter). But the horse racing industry is huge here, they've got clout and political pressure.
Uncontrolled breeding of animals for human enjoyment is amoral. Animal companionship is of course the exception but this comes with issues.
You said that "we need to phase out cats and dogs completely". This is the most extreme solution I've heard in any debate about household pets.
There’s quite a bit of anti-pet propaganda put out ironically by two groups that have diametrically opposed viewpoints: ones that love animals and ones that hate them. But that’s not what I was referring to mostly.
There’s also a lot of environmental propaganda that makes people feel as if every little thing that brings them joy must be curtailed because it contributes to global warming or they’re evil. That is propaganda from the people who make trillions off of fossil fuel or the energy derived from it, they want you to worry about your dog’s environmental impact despite the fact that climate change is 98% a matter of public policy. As long as you’re focusing on whether or not you should take that plane trip or have a dog you’re not worried about why there isn’t a carbon tax, and why the emitters get by year after year without being forced to pay for their negative externalities. And if that all sounds a little too tinfoil hat for you I totally understand, but read all the recently released documents from the plastic industry about how they promoted recycling, knowing full well that it neither worked nor helped the environment when it was done, so that you’d feel better about using their products.
They want you to think climate change is your fault and can be fixed if you just drive a more efficient car, or install a heat pump, or don’t have a dog. It can’t. We can all spend all our time doing all the little things we’re told matter, but at the end of the day our personal choices are a drop in the bucket compared to industrial/agricultural choices we have no say over. You can only make a difference in climate change at the voting booth. They know it but they don’t want you to.
Responsible pet ownership has relatively low (and certainly not unfathomable) environmental impact. One does not have to eradicate entire species just because some assholes let their cats roam free. Just don’t let your pets roam free.
Keep loving your dog and letting others love theirs. Pick up after it, don’t let it off leash, certainly don’t let it murder local fauna all day, and don’t worry about the CO2 emissions involved in its food. It’s negligible.
I will put that stuff out of business or die trying.
Industrial farming just entered the chat.
> Animal companionship is of course the exception but this comes with issues
This is, I think, a significant point, especially for people who are lonely, depressed, disabled, antisocial, etc. Its far more improtant than enjoyment of eating a burger.
What? That's a ridiculous "solution".
I'm absolutely in favor of mandatory spay/neuter, and much stricter regulation of breeders. (I would say, outlaw breeders entirely, but I don't think laws like that will fly with voters when it comes to dogs, at least.)
But I don't think "eliminate two species of animal" is a good solution to anything, outside of some narrow cases (disease-carrying mosquitos). And regardless, the idea that it would be politically possible to ban having cats or dogs as pets... that's naive, at best.
I agree that uncontrolled breeding is a problem, but "phasing out" cats and dogs entirely is not a solution; that too is barbaric.
(This is obviously satire)
Short of an all out ban, keeping them indoors or in a catery or controlled in some manner seems reasonable.
Most everything was non-native at some point. I mean of course it depends on (potentially huge) timelines but at some point in the past land bridges between continents didn't exist and then existed and then didn't exist. At some point some seed got lucky enough to be carried across a sea either by an animal or just wind.
I know this is a naive point of view, but nature adapts pretty well to this, it's kinda _what it does_, even if in the short-term and from a human lens it causes damage. What does damage mean exactly.. a drop in population of some particular species or plant that we are used to having in an area. Are we sure that's damage and not just normal evolution of ecosystems?
I certainly prefer that to happen than have local governments pass laws saying cats must be kept inside, lest they upset the environment that us humans are used to.
Nature and evolution can pretty easily deal with small changes in small areas happening over hundreds or thousands of years, which was normal before human population explosions.
But when that change happens across multiple human settlements (large areas), quickly (industrialization and the green revolution in just a few decades), and at a huge scale (not just cats but climate change and deforestation and pollution all leading to habitat loss), it is very very hard for other species to cope.
If a few individual wildcats crossed a land bridge, sure, they'll have a field day as they gorge on unsuspecting prey. They'll do well and reproduce, and their kittens will eat more prey. But eventually there are more wildcats than prey, a harsh winter or drought comes along, and a bunch of kittens die and the prey have a chance to recover over the next few years. It reaches a dynamic equilibrium.
That's different than when humans settle a new place and suddenly introduce hordes of rats and start breeding pet cats, at numbers far above what the prey population can sustain (because we feed them pet food). The unwanted ones become feral and enter the system at a rate higher than they would've through normal migration, and then we keep breeding more and more of them with an outside input (more pet food). Pretty quickly the feral cats will kill off a lot of the unsuspecting prey (the dumber, more exotic birds, often) and leave a bunch of human-adopted species like rats and corvids and squirrels that can coexist with cats, often having immigrated with the humans for hundreds of years. So you end up swapping the local wildlife for the introduced ones in just a decade or two, way faster than the dozens or hundreds of years it usually takes.
On islands or where settlements and road networks form unnatural barriers, this is especially bad because the escaping prey have nowhere to run to, being isolated to smaller non-contiguos pockets that can individually be trapped until the whole species is extinct or at least extricated (locally extinct).
Of course there are gray areas. The Hawaiian Islands, for example, are a mix of species that ended up there naturally, some a long time ago, some more recently. They have different times of introduction, just like humans do. But because it's a young island chain (in geologic time), its whole timeline is compressed and the species there have different, eh, degrees of "native"-ness, I guess. And among the various introduced species, not all of them are considered invasive. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/
Anyway, it's not an exactly cutoff date or algorithmic formula for determining nativeness. It's just a case by case judgment call based on the relative time of introduction compared to the ecosystem age, and also the effects of the introduced species on other preexisting ones. It's a human judgment call subject to errors, like any others, but still a useful consideration in ecology.
Sorry for the long post...
I don't really agree its damaging to or causing problems for nature/ecosystems, or that its unnatural, because it implies that humans themselves are not part of nature or ecosystems, that we are something different in kind than the rest of nature (you can argue this in some dimensions sure). I don't think humans settling a new place and introducing bands of cats who are fed from petfood is _that_ different from a landbridge opening up for a couple of centuries. Things will stabilise it's just a matter of timeline.
I think maybe the part that annoys me is that it's humans trying to control the ecosystem under the guise of keeping it in some idealised 'natural state' when that's cleary not a thing in nature, and how we end up having people advocating mandatory neutering of cats and dogs and laws that people must keep cats inside, practises which kinda disturb me tbh.
I mean, there's totally some degree of selfishness in us wanting to keep nature at some idealized level of "pristine": It has value to us as humans, both in terms of resources and ecosystem services, but also just at an emotional level -- some of us really value nature (as we roughly know it).
Even if you don't use loaded terms like "damaging" or "unnatural", you can still objectively measure a decrease in biodiversity (as in the # of different kinds and numbers of inter-species populations and cross-dependencies and an ecosystem's overall ability to respond dynamically to challenging events like harsh weather or wildfire). When big changes are introduced to a small system too quickly for it to handle, it doesn't so much matter what you call it... the same thing typically still happens: local flora and fauna, which are often endemic to an area (only found there), are displaced by "generic" versatile scavenger species like rats, pigeons, and crows. (Or in this case, predatory cats).
Is a marbled murrelet, a kind of bird, more worthy of preservation than the common crow? I guess that depends on who you ask. Yes, there's some amount of value judgment there -- most of us don't want to see a world with only like twenty remaining species because we killed the rest. We don't have de-extinction technology yet either, and we don't have the capability to regrow old-growth forests in human bureaucratic lifespans. It's true that we don't have all the answers, and all the proper "values" so to speak, to be able to measure the worth of any one species over another, necessarily.
> I don't really agree its damaging to or causing problems for nature/ecosystems, or that its unnatural
But even then, there are some we know to be "keystone" species whose disappearance will cause cascading effects across its local ecosystem, while others just have roles we don't fully understand yet (or maybe really are just "worthless"). But once we kill them off, we don't have any way to bring them back, and that's a few million years of evolution potentially lost forever. A simple precautionary principle might also apply there; we shouldn't necessarily go around destroying everything just because we don't see its immediate value or how other parts of the system depend on it.
This is the kind of thriving, diverse life that many people, environmentalists or not, value. Is it "natural"? If you don't like that word, don't use it, and maybe biodiversity is another metric we can use instead? Does THAT have value? Again, it's a judgment.
A roundish rock with magma lakes is also "natural", but it's not exactly teeming with life. A planet with only microbes is also alive, but not very diverse. Or a city with only imported palm trees and glass windows. The modern web of life took a looooooong time to get to this point, but we can easily lose a lot of it in a few short years. A lot of species value biodiversity -- not just humans, but many animals will prefer certain kinds of forests over others, and decomposers will converge on different kinds of debris, different birds have favorite foods, etc. -- life begets more life. If you don't value any of that, that's totally within your rights, but maybe I'd ask "Why not?"
Is it that you really love cats, and don't want to keep them inside all the time? (I have a cat too and I feel bad that it's an indoor cat... but for entirely different reasons, not biodiversity). Even then there are tools to limit the damage they can cause (like silly poofy collars that birds can easily see: https://www.birdsbesafe.com/)
Do you just not care for nature, feeling kinda meh about trees and birds and shit? That's fine, though it does seem like jumping to conclusions a bit quickly. How do we know these things are worthless?
Is it a more philosophical stance on nihilism and accelerationism...? Like if "nature" goes through cycles and things live and die and eventually our sun will burn out and entropy will increase and the universe will reach its heat death anyway, what does it matter what we do now?
I dunno. I shouldn't put words into your mouth. What do you think?
Wildcats that evolved in an ecosystem have their place within it, at numbers supported by the prey population there that co-evolved with them.
When humans suddenly introduce housecats to a new environment where the prey never had the chance to co-evolve, the overnight influx (in evolutionary time) will rapidly decrease the prey populations.
Some birds on long established migratory paths are especially vulnerable too, since they have limited options for resting grounds along the way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_lesser_short-tai...
> The bat roosts are very vulnerable, as they contain more potential prey within a single area. If these roosts were found by a predator, they could experience mass mortality events; in one incident, 102 lesser short-tailed bat deaths were caused by a single house cat in central North Island.
https://www.cityservices.act.gov.au/pets-and-wildlife/domest...
Cats can slaughter bird colonies (though somehow they never slaughter the ugly pigeons, nor the invasive parrots in the area I live in) so they are best left to themselves instead of going the "beautiful kitty that is starving" way and artificially growing their population.
Finally, I have a stray/rescue cat at home that stays at home (not interested in going outside), just in case someone though I was promoting the dog league.
Wouldn't feeding them reduce the amount they need to kill to feed themselves? I know of at least one cat colony that has a caretaker that feeds them, they have all been catch and release spayed/neutered so the colony can't grow. They try to get adoptions for some of them but the only other alternative is to kill them.
We must not perceived them through our errors, it is not that they are psychopaths or something, this is just the way they are. It would not be a problem if they were not artificially sustained through our help.
Sterilization is a good solution (in addition to not feeding them).
https://www.science.org/content/article/hello-kitty-goodbye-...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-develop...
Says the human . . .
IMO, there should be a $2000 USD tax per year on owning cats. If you do not register the cat, you get a hefty fine. Also dog catchers should be allowed to pick up cats roaming outside.
I think we have much lower hanging (and more impactful) fruit than "ban even indoor-only cats because sometimes they escape".
Now I live in the city. No cats but rats and people walking dogs dumping on the sidewalk.
I take a suburb with cats.
Edit: of course, I don’t deny that cats kill a staggering number of birds.
Many places have TNR programs (Trap, Neuter, Return), at the very least. Sure, that doesn't solve the problem of the existing cats killing local wildlife, but it at least ensures they won't continue to reproduce.
The problem with catching and keeping all cats (and dogs, really) is that most places just don't have the shelter space for them. Euthanasia for stray animals has become unpopular in many places (a stance I support and agree with), so it boils down to balancing how many animals you can get adopted vs. how much shelter space you have vs. how many stray animals there are out there.
In the past few years we've adopted three cats from our local SPCA shelter, that were found as strays. I wish every cat out there had the opportunity to live in a nice home without needing to kill the local wildlife for food.
> The EU’s executive said Thursday that it is “a strong defender of free movement rights — including of cats” and “categorically” denied it would ever force cats to be kept indoors or on a leash, as one scientific study suggests.
The RSPB themselves have said:
“While we know that cats do kill large numbers of birds in UK gardens, there’s no evidence this is affecting decline in the same way that these other issues are” (habitat/food loss from climate change)
Research in the UK has suggested cats are mostly preying on the "doomed surplus": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1474-919X....
> we (4) compared the condition of those birds killed by cats versus those killed in collisions, e.g. window strikes. Mean (± sd) cat density was 348 ± 86 cats/km2 (n = 10 sites); considering the eight species most commonly taken by cats, the mean ratios of adult birds/cats and juvenile birds/cats across the five sites were 1.17 ± 0.23 and 3.07 ± 0.74, respectively
>
> Across species, cat-killed birds were in significantly poorer condition than those killed following collisions; this is consistent with the notion that cat predation represents a compensatory rather than additive form of mortality.
Just because something has been one way for a long time doesn’t mean it’s good. Cats kill lots of native wild animals, and whether those animal populations would be similar without them is entirely beside the point. In the same way it is inhumane to have dogs rip foxes apart for sport, it is inhumane to allow pet cats to do so too.
That said, good luck stopping it. Feral breeding cat populations would be at best difficult to entirely eradicate.
In suburban areas there are also many birdfeeders in gardens. Does that mean additional birds without natural predators?
I am sure that cats can have a negative impact in countries where they have been introduced more recently and where there is still true wilderness but to raise the alarm in a country like the UK seems baseless.
They also shit in people gardens and veg patches, and spread toxic parasites
It’s about the fact that people have “pets” that they let kill several animals a day for sport, and for what? So you can see that cat once a week when it comes home?
It’s inhumane, and I’d argue a society caring about that is simply further evolved, culturally, in that one particular area.
The human population in UK has increased more than 10x since then, if cat population increased accordingly there are way more cats killing things today than back then.
The more humans around the more careful we have to be about our impact on the environment, so we have to be 10 times as careful today as we used to be historically.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37449477
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Whatever equilibrium we've reached in Europe might need to change with more wild predators eating birds and cats.
That is because even in the UK, small cats have been there for thousands of years. I just heard about a Scottish wild cat being introduced.
Small Cats in Australia and the Americas have only been there for about 400 years. Wildlife was unable to adapt quick enough. so a lot of extinctions happened, which I am sure cats helped out. New Zealand is a good case showing damage cats (and rats) did.
Given that we are already facing falling population and widespread extinction of just about every category of animal, and native ecosystems the world over are under threat from invasives of some kind, maybe we shouldn't be adding pressure to that.
I'm sympathetic, I grew up with outdoor cats and they clearly enjoy roaming free, but is that worth it?