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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

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croes·

A world with cats is a world with billions of dead birds and small mammals.

Without them we will have even more insects.

So this time cats won’t protect us from diseases by killing the carrier, these time they help the carriers

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Wouldn’t we have less insects because of increased bird, rodent and spider growth?

Less insecticide is probably the key thing.

Driving in the eighties with windscreens full of insects, and now hardly anything, and a lot less of the things that lived on them.

Sometimes I wonder about that. The measure is number of insect impacts on windshields but is the car the same?

If we use a more modern care would the increased aerodynamics prevent impacts as instead of punching through the air you are cutting through it?

Have never read the full experimental setup and assumptions... I do know that I have less dead bug then when I was a kid...

i've noted less bugs on the windshield but about the same on the optics and the radiator screen, so i go with the aerodynamics explanation as well. bugs are there because i see the bug swarms around the road too.

Ever since I started riding a motorcycle I've started to believe this to be the case too. I get so many bug splats on my helmet, jacket, and motorcycle that I'd never have if I was driving a car. By the end of most rides out in the country on the highway I'm covered in splats.

"Them" refers to birds and small mammals and "even more" refers to the consequences of climate change where insects have more habitable areas.

They still kill carriers for other stuff. Pick your poison, I guess.

Or killing them in the US will allow bird populations to recover, leading to birds killing more insects. Cats are not native to the Americas.

Cats are very native to the Americas.

Just not housecats.

Humans aren't native to the Americas either.

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