this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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DO NOT feed strangers cats. Water is fine. If you feed it, at best you're fucking up its diet, at worst you're basically abducting the cat.
Pet cats should live inside, with plenty of toys and people that care for them, not out killing bird populations and risking getting run over, etc. Outdoor cats have much shorter life spans...
I can see the logic but it does feel like the cat’s already out of the bag on this one. There are so many free-ranging and feral cats that I wonder if it makes any difference at this point.
It does. Travel to a 3rd world country and look at the difference. Dogs and cats everywhere due to no cultural expectation to keep them indoors or neuter them.
Here is an article better clarifying the effect of our cute little killing machines:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-kill-a-staggering-number-of-species-across-the-world/
That article seems very new-world-centric
Europe, Mainland Asia & Africa all have native small cats and so the birds and small mammals have evolved to deal with them, the issue is that in Australia & the Americas they haven't and so that's where all the risk of species actually being wiped out is - in the old world the cats largely just replace the larger predators that humans have killed off in the ecosystem
Even in the Americas we have wild cats though. Bobcats are slightly larger but not completely dissimilar. We even used to have ocelots across much of the US, and neotropical migrants will still encounter those for part of the year. So I find the claim that mainland birds are not able to handle cat predation to be a bit questionable. However I am not fully educated on this topic.
I’ve seen a lot of stats about cats and it seems very likely they have important conservation implications in island ecosystems where birds did not evolve with similar predators.
But I’ve not seen evidence of conservation impacts on the mainland where we do and did have similar predators in the past. Just stating that cats eat a lot of birds doesn’t mean they’re a threat to overall populations.
True, but that article says that over 350 of their prey species are at risk species, and that several of those are suspected to already be extinct.
I love cats—I think most people should have them—just be responsible with your furry murderers.
Again it would depend on where those are—threatened species are disproportionately located on those islands I mentioned. Furthermore it doesn’t assign any causation to cat predation.
Maybe cats are a serious conservation threat on continental areas but I’m just saying I haven’t seen evidence of this.
Here’s a study from Oklahoma State University specifically talking about the effects of mainland cats in contrast to island cats:
https://news.okstate.edu/articles/agriculture/2017/me-ouch-the-impact-of-cats-on-native-wildlife-species.html
Thanks, this seems more in line with what I was wondering. But I’ll need to see if I can get access to the full paper. The example given in Australia actually fits my hypothesis since they historically lacked felid predators. So I’d like to see the full list to see the location and severity of the effects they’re reporting.
Here you go:
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.1633
Oh I’ve got the link, but it’s paywalled. I’ll find the full paper later.
Here’s a non-paywalled PDF:
https://abcbirds.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Loss-and-Marra-2017-Population-impacts-of-free-ranging-domestic-cats-on-mainland-vertebrates.pdf
Maiq has heard its dangerous to be your friend.
Where I live there is practically no risk of them getting ran over. But yes they do catch 2-3 birds per yer.
My cat figured out the dog door by watching the dogs. She's inside 80% of the time but prefers to do her business outside if the weather's clear and goes out for an hour or so about twice a day besides that.
Of all things, my part basset hound mix is a bird killing machine despite the stubby legs, broken hip and arthritis. I don't know how she manages to do it, but lots of half eaten bird corpses started showing up in our yard right after we got her, but only in the back yard which she could reach via the dog door. Starting before the cat started using the dog door.
The cat is abducting itself. They’re not dogs. They’re rarely loyal.
Back when my cat was alive I got occasional reports that he would enter various other houses nearby and meow by the fridge until he was given a cold cut.
Does a cat in me who has a Facebook group and pictures of him sat on everyone's beds. In the summer he came into my house and ate my cat's food. Cheeky bugger.