The Flappie AI cat door stops your pet from gifting you dead mice | Hacker News Reader

The Flappie AI cat door stops your pet from gifting you dead mice

engadget.com

10 pointsrntn50 comments

They say the false-negative rate is 10%, i.e. 1 in 10 presents will be allowed through. But what about the false-positive rate? I would certainly not want my cat locked out indefinitely because some AI thinks a spot on its side looks mousy.

They'll sit there and meow for a bit, and if you're not around to let them in, they'll wander off and try again a little while later. I'd be more concerned about complicated gadgets like this breaking down completely.

Yeah - I recently replaced a SureFlap with a mechanical flap, because it failed and let my cat out the day she had come home from an operation and needed to be kept in. 'Failure with no warning' is more likely with complex products.

And if you’re away on vacation?

You shouldn't be leaving an animal without supervision for extended periods like that! If nothing else, what if they fill up the litterbox?

Who said anything about extended? Do you think there might be a period of time a person might be away such that they would not want their cat locked out the whole time, but their cat also has no chance of filling up their waste receptacles?

Vacation generally means an extended time, so you did.

If the false positive rate is not 100%, their next try is likely to succeed. Unless, as I mentioned, the contraption just breaks entirely, which is why I'd be reluctant to have one of them in the first place.

We have no evidence that the failures are randomly distributed. What about when the failure mode is such that any time there’s not a massive blizzard outside, it works great. But when there is… icecat.

Sounds like you and I are actually in agreement here. It's not regularly-distributed but still occasional glitches I'd be worried about, it's the modes of total failure. Or as I like to put it: "gadgets break".

> If the false positive rate is not 100%, their next try is likely to succeed

Assuming they’re randomly distributed. If it’s 20% of cats getting rejected 50% of the time, that could be a problem.

> So if your pet has been microchipped, you can make it so the cat door only opens for your specific pet.

That's horrible! Won't the cat be allowed to bring their friends in for parties and cat-fights? What if the cat falls in love with a raccoon and wants to bring the raccoon and its friends for some interspecies sexy times? What sort of human is so intolerant?

> What sort of human is so intolerant?

In my experience? Cat owners.

Two other recent examples of AI cat doors like this are https://www.onlycat.com/ and https://www.yourpawly.com/.

Don’t let your cats outside was the advice my vet gave me. They’re an invasive predator and their lifespan faces threats from human activity. Indoor cats live longer healthier lives.

If you can modify your house to have a fancy cat door you should just go all the way and build a catio.

+1 on the Catio, we built a really large one years ago (16' wide x 8' deep x 10' high) against our house with a convenient window with a flap cut in the window screen. It has a small tree growing out of it and some flowers and plants, with a few different levels. Cats love it, especially when the odd bird wanders in through the welded wire.

Any design tips on what makes a good space that cats like?

Lots of views, fresh air if possible, warm spots for the cat to sleep and more than one, some place with either wildlife and/or human activity, and of course scratching pads/tower.

Granted, I do all of this and my cat (a gift from the pandemic someone dumped on the side of a mountain for me to find, despite not wanting to be a pet owner, thanks humans!) still manages to find a way to sleep on equipment I don't want to have to replace...

Edit: typo

Go vertical if you have the room. Put in lots of ramps and places to perch. They like grass and small plants.

For construction, we did a two by four frame with welded wire covering it. The welded wire is very secure but still allows a nice view, and is pretty cheap. If you have a Tractor Supply store near you in US) they have it.

Indoor cats may live longer lives, but I'm not convinced they are happier about it.

I wonder what the effect on average human lifespan might be if people were routinely confined to assisted-living facilities for the duration of their adult lives. How many additional years might one gain if you faced no physical risks and experienced regular medical monitoring and treatment? Somehow I doubt many people would opt for that lifestyle, regardless.

You're making a bad analogy. The life expectancy of an indoor cat is around 15-17 years, while the life expectancy for outdoor cats is only 2-5 years.

https://www.petmd.com/cat/care/can-indoor-cat-be-part-time-o... which cites University research.

So, a better analogy would be if you would be willing to die at age 25 instead of 75 just so you can base jump and free climb every day. Most people wouldn't like that trade-off even if it is more fun in the moment.

Not to mention the happiness of the 2 billion birds killed by domestic cats each year. Remember that even though domestic cats can and do survive as wild animals, their population is greatly inflated by human activity. We're responsible for that imbalance in the food chain and should keep our pets away from the rest of the wildlife. We feed our cats and then if they go outside they basically kill birds for fun.

I'd much rather my cat play with toys. It's very easy to keep a house cat happy without putting them and prey animals. They already spend the majority of the day sleeping. Play with your cats for a couple of times a day, provide some solid toys that they can play on their own with, and give them loving attention and they'll be quite happy.

I've seen assisted living facilities, I think I'd rather be dead than have to live in one. Longer life is not automatically worth any tradeoff.

A loving home isn't a good analogy to a sad badly-managed assisted living facility for a cat. If you play with your cat, provide self-play toys and areas to climb and scratch, feed your cat good quality food, and give them cozy places to enjoy in your home they're visibly happy and content.

In this case, the tradeoff is not made by the cat, but by the human. Just like a lot of the time the decision to move someone to an assisted living facility is made by the family not the person.

Cats don't have hopes and dreams to be crushed, we can hardly compare cats to people.

Yeah, I mean, for the record, I'd absolutely love being a house cat. No job, all my meals provided, never any bad weather or threats to deal with, and I have a huge playground of a house all to myself. Would you rather be an Emperor Penguin freezing your ass off in the artic making an 100 mile nesting migration?

People vary wildly in our fears and our desires, don't we? The life you describe sounds like my nightmare. I don't value comfort so much, but purpose and autonomy are essential.

Perhaps this is why I like cats, though I've never wanted to own one (they keep showing up in my life anyway, via housemates and partners): they seem like independent beings, tolerant of humans for the services they provide, but pursuing their own interests; wild creatures, only pretending to be domesticated.

I've yet to meet the cat who loves indoor life so much they won't bolt for the door if it's left open.

There’s outdoor cats and there’s indoor cats. Some cats thrive being inside and love it, others are miserable when inside and will frequently try to escape.

I agree that they’re mini serial killers and have an impact on local ecosystems, but let’s be honest, in most cities, the local ecosystem is just full of invasives (rats, pigeons etc.).

Ultimately look at what your cat prefers and let it do what it wants. That’s the only way to ensure longevity.

Your points are legit. Anecdotally with a reasonable sample size, outdoor cats are chiller; indoor ones tend to be neurotic and need more attention.

But I bought my cats specifically to do the job they were bred for, which is to catch vermin (rats and mice). They're cute pets as well, but that's not what we selectively bred cats to be.

The problem is that humans are invasive; stockpiling rubbish, building grain silos, and creating environments where rats and mice can hide and not be caught by natural predators.

If you live in a country where wildcats, or other larger predators, are indigenous, then I don't see the problem in letting them outside.

Having cats specifically for rodent control is an exception but it's also important to recognize that it makes you and your cat a 1/20,000 exception. The vast vast vast majority of people who own outdoor cats are not doing it for rodent control.

> The vast vast vast majority of people who own outdoor cats are not doing it for rodent control.

Where I live on the country side cats hunting mice and rat is like the first or second argument for having them when speaking to the owners. Of my 6 neighbors, three have cats, so I don't have to though.

When I lived in the city, the cat owners were complaining the cats caught mice, not bragging. But city houses also take damage from mice, so I guess it might be a mindset thing.

Cats specifically are invasive species that decimate bird populations.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill

Gentle reminder that The Oatmeal is not a reliable source for such information. Dude is far too credulous.

Just put a jingle bell on their collar. My family cats growing up never caught anything since.

My family cats just got stealthier with the bells and still brought pray and additional problem started - you could trip over the stealthy cat that came near you

These things are just as abusive to cats as cow bells are to cows. Imagine you would produce a noise every time you make just the tiniest movements during sleep - most people don't bother to put them off once the cat comes back into their house.

Animals have different sleep patterns and attention spans than us. Cats and dogs usually tune out the sounds they know are not important.

Cow bells have been shown to reduce the amount of food the cow eats many years ago [1]; however the mechanism (sound vs weight) isn't clear.

Farmers militantly oppose any attempt to get rid of cow bells though. Some claim that they aren't an issue for the animals, some whine about "traditions" getting endangered (which is even worse IMHO, to torture animals despite knowing better just because it looks good - ffs we managed to ban breeding of dogs and cats that we know to suffer), and others whine that they can't find escaped cows (just as ridiculous, even the 500g of a small cowbell is enough for a year-long battery and RF sender...) [2].

[1] https://www.schweizerbauer.ch/tiere/milchvieh/sind-glocken-f...

[2] https://www.fr.de/panorama/tierschuetzer-fordern-verbot-kuhg...

> Eventually, Flappie says that pets are likely to be trained that they can't enter when carrying something, and when they drop the prey the door will promptly unlock so they can get inside

I guess a dead mouse on the porch is better than inside the house. $400 better?

My brother has two cats, and the biggest problem is not the occasional dead mice, but the live ones, and when they bring other live animals, like birds.

Particularly when they then lose interest in the animal after having let it loose in the house.

I was under the impression that pet microchips have an incredibly short read range, like you have to actually rub against the reader, and on target. The cat would have to be already passing through the door to be scanned. Are they just jacking up the transmission power, which makes me wonder why all the existing chip readers wouldn't do that as well if possible?

I briefly looked at building such a chip reader until I saw the disance specs and realized it wasn't going to be practical to train a cat to rub the mid/back part of its neck on some protruding antenna

The microchips are basically little RFID widgets that are about the size of a grain of rice. The chip can migrate from between the shoulder blades to anywhere else, and the range is really poor - basically near-contact range.

I once tried a pet feeder that would read a cat’s microchip to determine if it would allow that cat to use it. It worked by having an arch with an RFID sensor that the cat would pass under and it would uncover the food for the matching cat. For one of my cats, it worked great because the chip was still between her shoulder blades in the usual spot. For my other cat it had migrated near her ribs and it didn’t work at all.

The read range on the chips is definitely enough that it can be used for cat flaps. There's a few well established brands in the locking cat flap space, like Petsafe and Sure Petcare.

Have a couple of these devices - the way they work is that they make the reader coil enormous compared to a flat RFID reader. The cat basically walks through it. Reading seems to work fine, although I'm not sure if it would if the chip had migrated far down the torso.

the neighbourhood cats where i live are highly territorial - do cats really try to enter into other's houses, or are rfid locks to protect against other animals getting in?

I'm starting to feel reeally old when I couldn't stop rolling my eyes over the fact "a cat door with subscription".

"Giving." (sigh)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gift#Verb

And here's an use of it from 1670, so it's not a recently-verbed noun: https://archive.org/details/nature00lucy/page/137/mode/1up?q...

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