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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

If your cat actually eats what they kill (ours did) it's not nicer for the environment to turn forest into farmland to grow corn to feed chickens to turn into cat food. You're just pushing the environmental impact somewhere you can't see it.

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From the abstract of the article:

> We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually.

I don't understand how to marry the point you're trying to make to this. Cats are an invasive species to most small animals, and should be kept from accessing them.

In addition to the havoc they wreak on local small animal populations, outdoor cats live shorter lives than their indoor counterparts.

https://www.vetinfo.com/indoor-outdoor-cat-life-expectancy.h...

> I don’t understand […]

They’re willfully ignoring the facts and indulging in emotional projection. Domestic cats aren’t wild animals, they’re pets. Letting them roam outdoors is irresponsible both to local ecosystems and to the cats themselves.

Many dogs will run right out the door if left to their own devices, but somehow this is not ok while the same behavior for cats is. Very strange.

I think they're pointing out also that humans themselves are an invasive species. They've killed wildlife and converted fertile land to monocultures. Letting humans roam outdoors tends to be irresponsible to local ecosystems.

> Many dogs will run right out the door if left to their own devices, but somehow this is not ok while the same behavior for cats is.

That's not at all difficult to explain. The dog is a nuisance to the nearby humans.

Nobody cares about their pets being a nuisance. They care because dogs are more likely to get lost and not find their way home or get hit by a car.

Realistically, in much of the US both urban and rural, cats are as much a part of the wildlife as whatever animal purists actually want to call wildlife. You can spay, neuter, domesticate, and indoor them as much as humans are capable of doing; but they breed like, well, cats, and they deeply want the freedom of being outside. Most modern dogs would not survive if humans didn't intervene in their survival; but the vast majority of cats would. Humans don't generally actively participate in inciting cat breeding like we do with dogs; in fact, we try to stop it as much as we can. What you're describing is just... nature. Its harsh, its brutal, but cats are a very natural part of our ecosystem.

Even the term "domesticated cat" is a partial, minor misnomer [1]. They aren't really domesticated in the same way dogs are. They're wild animals, who's wild behavior just happens to be kinda chill and mesh well with humans.

Cats do live longer when you keep them inside. Humans would also live longer if we kept them in a prison for their entire life, feeding them a nutritionally perfect slurry. Not sure why its relevant to the discussion.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-s...

You could try thinking about it. Buying cat food at the store isn't magic. It comes from somewhere.

Cats can eat the wildlife in your yard. Or, you could have wildlife in your yard, and offset the calories by growing them on more farmland somewhere else.

The only difference in the second scenario is that you don't see the extra acre of woods — along with all the lizards and birds that would live there — getting turned into soybeans.

"Feral Cats are wild-living variant of the common pet cat, introduced to Hawai‘i by Europeans. Feral cats have established populations on all eight of the main Hawaiian Islands and contribute to widespread ecological disruptions that threaten native Hawaiian wildlife. Feral cats are one of the most devastating predators of Hawai‘i’s unique wildlife. In addition to direct predation, feral cats also spread a potentially lethal parasite (Toxoplasma gondii) that contaminates terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments and has been shown to negatively impact birds and mammals – including humans."

https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/invasive-species-profiles/...

Most pet food is made from waste from producing human food. E.g. offal. So I'm not sure pet food accounts for any significant loss of wild land on its own.

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