Japan's Cat Island won't survive much longer | Hacker News Reader

Japan's Cat Island won't survive much longer

tokyoweekender.com

82 pointsPaulHoule75 comments

> The population, which was around 900 after World War II, dropped to 13 in 2017. At the same time, the number of cats was in the hundreds. Aging residents felt there were too many of them and not enough people to look after them. The Aoshima Cat Protection Society, therefore, recommended that every cat on the island be spayed or neutered in order to gradually reduce the population. The sterilizations took place in 2018.

Is there anybody local that wants the cats to stay? Sounds to me like the program is working as intended. Sure tourists love it, but if there's nobody local to look after the animals welfare, it should end the way it's been planned it seems to me.

>Is there anybody local that wants the cats to stay?

There are five locals. One is the "cat mama" mentioned, who presumably likes the cats but realizes their fate without her is grim. The other four probably don't care that much.

If it’s a tourist attraction, there’s probably an argument for keeping it running on the government’s dime

I suppose they can Disney-fy it, hire people to live/work there as caretakers, but is that what the area wants/needs?

I remember reading an article about Prague, where the author felt like it's been turned to Disneyland: because of the tourism boom, the city got littered with tourist gift shops and eateries.

Prague didn't seem very much like Disneyland when I was there, except maybe by the clock which everyone photographs.

we could see cats split into prey and predator, or them develop great fishing abilities or bird lure and climbing capabilities, life finds a way to make many out of few opportunities .

> Sounds to me like the program is working as intended. Sure tourists love it, but if there's nobody local to look around, it should end the way it's been planned it seems to me.

Are we talking about the country of Japan or cat island here? The declining cats of cat island is a wonderful metaphor for the declining population of Japan island.

Makes no sense to me really. Sure the population will decline and maybe in 100 or 200 years Japan's population will recover. Why go through that mess when you can just have 100 million non-Japanese people slide in, just give free citizenship to anyone that has a kid on Japanese soil and don't enforce immigration law, simple as.

"The population, which was around 900 [people] after World War II, dropped to 13 in 2017. At the same time, the number of cats was in the hundreds. Aging residents felt there were too many of them and not enough people to look after them. The Aoshima Cat Protection Society, therefore, recommended that every cat on the island be spayed or neutered in order to gradually reduce the population. The sterilizations took place in 2018."

I don't think I've read anything in a long time that's made me this melancholic.

Why does it make you feel that way?

Because not everyone lives in a city, but the dynamics of our economy makes living outside of them more and more inhospitable.

All things are transient; All things will end. At least this isn't ending with the island being abandoned by humans and the cats trained to depend on them being abandoned to starve.

Japan has a lot of stories like that. The urbanization is crazy, with literal half-empty towns, and people's homes left behind in the countryside. In case you are open to English narration, the creator behind the Abroad in Japan channel specifically likes to visit places like this, and explain some of the social and cultural context behind them:

https://www.youtube.com/@AbroadinJapan/search?query=abandone...

Probably there's a certain cat population level that the local ecosystem would support, but not a artifically high population level enable by humans feeding the cats.

But our culture and modern views relating to nature and cats would never allow the idea of having a population of feral cats fending for themselves in a unhabited island.

> our culture and modern views relating to nature and cats would never allow the idea of having a population of feral cats fending for themselves in a unhabited island

…national parks exist.

Cats pretty much decimated the native bird population of most Hawaiian islands which has had a pretty big impact down the food chain. House cats are definitely cute but they’re also a manmade ecological abomination as an invasive/introduced species.

Nah, that's natural selection at work. It is not like we are a kind of metaphysical entity floating above the aether like some kind of demiurge. We are part of the nature, there's no morals on evolution, no preferred steady state. If we protect an species we are playing god, if we don't, the same.

That's the opposite of "natural selection". Invasive species ruin ecosystems.

Nope you are wrong. Cats are brought by humans everywhere where they are not native. Humans already destroyed ecosystem by many ways. This was just trying to reducing that harm.

This is going to blow your mind, but humans are part of nature. The view that are not nature is religious.

Species purposely introduced by humans would be considered artificial not 'natural' selection. If the cats swam over to the island of their own volition as a survival strategy though, that would blow my mind.

So, would ticks brought to a new prairie by bisons. So, would seed brough by the feces of migrant birds.

Yes, we can CHOOSE any moral framework, including one where we introduce this arbitrary notion of artificiality to treat the impact of homo sapiens as a distinct category. But let's not treat this as science. I wouldn't go so far to call it as a religion, but it is still on the realm of ethics and philosophy.

We can even have pragmatical reasons for choosing so, like the need for a particular eco-system to stay in a given state for our own confort, health and economic reasons. But it is still an arbitrary choice.

Species migrate by themselves in the nature, sometimes they play havoc on the existing biome they migrate themselves into. This was, it is, and it will be a significant driver of evolution long after we are gone from earth.

And on this particular case, it is not even like we are restoring the island to some idealized, pristine steady state. Cats are not the only species that piggyback on our civilization to spread, we also have the domestic mouse. If anything, completely eliminating the cat from those islands will serve only to ensure that the domestic mouse will be the dominant species there.

Sure, "we broke it so we should try to help maintain it" is entirely an ethical question and not a scientific one.

Are you satisfied now? Can we go back to talking about the problem instead of arguing about the definition of "natural"?

...but wait, you're the one that introduced the word "natural" to this conversation, using it as a reason to do nothing. That's ridiculous. If everything is natural, then your argument would say we should never do anything ever.

You can't have it both ways. If you want to use such a wide-reaching definition of natural, then you can't also use "natural" as a motivation to not intervene.

> So, would ticks brought to a new prairie by bisons

Ah, no. Nature is specifically what has unadulterated by humans. If humans are involved, it's not natural. I didn't make up the words, but that's exactly what it is. At least if you're talking about nature as being distinct from something else. If you're talking about nature writ large, then there is no distinction, but we're not talking cosmology here.

> we can CHOOSE any moral framework

I was only making clear the distinction between natural and unnatural.

But, to take on this argument, cats and mice are exotic pest species in many places. You might object to them being called pest, but their existence is usually at the extinction risk of native species. It's fair to say there'll be enough cats and mice around the world. You could say that we should just let whatever thrives to thrive, but I'd argue the world would be a more boring place without native species, and indeed ecosystems can collapse from the introduction of exotic species, potentially even causing existential risk to the introduced species (including us humans).

Natural disasters are also part of nature. It doesn't follow that I should want to be hit by a tsunami because of this.

It doesn't matter if we're part of nature. The negative affects are enough to justify not allowing it to happen when possible.

The trouble here is that this is a minor, technical nitpick, which I can't really support. "Natural" as a layman's term doesn't just mean "thing from nature" but also means "thing undisturbed by human activity". People here clearly mean this latter thing when talking about "natural". Which is pretty confusing, I agree. Languages should have a word for this, as it is clearly needed.

Also, observe that many humans don't like natural selection either. There are efforts, for example, to conserve species that are going extinct, no matter how natural or man-made the cause.

Why natural should mean "things undisturbed by human activity". This is just an arbitrary moral choice.

Natural already means "things undisturbed by human activity", among a good lot of other things. As long as there's a clear need for such a word, it would do us good to have a separate word for that, like notmanmade or whatever, because that would make discussions clearer.

The problem is that the domestic cat has literally been domesticated and isn’t really intended to live in the wild.

Wild cats already exist in the wild.

The problem there is we’re killing them through deforestation and poaching.

> a population of feral cats fending for themselves in a unhabited island.

There were numerous examples of this around Australia, there still are some - it's damn hard, nigh impossible, work to remove them via traditional trapping means w/out motivated local inhabitants.

These days we have the Felixer:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-...

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/felixer,-the-grooming-trap,-...

Even so, it's unlikely feral cats will be eradicated from Australia anytime soon.

Calling the Felixer a groomer is either vernacular in the feral-control community or a terrible euphemism.

It's a self grooming behaviour trap - the cat ingests a poison because it grooms to remove gel stuck to its fur.

Let's also not forget that cats are not the only species that piggyback in our civilization to spread.

Far more successful than even the cats in doing so, is the domestic mouse. If anything, once there are no more humans and cats on this island we can rest pretty assured that our friendly rodents will become the dominant species.

The last paragraph sums it up:

Spaying/neutering every cat results in _all_ the population not making it more than a generation out, right?

If you actually catch and spay every one of them.

But i'm sure they'd notice the kittens and sterilize them too.

The unique context of being an island with only a single ferry transport made this possible.

We have a similar place in Taiwan that only became a "Cat Town" as recently as 2008, when one lady just kept adopting cats. Doing so basically "saved" a dying mining town by turning it into a must-see tourist destination on the way to Jiufen, another "must-see" tourist destination.

For certain definitions of saved, of course. Jiufen (another former mining town) seems to be getting a bit overwhelmed, but Houtong infrastructure has been rapidly expanding to handle it and the locals seem to be ok with it.

Forgot to link to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houtong_Cat_Village

Probably what they wanted ?

Cats are often a menace to remaining wildlife (see Oatmeal); and their urine/feces smells so horrible to the point that regular cleaning becomes necessary.

Related. Others?

A Visit to Aoshima, a Japanese 'Cat Island' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24237807 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)

Japan's Cat Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9150352 - March 2015 (4 comments)

Just an obligatory link to the awesome and relatedly-inspired Wes Anderson movie, ICYMI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Dogs_(film)

Don't forget to spay and neuter your pets.

Idea: maybe retirees could move to the island.

Also: they could replentish the cats with stray cats from the mainland. They could be neutered first...

Retirees tend not to want to move away from their family to an unfamiliar, run down, remote island with a somewhat large tourist population. If they did want to do so, there's got to be a ton of cheap houses.

Japan's entire countryside is littered with cheap or abandoned houses.

Like, for example, that island.

i wonder if this is better than just letting them go feral.since its an island you could argue you could make an ecosytem by putting some sort of plant eater that the cats can go after.

I’m glad the neutering program worked. I usually don’t go to touristy places, but I will make an effort to come here now that I know it’s a transient opportunity.

How's the bird population on that island?

Should be fine unless the Aoshima Bird Protection Society gets involved

Probably all gone, with that many cats.

I wonder how many people will see this and try to smuggle in fertile cats. Probably a non-zero amount, though I suspect nobody will volunteer to move there to take care of them.

I suppose it's possible to smuggle fertile cats in, but it's really far-fetched. According to another comment here, this remote island has a single ferry. A howling cat in a carrier is going to be easily noticed while boarding the ferry or traveling on it.

I said try not succeed, though it wouldn't be that hard to sedate a cat for thirty minutes or find a boat.

I think some people will think this is a travesty they can fix. Even this thread has some amount of people who don't seem to realize this is intentional and the alternatives aren't great.

> wonder how many people will see this and try to smuggle in fertile cats

…why?

Why do I wonder that? Because I suspect it will happen, and I find that interesting.

Why would someone do that? To "save" the cat island that's in danger, despite this being the intended result.

So that the cats starve to death?

The cat island only existed because fishermen were there to feed them with their catches. The fishermen are gone and the last humans on the island are aging out.

I'm aware, that's why I put 'save' in quotes and mentioned that this is the intended result.

Alternative title: Native species rejoice at the prospect of recovering island from predator infestation.

edit: The Felis catus apologists are numerous on this forum!

or there might not be any native species on there.

Even if the little apex predators annihilated all of the birds, reptiles and bugs, there's always hope some survived!

We must protect them from the evils of the world.

So since there weren’t enough people to take care of the cats they decided to just drive them extinct? That’s pretty wild.

Spaying and neutering cats is not "driving them extinct."

Given that the goal was for no more cats to be born (so that the cat population eventually drops to 0) and this was apparently accomplished, it seems like a fair term.

"Driving into extinction" is an awfully loaded and hyperbolic phrase for "neutering a single colony of feral domestic cats." It makes it sound like an atrocity. Maybe that's not what you intended.

Preventing unwanted and uncared-for kittens is a good thing. It's a major goal of animal welfare groups all over the world.

Managed decline.

Artificially high population of cats. Almost no human population to feed them.

They performed non lethal surgery on them so there wouldn’t be a population of cats dying of starvation when the last residents pass.

I think this is a perfectly humane solution. Especially considering it in the context of their cultural embedding, in which animal welfare in general are not the greatest. And also considering that the alternative is that feral cats starve to death.

>The Aoshima Cat Protection Society, therefore, recommended that every cat on the island be spayed or neutered in order to gradually reduce the population. The sterilizations took place in 2018.

This is peak surprise_pikachu.jpg.

If they didn't want to drive the cats to extinction ("gradually reduce") then why did they do it to every cat?

Common sense is a fucking superpower, I guess.

The decreasing human population is the problem. Rather than let the cats suffer and starve after the last human leaves, they sterilized them so there would at least be less needless suffering.

Who is surprised? The sterilization program is doing exactly what it was supposed to, and that's a good thing. I think you're misinterpreting the article.

The headline reads: "... Won’t Survive Much Longer".

Later, the article goes: "Sadly, though, this feline paradise won’t be around as a tourist destination for much longer."

So no, I'm misinterpreting nothing. The article implies the cats going extinct is a bad thing.

No doubt something perhaps got lost in translation and then further got sensationalized for clicks, but as presented I am left wondering who left their common sense by their front door before going out to work.

edit my comments seem insensitive given the reply. I'm sorry for your loss, I'll just delete this.

As someone who put his mother to rest last December, someone dying is a "good thing"?

I think I can gather what you're trying to say, but what the sincere fuck my dude.

EDIT Note to other readers: Clearly there was no ill intent, the comment was retracted and amends have been made. I'll leave my reply in place for some context, but let us speak no further upon this.

The author being sad about it doesn't necessarily mean anyone else is.

The sole caretaker on the island is getting old and won't be able to look after the cats forever, so the Aoshima Cat Protection Society decided to spay/neuter the cats and let nature take its course. This is going exactly as planned.

The author thinks it's sad that a popular tourist attraction will vanish soon. I can sympathize with that while still knowing it's for the best.

The sad part is that the Cat Mama has to wind things down. This does not imply any kind of failure on the part of the Society.

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