Selfishness
this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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The factual answer
@trk @TassieTosser Knox City Council in outer-eastern Melbourne did exactly this: https://www.knox.vic.gov.au/whats-happening/news/keeping-your-cats-safe-and-secured .
The council did it because some of its suburbs (The Basin, Ferntree Gully, Upper Ferntree Gully, parts of Boronia, Lysterfield) border national parks and the Dandenong Ranges.
Younger cats can adapt to living indoors.
But the challenge was with older cats, who are used to roaming around.
The happy medium would be to phase it in over five to 10 years, where any new cats registered or adopted after a particular date have to stay indoors, but older cats can continue to roam.
That's 5-10 years in which it's really hard to enforce though, as you can't just have some cat trapping and taking to the pound program. So people would still let them outside you'd have the same problem at the end of your phase out period
Don’t forget laziness.
Benefits for cats: No FIV infections, no car injuries, safe temperatures, no fights, no parasites.
Benefits for wildlife: no murder, fewer vectors, no loss of habitat to cats
Benefits for community: no roaming cats triggering sensor lights/setting off other pets/damaging property with claws, no toxo transmission, no digging up poo while gardening/losing plants to cat piss
Cons to cats: Keepers must provide entertainment
Cons to keepers: Exercise the level of basic responsibility every other keeper of pets is expected to, or parent with children.
Issue: Controversial??????????
Try to keep non de-sexed cat indoor. I tried, no way it can work. In the end poor boy lost his balls.
Try to keep non de-sexed cat
I'mma stop you right there. No, don't do that.
Balls vs literally thousands of wildlife. What a hard decision?
Letting a desexed cat roam is literally hatred for this land. Do you want more feral cats? desex pets, it's again basic responsibility.
That its only a symptom of the real problem and won't actually solve anything.
The animals they catch are weakened from pesticides.
The animals they catch are weakened from pesticides.
Citation needed
Https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8640698/
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We didn't know or study the effects of pesticides in various wild birds. And it varies wildly between species, with chickens not being a good general case. Also that birds are considerably more affected by pesticides than mammals.
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Simple logic. Housecats do not have access to deep woods or exist in large populations outside of cities and suburbs in North America, yet the populations are declining there. This implies that they are not the cause of the decline.
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This logic is backed up by https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back#:~:text=All%20told%2C%20the%20North%20American%20bird%20population%20is,declined%20by%2053%25%2C%20or%20another%20720%20million%20birds.
LWhich points out that it is a multitude of factors and that grassland species(i.e. farmland) are the most affected, with wetland and forest species being less affected.
- Further logic is that the decline is a relatively new phenomenon. But housecats killing birds is not new. Therefore something else is behind the decline, and simply keeping cats inside will not fix the issue.
That's a whole heap of words to say "maybe". On the other side of the world.
If you're happy being a selfish piece of shit, feel free to leave your cat roam. When Mittens gets hit by a car / contracts feline aids / otherwise meets a premature death, you can rest easy knowing that akshually it was probably pesticides.
Say you didn't understand what any of those papers said without saying you didn't understand what those papers said.
I mean, he doesn't have to say it, your comment and the sources did a good job suggesting you only did a cursory read yourself.
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The first paper states that birds are less sensitive to pyrethroid based pesticides, which makes your broad statements about pesticides sketchy at best.
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Simple logic doesn't work in science specifically because it's simple and is subject to internal biases. You can't make an assumption and appeal to intuitive reasoning without some evidence to draw that link.
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Your second paper doesn't back up your claim. It states that bird population loss is a multifaceted problem. Yes, pesticide use is called out as a factor, but so too is habitat loss through urbanisation and unregulated harvesting practices, which kind of answers your point 4.
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These are all American sources. As a result, very little of this is applicable to the Australian biosphere beyond the most broad strokes since they dont take into account differences in local food webs, urban planning, environmental legislation etc.
TLDR, someone is using irrelevant sources and their dislike of pesticides to justify keeping their cats outside
No it absolutely doesnt.
It absolutely states that birds are considersbly more at risk, and that we dont know how by how much. Try reading more than the intro next time.
I said that cats arent the problem, they're a symptom of it. That is a definition of a multifacted problem. That paper absolutely says the same thing.
The reality is that you could keep every housecat inside and it would not stop the decline.
"There's a possibility that some other factor may play a part in offsetting one of the negative impacts of free-range cats... therefore, all other positives of containing pets may be completely ignored"
- You, 2024
We need to genetically modify cats to only hunt rats.
Good news, they also kill native bush rats!
.... Wait that's bad news.
"We need to genetically modify cats to only hunt introduced rats. " In my area foxes were hunting outdoor cats, so you hardly ever see one. Foxes got baited, and now cats are everywhere. Q is, what is better.
Foxes are also introduced, so I'd say cats everywhere are "better" because there's half a chance their numbers can be reduced through requirements for owners to contain them.
Also, cats can be baited too if required. And, IMO, it is at the point where it's required.
In my neighbourhood in the city, there's some people who take their cat out in the park on a leash. I've done it myself. Though I also let one out on his own. He got spooked by a reindeer and then stayed inside for a whole day lol
Mainly they were indoor cats though. I don't think mine killed anything
Walking your cat on a leash is pretty common here. I can't even remember when I last saw a cat just roaming freely.