hckrnws
Be careful what you wish for. It reminds me of the Four Pests campaign in China around 1960, especially the extermination of sparrows, one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.
500k feral cats: that's a lot of mice, pigeons and young rats! Without predators like feral cats, NY's rat problem could become even more, well, interesting.
Complete anecdata but this appears to have happened where I live. Urban-ish neighborhood (it'd be "urban" to most of the USA, but not to say someone living in Manhattan). The area in general has a lot of rat issues. But our little half block radius never did.
There was a feral cat colony that lived in an abandoned building right at the epicenter. Few years back that building was torn down and new condos went up, and the feral cat colony is no more.
Go figure, our little neck of the woods now has the same rat issues as everyone else near us.
The article mentions that the cats may be responsible for control of mice population, but apparently attacks on the New York rats are relatively rare being far larger and more aggressive.
Apparently rodents avoid places that have a scent of a cat. So, cats don't even have to hunt them to have an effect on the population.
Unless the rats have toxoplasmosis
[dead]
Time for foxes or bigger stray cats
And then we’ll be stuck with gorillas https://youtu.be/P9yruQM1ggc
NY could introduce coyotes that will take care of both the rats and cats. They mostly hunt at night here in SF.
Then bring in some bears to take care of the coyote problem
Then some gorillas to fight off the bears.
Why not buy this rock that keeps tigers and/or bears away?
"But then we're stuck with gorillas!"
[dead]
purely as a thought experiment, I wonder if given enough time, the NYC stray cat population would observe a genetic drift towards larger body size and start preying on the abundant local rat population? I never lived in NYC, and don't know how big the rats are there, but the rats I've seen (mostly at uni. biology labs) they grow to about 25cm in length (about the length from tip of index finger to tip of thumb with hand stretched out to the fullest for someone with large hands, not counting the tail), which I think is entirely within what a normal-sized adult cat can tackle.
urban rodents is a rich food source begging as an ecological niche to be filled.
And then the rodents will genetically drift to being larger as well and at some point in the future will have cats and rats as large as cars.
This will put pressure on having bigger cars and at some point in the future we'll have cars as big as the american ones
this is the origin story of mechs
> I wonder if given enough time, the NYC stray cat population would observe a genetic drift towards larger body size
How much time are we talking? Thousands of years?
Comment was deleted :(
That’s nonsense - When I lived in a rural area I had a Bengal cat that would bring home much larger prey than Rats such as Rabbits and Squirrels.
NY Rats are larger than Rabbits and Squirrels.
I do not know if this is or is not a joke.
It's not a joke. Some of the rats are larger than cats.
Pics or it didn't happen
How would anyone know how many rats the cats are eating?
Population correlation studies, camera traps, mark-recapture studies, GPS tracking to understand spatial relationships between cats and rats, analyzing cat stomach content and so on.
That's what I was also thinking.
The cats have been there for some time now (I assume there were lots of feral cats even before the pandemic) and the local ecosystem has somehow adapted to/with them. Getting rid of them is probably going to have unwanted consequences.
Who's to say cats can't live independently among humans (and rats and other animals) in cities? Someone is probably going to bring up the argument that the cats are not taken care of and have diseases, parasites, injuries, etc., but so do all animals living in the wild. The only difference is that you don't see the parasite infested malnourished stoats in the woods every day like you see your neighbourhood cat colony.
> Who's to say cats can't live independently among humans (and rats and other animals) in cities?
I knew about this nonprofit via a cat colony caretaker, @poetssquarecats (I follow her on Tiktok and she's amazing) that talks about the struggles of feral cats and uncontrolled cat colonies. Yes, of course animals in the wild also suffer from diseases, parasites, and injuries. But these animals aren't in the wild. They're far more constrained than in the wild, with a lot more access to food, and with a lot more dangers. One of the problems is that, in those conditions, the number of cats can and does explode (female cats can become pregnant at 4-6 months old already, and they have on average 16 kittens a year in multiple litters).
And yes, of course getting rid of them is going to have unwanted consequences, but having them has other unwanted consequences. For example, as the article mentions, birdlife is severely affected, which can also have other unwanted consequences. I think that in that case it's better to have the cause under control: either way it's going to have unwanted consequences, but at least when you control it you know that it's happening.
> female cats can become pregnant at 4-6 months old already, and they have on average 16 kittens a year in multiple litters).
This totally was not true in my living memory of fifty years.
Edit : like this is totally news to me which frightens me knowing that could really mean that we've passed a irreparable inflection point in a number of the most stabilized metabolic endocrine and hormonal management systems that have taken the entirety of history to develop into sustainable life.
Is systemic oestrogen poisoning to blame?
Or has there been effective speciation as a consequence already, which might demand humane euthanasia?
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8300725/ :
"Estrogens occurring in the environment can negatively affect the organisms, such as animals, through phenomena such as feminization, dysregulation of natural processes related to reproduction[...]
Edit :
IF what you are saying is true then de facto there's been speciation because there's no way for prior variants of this animal to co exist socially or biologically in any compatible lifespan and neither could the cats I thought existed exist in any shared habitat for reasons of disease and competition. The only possible conclusion is that the very design for life on the planet earth is already proven to be being erased before our very eyes.
Another, more reasonable hypothesis, is that you were wrong about your preconceptions of cat reproduction. The time to reach sexual maturity seems to be pretty well established, and the number of kittens of course will vary depending on conditions but it's not rare to be in those cases of female cats having multiple litters in a single year. Cat pregnancies last two months approximately, so it's not unreasonable at all.
At least gay frogs don't breed huge families, but adopt instead.
Yup.
Similarly, in the Everglades the invasive Burmese Pythons introduced in the 1970s are multiplying, killing predators like bobcats, and the rats are taking over, further destroying the ecosystem. [0]
[0] https://www.livescience.com/animals/snakes/burmese-pythons-a...
Our neighborhood feral cat population has gone way down and our bunny population has gone way up. When I saw a cat almost catch and kill a baby bunny it dawned on me that these might be related.
This definitely isn't new. I had an apartment in Bushwick through the 2000s, and due to construction in the surrounding area, the rats on our block and occasionally in our building were huge and relentless.
Then my neighbor moved in. She was a pet photographer by trade, but also cared for all the neighborhood cats as well as all the area bodega cats - making sure they all had their shots and were spayed / neutered. She also traps around the city when needed. We had 4 street cats that just hung out on our block because she would leave food for them. I would occasionally feed her own three cats and whatever stray she had locked in the bathroom when she had to go out of town.
That's how I got my cantankerous orange tabby. He was abandoned on the streets of Bushwick and was fortunate for my neighbor. He hates everyone but my wife and I, and tolerates our young son. But he sleeps with us every night and rubs on our feet when he needs attention. There's no way he would have made it this far (13 years and counting) without my neighbor bringing him in as a kitten.
I was hoping to see her show up in the article.
> the rats on our block and occasionally in our building were huge and relentless
and...? I was hoping to see the rats show up on your comment but you never mentioned them again
There was a commenter, I'm not sure if it was here, slashot or reddit, he would start with interesting premise but then halfway he got distracted and finished different story with something mundane never finishing the interesting story. He was famous for it.
I was sure you were going to refer to u/shittymorph of reddit fame.
Like back in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcers table
The other commenters got it: ...and then the neighbor with the cats and the traps and the camera and the occasional feral cat locked in her bathroom moved in.
Before then... One time I woke up to my girlfriend-at-the-time standing in our bed in tears, wavering over me with a baseball bat in hand. We were in good standing at the time, so I was confused but thought I was done for. Turns out she was trying to hunt down a big fat rat that she saw waddling across the dresser.
I had just finished a thirty-hour stretch of work so I was in no shape to deal with it. She broke some things with the bat, and it ended up waddling its fat ass back into the walls. I think it ate some poison because it ended up scratching at the walls for about a week as it slowly expired. Then the stink arrived and it took about as long to leave.
Rats didn't show up in comment again because cats came.
Then his neighbor moved in...
> This definitely isn't new.
This is mentioned in the article.
melrose st?
I used to live one block away from Melrose and that’s where I found my stray cat…
Cook st - a Banksy showed up on my building a few weeks after I moved out.
The article is making it seem like trap-neuter-release is a completely new strategy, but groups in NYC and elsewhere have been employing it for a long time. What's new is that Flatbush Cats is building a new vet clinic to provide more spaying / neutering capacity.
No it isn't. The article brings up the term about halfway into the article and immediately say it was "first developed in England in the 1950s." This is right before they even define what TNR is! Then they immediately go into what other cities have done on this front.
The 50s is a pretty long time ago by 2020. It's not so recent as it was in the 80s or the 00s
NYT seems to be running an anti-cat agenda.
This article calls trap-neuter-release (TNR) a "controversial" practice, whereas it's well established and proven to be effective (something even this article says).
A few years back, they ran a full-blown frontal assault[1] on Google's volunteer-ran TNR program, gCat, blaming the TNR program (and only the TNR program) for the decline of the local burrowing owl population.
This led to Google forcing the shut-down of the employee-ran TNR program, and extermination of the remaining neutered cats that couldn't be immediately adopted.
To say that this was devastating to people involved is an understatement.
Of course, this was utter nonsense. The decline of the burrowing owl population is well-studied, and in all cases I know of has been attributed to destruction of habitat - both in the Mountain View area and beyond it [2][3][4][5].
Preservation plans - when they even mention cats - put them dead last on the list of reasons.
The cause for extinction is simple. Burrowing owls need two things for their habitat:
(1) soft ground for the holes;
(2) other animals, like squirrels or prairie dogs, to dig holes for owls to burrow in.
I have a hunch that a certain Mountain View company rapidly expanding its campus circa 2018 wasn't conducive to preservation of the said habitat, and "kill all cats" was a simpler solution to the problem than halting construction[6] (also see: [7]).
But having an indignant NYT article as a justification for felicide has sealed the fate of the cats who got used to coming to the same place for food.
In the aftermath of the shutdown, the local feral cat population predictably exploded[8], and the burrowing owl population at Shoreline Park went down to zero[9].
The report says:
>Habitat loss and direct human disturbance have been the main observable factors for the population decline at this site.
Cats - feral or TNR'd - are not mentioned in the report.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/technology/google-cats-ow...
[2]http://www.elkhornsloughctp.org/uploads/files/1408724962Moun...
[3] https://mv-voice.com/news/2016/11/15/worries-over-dwindling-...
[4]https://mv-voice.com/news/2012/04/06/new-hope-for-citys-burr...
[5]https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb52268...
[6]https://www.whiskersproject.org/latest-news
[7]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36235779
[8]https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2021/11/16/feral-cats-in-mount...
[9]Page 11, https://www.scv-habitatagency.org/DocumentCenter/View/1387/S...
----
TL;DR: NYT made Google kill all cats on Google campus.
Your citations contradict your claim.
[2], p. 30: "Predation by nonnative and/or nuisance species. Predators, such as nonnative cats, dogs and foxes, as well as native crows and ravens, that are thriving in human-altered environments. The City policy of removing cats and foxes has been effective and beneficial for the burrowing owls."
[3]: "There are many factors that could explain the low numbers. The owls are ground-nesting, living in holes hollowed out by squirrels. That can leave them vulnerable to a long list of predators, including foxes, skunks and raccoons. Feral cats are considered the worst of the lot, preying on owls as well as the small birds and rodents that make up the owls' main food supply. In fact, a released cat last year ended up mauling one prolific male owl, Kleinhaus said."
[5] appears to concern burrowing owls in Black Hills National Forest, which is substantially different from Mountain View.
[9] does not call out cats specifically, but does recommend "[r]educing adult mortality rates by preventing the use of harmful rodenticides near occupied habitat and reducing the threat from non-native predators" on p. 22.
>Your citations contradict your claim.
It appears you did not read the claim. Again:
Preservation plans - when they even mention cats - put them dead last on the list of reasons.
>[2], p. 30: "Predation by nonnative and/or nuisance species
YES, dead last, right after:
- Systematic and regular grading on a large scale destroys prime foraging and nesting habitat
- Insufficient high-quality foraging habitat
- Insufficient mowing during the breeding season to maintain nesting habitat
- Disturbance by vehicles going off-road, leading to erosion (of habitat)
- Formal and informal trails and unofficial roads in owl habitat
Notice anything common with al of the above?
>The City policy of removing cats and foxes has been effective and beneficial for the burrowing owls
Yeah, the city thinks it's doing a god job as the population went down to zero. Also, notice the foxes. Also, notice that these were not the neutered cats in Google's TNR program that were potentially dangerous. Also...
[3]: Great, evidence of one owl being mauled by a cat. Again, notice that this is the last thing mentioned.
[5]: Oh, so this is different. Just like feral, un-neutered cats roaming the city are different from neutered cats fed by Google's TNR proram. Anyway, again, cats aren't called out.
[9]: "does not call out cats specifically" - isn't that what I said?
You are badly misrepresenting the content of your sources.
[1] says:
>The owls are endangered from many sides. One of the biggest threats uses the Shoreline golf course. A bleak Mountain View report three months ago noted there have been deaths “due to direct contact between golf balls and burrowing owls.”
They do not blame only cats. They discuss cats in particular but do mention there are other threats. I will grant that this one confusingly-worded paragraph is not enough background.
They also do not call for the killing of all cats. The article mostly criticizes the practice of feeding cats, not TNR or adoption.
[2] says:
>Feral cats are supreme predators and actively prey upon burrowing owls. One study in Florida found owl mortality by cats accounted for 30 percent of deaths (Millsap and Bear, 1988). Cats also impact burrowing owls indirectly by decimating small bird and rodent populations, reducing the available food supply for burrowing owls.
One suggested solution is to:
>Proactively discourage all feeding of cats in Shoreline
It is exactly the same message as the NYT article.
[3] calls out the threat of cats first and foremost.
>There are many factors that could explain the low numbers. The owls are ground-nesting, living in holes hollowed out by squirrels. That can leave them vulnerable to a long list of predators, including foxes, skunks and raccoons. Feral cats are considered the worst of the lot, preying on owls as well as the small birds and rodents that make up the owls' main food supply. In fact, a released cat last year ended up mauling one prolific male owl, Kleinhaus said.
>In the aftermath of the shutdown, the local feral cat population predictably exploded[8], and the burrowing owl population at Shoreline Park went down to zero[9].
You seem to acknowledge that the large cat population was in fact a threat to owls, but still object to the NYT story.
>You are badly misrepresenting the content of your sources.
If that's the case, so do you.
>[1] do not blame only cats.
[1] is a direct attack piece on Google's TNR program. The entire article is centered on that. To say that they "do not blame only cats" is laughable. Who they actually blame is Google's employees who ran the TNR program.
>They also do not call for the killing of all cats
Ah, but isn't it neat? They don't say it, that's just the impact they want (and got).
See, the entire point of gCat feeding stations was attracting un-neutered feral cats, trapping them, and neutering them. That's the T and N of the TNR.
R stands for release. Why release? Because not all cats can be domesticated. gCat has adopted dozens of cats from the street, but not all cats were OK with that.
The call to "not feed" the cats meant an end to the TNR program, because it could not trap the cats. It also meant that the released cats kept coming back to campus, looking for food.
Lacking a TNR program, these cats were captured, then killed (because adoption was not an option for them).
>[2] says:
Oh, we're quoting [2]? Let's quote [2]. [2] lists the following threats:
- Systematic and regular grading on a large scale destroys prime foraging and nesting habitat
- Insufficient high-quality foraging habitat
- Insufficient mowing during the breeding season to maintain nesting habitat
- Disturbance by vehicles going off-road, leading to erosion (of habitat)
- Formal and informal trails and unofficial roads in owl habitat
Notice anything common with al of the above?
And yes, after all of the above, cats may also present a threat.
Not the gCat TNR program cats in particular. Cats in general.
>One suggested solution is to: "Proactively discourage all feeding of cats in Shoreline"
...not differentiating feeding feral cats, and feeding stations in the TNR program.
It's infuriating that you accuse me of misrepresenting truth.
>You seem to acknowledge that the large cat population was in fact a threat to owls, but still object to the NYT story.
Large, uncontrolled, feral cat population is a problem.
Google's volunteer-ran TNR problem was a solution to that. Many cats were adopted (over 50, IIRC, the website has since gone down). The ones that were not adopted were neutered, and their romaing range was made smaller as they (predictably) returned to the feeding stations, instead of roaming freely.
The NYT story specifically attacks the TNR program, and misrepresents it as the problem.
>[2] lists the following threats:
Oops, you forgot one:
- Predation by nonnative and/or nuisance species
>And yes, after all of the above, cats may also present a threat.
You seem to think it's very important this bullet point is last, but there is nothing in the source that suggests items are listed in order of importance. Even if there were the order is not consistent in all parts of the report.
Why are you reading tea leaves when the authors say, explicitly and repeatedly, that cats are a serious threat?
>You seem to think it's very important this bullet point is last
I think it's important to know that there are five other threats listed, all of them having to do with destruction of habitat.
That's to drive the point home that destruction of habitat has a much higher impact than anything else - including predators.
>There is nothing in the source that suggests items are listed in order of importance.
The content of the bullet points suggests that. They are listed in the order of impact on habitats.
The bullet point following the "predation" bullet point is "future possible threats".
>Why are you reading tea leaves when the authors say, explicitly and repeatedly, that cats are a serious threat?
Because the authorities don't provide any hard data on that.
But let's not read tea leaves, indeed. The most important point is that the gap between cats, in general, may be a threat to Google's specific cats are a threat has never been filled.
It's solid logic:
- Some cats threaten owls
- The animals fed by gCat TNR volunteers are cats
- Therefore, gCat threatens owls
Do you see a problem here?
I'm sorry but you're dreaming of you think that feral cats aren't destroying local bird populations.
Humans kill far more birds than feral cats. Agriculture, pesticides, deforestation, destruction of fields and grasslands, the use of mice and rat poison, car traffic, wind turbines, ... it all adds up. It makes feral cats look like amateurs showing up on a gun fight with a pencil.
In the EU, a 2021 study of 378 bird species estimated that bird numbers fell by as much as 19 percent from 1980 to 2017. And that's not because of cats, feral or not.
The good ol’ “there are many contributing factors, so how dare you try to solve one of them” argument.
“Animals are dying. Let’s kill the animals that kill them” argument I would call it.
<s>kill the animals</s> breed fewer of those animals
FTFY.
the non-native animals (cats) that are disrupting the ecosystem argument
As long as we're being ridiculous and unserious I suppose you support TNR for humans to?
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I think we both know this person isn't supporting TNR for humans, don't be silly
Can we get them to go after the pigeons and rats (aka flightless pigeons)? I’d rather have feral cats, like Rome, than large populations of those two pests.
Why do I care about the bird population over the cat population? Who's playing god?
Because there's a real danger of losing some of these bird species, and absolutely zero danger of losing domestic cats as a species?
This is absolutely untrue. Most studies on cat impact on bird species are ridden with incomplete and bad data. In Germany, estimates are around 200 million birds killed by cats every year. But since the total population of birds is estimated at 400 million that would be every second bird! That's insane and grounds for immediate skepticism. Well, it turns out that extrapolating local results to global scenarios does not at all represent what is going on in reality.
For example, while cats might kill a lot of animals in settled areas like NYC that doesn't at all mean that species are endangered as a result of it. Birds don't exclusively live in human settlements and their continental populations might barely be affected by cats as there are sufficient areas outside of human settlements where feral cats are simply non-existent or at least not a problem.
Furthermore, the decline of birds is almost entirely human made - no one doubts this. Habitat loss and insect decline. Reducing the cat problem will simply not have a notable impact at all. Yes, millions of birds are killed by cats but what does that mean in the grand context if billions and billions of birds are killed by humans? It's a drop in the bucket and not worth the effort and I would ask ornithologists to name species that have been wiped out by wild cats in a continental context and not just from Smallstown, Minnesota.
Disclaimer: island scenarios like New Zealand are different due to the locality of the problem.
It's like trying to save ants from some dude stepping on their streets once a day while ignoring a ravaging fungus that is destroying the colony from the inside. But here you are, saying "not stepping on the ant street is also helpful!". Congrats to saving 10 ants while the colony is being decimated by a fungus.
You can come clear up the weekly dead birds in our garden throughout nesting season, killed by the local cats, then.
You apparently haven't read my comment then. I already included your concern about birds being killed in and around human settlement. That says nothing about total populations since birds dont exclusively live in your garden. Conversely, cats DO live mostly in and around human settlements.
Let's do this. And when we're done killing all the cats and the rat problem becomes worse and somehow the birds don't seem to return to the filthy and noisy concrete jungle with no trees we can just pretend it never happened.
> and the rat problem becomes worse
Cats usually won't tackle rats, this is even mentioned in the article.
The rats dont just pop out fully grown, the young rats are an easy prey.
Haven't you read any James Herbert?
Joking aside, cats aren't going to be very inclined to head into a lair to pick off their young.
Species are lost all the time, it's just an arbitrary cut from an infinitely expanding evolutionary tree. So it's about as many different of them as possible? Does that strike you as an odd metric?
Nothing matters and we're just a speck of dust hurtling through the infinite so who cares what happens about anything right?
In my view, yes, nihilism sucks. But making the point that evolution means change is fair. Trying to keep everything as-is forever is fundamentally unnatural and impossible and I don't think that is what conservation should be about.
Choosing not to do anything is just as much of a choice as choosing to do something, and is "playing God" in equal amount.
We are way past this point. This huge population of cats exists solely because we are breeding cats. Besides that, we are killing lots of other, apparently lesser animals, in order to feed them to our cats. What do you call this, if not playing god?
Cats don't need help breeding. GP even said "feral cat".
I don't know of any "cat breeders". They are just a resilient species.
I suppose we could make some sort of "equity" system for species based on an arbitrary metric, but that's closer to playing God.
Domestic cats as a species had been introduced to America by humans, and still are explicitly kept and feed by humans. I'd call that breeding. This also sets an easy and natural metric of how many cats should be there: 0.
So your metric is how an animal got to a location?
Birds can fly, not really fair to the feline species concerning which places it's allowed, eh?
Zero cats should be allowed to exist in NA?
No open borders for cats!?
> Zero cats should be allowed to exist in NA?
Zero non neutered cat should be allowed to exist in North America, correct.
>Domestic cats as a species had been introduced to America by humans, and still are explicitly kept and feed by humans. I'd call that breeding. This also sets an easy and natural metric of how many cats should be there: 0.
Same applies to humans of non-native descent, I presume?
I'm sorry, but you seem to be ignorant of the facts.
I have provided extensive references for everything I said. Please read them before typing out your gut response.
While cats, in general, are a threat to birds, these particular cats were not a threat to these particular birds.
[flagged]
I repeat my request to actually read the words that I wrote, along with the references, and respond to that instead of the emotions you're feeling.
Please read these points carefully:
1. While cats, in general, are a threat to birds, the cats managed by the TNR program on Google Campus were not a threat to burrowing owls in the Shoreline park;
2. Shutdown of the TNR program resulted in the increase of the feral cat population, and had no positive impact on the owls;
3. The primary threat to the burrowing owls is human interference and destruction of habitat. These birds are not particularly threatened by stray cats in the first place.
4. Saying that the general statement applies to a particular case without looking at the facts is a fallacy.
TL;DR: "cats are a threat to birds" doesn't imply that my house cat in the US is a threat to kiwis in New Zealand.
This is a discussion about NYC. I don't know why you're focused on Mountain View.
Do you think that you can somehow generalize from that to NYC?
> NYT made Google kill all cats on Google campus.
NYT didn't "make" Google do anything. They published an article which may or not be correct and then the Google people made their own choices.
Yes, my bad here. Google didn't have to do that.
I have some personal knowledge of this. I worked at Google 2005-2017, and in 2006 I quite often walked through the hills across Amphitheatre from Google. I would often see burrowing owls then.
South of there is Shoreline Amphitheatre, north is the golf course, and east is more park, plus a restaurant. None of that changed at all, as of 2017. The owls were gone long before that. Unfortunately I don't recall exactly when I stopped seeing them.
Often they would just sit and stare at me, even though I was only 15 or so feet away. So I can easily believe that predators got them, maybe even cats; it seems being more skittish would be more adaptive. I've also seen snakes in there.
[3] says "Humans can also be a big nuisance for the owls. City parks staffers have installed signs and fencing to cordon off sensitive areas, but hikers sometimes go trailblazing. Shoreline Park prohibits dogs except in an off-leash zone near the entrance, yet some people still untether their canines in other parts of the park."
This is completely unsubstantiated and just plain wrong, from my experience. People do not go "trailblazing" and off-leash dogs are just not a thing.
"a certain Mountain View company rapidly expanding its campus circa 2018" -- you have outed yourself here. Google did not expand into the habitat area at all.
Can you fill the missing gap in this story? Why does the NYT have any authority over internal policies of Google?
>Can you fill the missing gap in this story? Why does the NYT have any authority over internal policies of Google?
Because Google is very PR-sensitive.
NYT articles had a big impact on what Google was doing.
NYT has always been pro-rat.
> NYT seems to be running an anti-cat agenda.
My sides.
Of course TNR is better than doing nothing, but if you trap the cats anyway why not just kill them then?
I dated somebody long ago who did this in her spare time. She did this at her own expense because she loves cats. So that's why she wouldn't kill them. I'd imagine this is common.
Because cat lovers will help if you do TNR, but not if you catch and kill.
People (not me) love their "friendly neighborhood" cats, but most of them recognize that allowing them to breed isn't ideal. Maybe you can convince them to nab them, bring them in, and have them neutered.
100% agree that euthanasia is the effective way to deal with the problem.
But, someone in this thread made the very strong point that people will trap and collect cats for free if you're going to neuter and release them.
Granted TNR hasn't worked at all, but at least it's possible to stay elected while the program exists.
I imagine TNR also provides convenient subjects for veterinary interns learning surgery.
>Granted TNR hasn't worked at all
[citation neeeded]
50 to 70 million feral cats in the United States
> the Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology oppose [trap, neuter, release], holding that cats are a highly destructive invasive species that should not be allowed to live outdoors at all
The only option that leaves, really, is extermination.
But nobody is going to do that (not on a scale to have an impact, anyway) because (1) it costs money and (2) people would flip out because they love cats.
Is the the Audubon Society society going to step up to pay the bill and take the blame? Will local government agencies? I don't see it happening.
Meanwhile, TNR runs on very lean budgets because it's all cat-loving volunteers.
Of course, I'm not sure it's actually effective. But, so far, no one is proposing an alternative that could actually be tried. The Audubon Society's position is effectively identical to ignoring the issue entirely.
> it costs money
I can't imagine that euthanasia is more expensive than TNR.
Exterminators cost money. TNR runs on volunteers and a lot of donated services. (Nobody volunteers to kill cats, and if they do, you don’t want them.)
And the overall effort isn’t that different.
With TNR you trap, neuter, release.
With extermination you trap, kill, dispose. (I don’t think you can leave a bunch of dead cats and poison traps laying around).
Neutering is a lot more effort than killing, but disposing is more effort than releasing (you can’t just throw piles and piles of dead cats in a dumpster).
Given that the article is also kind of a PSA for New Yorkers, I'm surprised that it didn't mention ear clipping. If a feral cat has already been spayed or neutered, its left ear is clipped so that people know to leave it alone and not trap it again.
TNR with ear clipping is done in the UK by the Cat Protection League. They loan you a trap and neuter the cat. Our house cat is an ex stray with a clipped ear from CPL.
here, they now give neutered cats a tattoo on the belly (~1cm green line) instead of clipping. this is a bit more humane and becoming more the standard nowadays i believe.
I think that's pretty normal for pet cats: mine are like this.
However, I don't see how it's useful for stray cats. You can't just pick up a stray cat to look at its belly. A clipped ear you can see from a distance.
yes, i should clarify that LA has a pretty effective no-kill cat rescue network (even sending rescues to other states for adoption), so most cats here are neutered, chipped, vaccinated, and tattooed when rescued and adopted out (e.g., my sweet little rescue cat). but there are also dedicated TNR volunteers who strictly neuter and release stray cats and employ the ear-clipping method for that reason (easier to see from distance).
ear-clipping isn't foolproof though, since many feral cats will not sit still long enough or let you get close enough for you to observe a clipped ear. that said, plenty of stray cats are relative docile and friendly, and totally adoptable by simply picking them up and taking them home (which is what one of my neighbors did).
>ear-clipping isn't foolproof though, since many feral cats will not sit still long enough or let you get close enough for you to observe a clipped ear.
Nothing is foolproof, but you can use binoculars to see feral cats' ears from a distance if you really have to. Most stray cats, in my experience, are NOT friendly at all; they won't let you come close enough to them to pick them up, and if you do they might fight you.
Not sure if it's changed here, but in Australia it's a tattoo on the inner ear (a circle with a line through it).
Pretty soon it'll be a full-sleeve and a nose ring.
this is not always the case this is only done by public service organizations. if you have you pet taken into the vet to get fixed, the ear clip is optional and many choose not to get it clipped
While neutered cats don't always have their ears clipped, a cat with a clipped ear is near-guaranteed to be neutered.
This is why it makes sense to mention it.
NYT, which called TNR (trap-enuter-release) "controversial", isn't interested in informing people about it, it seems.
Well, yeah, it'd done for TNR so people know they don't have to catch the cat again.
If this is successful, I wonder how long it would be before we see a cat that is born with ears that look like they are clipped as it would be a pretty big reproductive advantage.
Flatbush cats and other organizations like them are real heroes, stepping in to help fix an important issue that is completely and utterly ignored by the government, and if anything exacerbated by some of their rental policies.
As rental scarcity has only become more severe, and no pet clauses have become more restrictive, the amount of pets unfortunately abandoned on the streets has increased. The government has shrugged its shoulders and these volunteers have showed up to clean up the mess.
The negative attitude of the birder organizations expressed in this article is wild to me. These TNR orgs are keeping a lid on the feral cat population that would absolutely explode otherwise. The impacts on birds would be dramatically worse if these cat trappers weren’t out there helping working to reduce the population of feral cats.
Been donating to Flatbush Cats for years and I will continue to do so, even though I am 3000 miles from Brooklyn. They are truly angels.
Since nobody else has mentioned it: rats in NYC are frequently poisoned and are dangerous for predators to eat. The city has had a number of famous hawks and owls die over the years due to poisoned rats, most recently Pale Male[1].
I have a feral cat that lives under my stoop, and I like it. But I’m also not under a bucolic daydream about a closed ecosystem between this city’s cats and rats.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/nyregion/pale-male-hawk.h...
This is just propaganda by the Pro-Rat lobby.
Raccoons playing 5D chess to get on top of the agenda in a generation or two
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NYC should learn from Istanbul and accept their rodent cleaners.
I've seen NYC subway rats and I'd wager most cats wouldn't take them on.
This really depends on how hungry the cat is. Feral cats commonly kill mammals larger than NYC rats, although they prefer smaller game. In general, you can expect a feline to be able to kill prey over twice it's body weight. In many habitats felines are the apex predator, and even feral cats are apex predators of some habitats.
The biggest issue is that NYC rats, the non-native species that have evolved in urban environments, have evolved with cats as a predator for a long period of time and are better than native birds/small mammals at evading cats. Cats eat the native population at a higher rate, which means the invasive and hated 'NYC rats' have less competition from native populations.
My cat used to bring home Jack Rabbits. No small feat.
That cat was an amazing cat in so many ways.
I had an alpha male cat when I was a kid and once saw it run down and kill a jackrabbit with one bite.
Imagine how many more rats would get to that size if cats didn't get them when they were smaller. Or if they could breed in spaces currently occupied by cats.
Rats and cats ignore each other here. The rats are too big.
We gonna need bigger cats
Bring in the lions!
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The article says that the cats will hunt mice but rarely hunt rats.
I hate that cats kill birds.
"We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3-4.0 billion birds and 6.3-22.3 billion mammals annually."
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
Honestly, birds are pretty much the only surviving wildlife in many areas and I wonder what our children and grandchildren will encounter.
In any discussion of cats that study is mentioned and usually mentioned several times at that, and that is not surprising giving that it is published in Nature and comes from Smithsonian - it immediately generates a lot of trust in it.
2 things are notable about that study:
1. the researchers didn't specify the proportion of ill and old birds and mammals in those billions of killed. It is a glaring deficiency for such a scientific study. Billions of mammals and birds reach end of life each year. In natural settings natural predators take care about that. In developed areas basically only cats and rats are such predators who is available to perform that duty. When it comes to the ill birds and mammals - we have already been through such situation with deers and wolves. Thus, if the proportion of ill and old is high then it would mean completely opposite conclusion than the one the study reaches - it would mean that cats predation is beneficial for those birds and mammals.
Now, why the study has such a glaring deficiency? One can make an informed guess when one learns the 2nd notable thing:
2. a researcher in that department that produced the study was convicted of animal cruelty committed toward cats and that researcher is cited in that study.
Some other things to note wrt. cats and birds :
1. rats, a human civilization companion, raid birds nests and eat eggs, i.e. causing massive damage to population during the most fragile stage in the birds lifecycle
2. cats don't eat eggs
3. cats control rats population
Anekdotally - my grandmother's farm (farmhouse and 2 large barns) had always had a bustling population of barnswallows, and it also had always had a pack of feral cats living there. Sometimes we'd find a small pile of feathers - all what is left of an ill or stupid barnswallow as the cats would have no chance of getting a healthy flying bird. The farm had naturally had a lot of various food stuff - cattle feed, pig feed, chicken feed as well as human food - pretty much everywhere, ie. in storages as well as being actually fed in the barns and outside ranges to the cows, pigs, chicken. Despite all that food stuff present in large amount in many places, there had never been any traces of any mice or rats (note: no artificial pest control measures - like traps or poison - had ever been taken on the farm). So to me the cats are necessary companion of our civilization, and as far as i see they are beneficial - by protecting from rats and by taking out ill birds - to whatever birds population still surviving the stress of development already imposed on it by the humans.
> 3. cats control rats population
I'm not here to tell you I know the absolute truth on the matter, but I can say definitively that your assertion of this fact extends beyond conclusive data. Cats decrease rat sightings, but urban rat populations are good at evading them [1, 2]. Where cats do prey on rats, it's usually juveniles with ultimately little effect on local populations [3, 4].
It's easy to imagine that a certain percentage of the birds cats are killing are ill or old. Yet in the absence of actual data, your assumption that this is the bulk of bird deaths seems like obvious wishful thinking. It's also just as easy to imagine many of the deaths are juvenile / nesting birds too. And unlike rats, most birds can't repopulate so quickly.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/science/cats-v-rats-in-ne... [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1381025 [4] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Pet ownership needs more regulation. And it needs to be enforced.
Our neighborhood social media pages are full of stray animals roaming the streets, piles of newborn kittens in crawlspaces and dumpsters, emaciated dogs found everywhere...
And then at the same time you have people trying to give away or even sell puppy after puppy and kitten after kitten.
If you own an animal, it needs to be spayed or neutered.
Unless you are willing to throw poor people in prison over kittens, you can't really effectively enforce pet ownership laws, because the judgement-proof will keep pets.
I suppose you could have roving cat detector vans that would spay and neuter any cat they could get their hands on unless it had approved breeding chips embedded inside. I've heard a documentary on such a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOonOtyoplY
Poor people aren't the problem here, it's the relatively wealthy who feel that responsible pet ownership laws don't apply to them.
So we'll solve it with more laws. Brilliant! Just outlaw murder while you are at it too!
If murder was almost unmonitored, you could definitely improve the situation with some laws and some enforcement of those laws.
I don't understand your mockery here.
Brilliant! If murder was legal, we'd see a lot more of it, don't you think?
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Do you know how traumatic spaying is, and how absolutely trivial it is to not get your dog knocked up unintentionally?
Until you snip all your own tubes and those of all your children, keep your euthanasia propaganda to yourself.
Every human causes far more environmental harm than any animal.
What does this have to do with environmental harm? I thought the discussion was about animal population.
I'd also argue that starving to death is pretty traumatic, hence why we should have better regulation on pet population.
See the part where it’s trivial for a responsible pet owner to not get their dog knocked up.
> Do you know how traumatic spaying is
How traumatic is it? The surgery and recovery doesn't look that hard. And heat's not exactly pleasant.
> how absolutely trivial it is to not get your dog knocked up unintentionally
I wouldn't say it's trivial to guarantee your dog never gets out or has a visitor to the yard. (And your own track record here is just an anecdote.)
> Until you snip all your own tubes and those of all your children
I can control myself, and if my child gets pregnant that's their responsibility. A dog can't be responsible for its own babies.
> keep your euthanasia propaganda to yourself.
The fuck?
Eugenics, I should have said. The point remains.
Have you ever even had a dog? You speak as if you’re pretending to be an expert in canine physiology but everything you say is just plain wrong.
For one, my dog can control herself just fine around studs while she’s in heat. And her being in heat is a minor, annual, occurrence. Contrast that to humans, whose heat is painful and monthly. Would you advocate for forced snipping of all human tubes as you so callously do re canines?
Glad to hear that you’ve somehow managed to “look” at a dog post invasive surgery and determine “idk probably not bad”. I assume you didn’t notice the months-years-lifetime of depression following?
A period isn't heat, snipping tubes doesn't stop a period, and humans are able to decide for themselves. And keeping your dog from breeding without spaying is exactly as "eugenics" as spaying.
> I assume you didn’t notice the months-years-lifetime of depression following?
If there are any long-term effects I will easily bet they're because of hormones, not trauma from the surgery, and if you actually did get the tubes tied then you would avoid hormonal changes.
"Popular notions aside, cats rarely attack rats..."
I stopped reading at that point. I have, on numerous occasions, witnessed cats kill rats (sometimes taking a while doing it, mind you, but always finishing the job). I am not usually outside, and I'm sure there's a lot more going on than I see.
I live in a neighborhood that has had feral dogs, then when they went away (because more houses were built, I'm guessing, and there wasn't as much space for them to roam), feral cats moved in. The drop in rat problems was precipitous. When (due to coyotes or cars or whatever) the cat population drops, we get rat problems, and then when we get new feral cats in the neighborhood, they go away.
Now, perhaps Texas rats are smaller than New York City rats, or else Texas cats are bigger than NYC cats, or something, but the idea that "cats rarely attack rats" is laughably incorrect.
You stopped reading because they said something that is widely known by disease ecologists and the result of an actual scientific study?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cats-are-surprisin...
"Researchers led by Fordham University’s Michael Parsons spent five months observing a rat colony housed at a Brooklyn waste management facility [...] Over the course of the 79-day testing period, local cats ambushed just three of the facility’s roughly 150 rat—killing only two.
[...]
A potential explanation for the felines’ unexpectedly low kill rate is the size and ferocity of city rats, Tanya Loos writes for Cosmos. New York’s infamous brown rats generally weigh around 330 grams, or roughly 10 times the weight of the average mouse. Given the choice between attacking a monstrous rat, a 15-gram bird and a 30-gram mouse, cats tend to opt for the less challenging prey.
[...]
But cats and rats are more likely to ignore or avoid each other than engage in outright conflict, University of Florida disease ecologist Gregory Glass, who was not involved in the study, tells Chen.
“Once that rat hits puberty, [it’s] way too big and nasty for the cat to deal with,” he says. “You can watch a lot of cats and rats accommodating one another, easing by one another, eating out of the same trash bag.”
Yeah, I saw a TikTok and this guy was filming a cat that had lost it's tail and an eye. Apparently, it had gone toe-to-toe with the rats of Brooklyn if I remember correctly and lost. NYC rats can get pretty gnarly in size, nothing like the mice or squirrels we think of that cats usually kill.
Rats can get pretty large, and pretty vicious - cats can be outclassed by the bigger ones, you pretty much need a small dog like a Terrier (a "ratter") to guarantee that you can eliminate them au naturale.
We need AI driven robocats.
That study doesn't make "cats rarely attack rats" accurate.
More accurately from that study - a transient group of feral cats rarely attack huge rats that are in a 150 rat colony at a waste management facility.
- They watched huge urban rats that had engorged themselves at a waste management facility
- A large rat colony can communicate and they had safe routes established by the time the researchers and cats visited
- The feral cats had better options in and around that facility for food or fun
- They observed many cats in the environment which changed the rat behavior. "a one percent increase in the number of cats on a given day made it 100 times less likely that a rat would trigger the team’s motion-sensitive cameras". So throw a ton of cats at the problem and they become less effective.
“You can watch a lot of cats and rats accommodating one another, easing by one another, eating out of the same trash bag.”
Many predator/prey animals will ignore each other if there is an ample food supply to share. Hyenas and lions do this. Lions don't stop eating a kill to go kill hyenas. They'll chase them off or choose to share a meal.
Long time ago I used to have a huge cat that was indoor/outdoor. It went outside and killed anything that moved. It once drug home a large rabbit and put it on the doorstep.
This study shows, contrary to what many would think, that you can't toss feral cats at a huge rat colony and expect them to eradicate them. True. Especially good to know if you run a waste management facility in New York.
You'd probably get more kills if you used a single well-fed housecat than letting a lot of feral cats come and go into the rat colony which drastically changed their behavior and made them stay in hiding.
Put a rat and cat in your house and the cat WILL attack it. Send a cat into a rat's environment, same thing. Watch a bunch of feral cats come and go into a rat colony with huge rats - yeah, probably not many attacks as they load up on the easy food from the trash bags and the rats stay hidden. Fat rats can do that. Especially at a waste management facility.
The general claim that cats rarely attack rats due to that study is silly.
Didn't New York just create a "Rat Tsar"? Surely you solve both problems by stopping feeding the cats.
Dogs are a lot better at hunting rats. The city should breed and release thousands of rat terriers if they mean to get serious about their rat problem.
Some of those rats are the same size of the cats.
As the article points out, cats are not very good rat predators.
They will find other food far more easily.
Sort of. You have to feed them about half what they need to get them to hunt. That was the official policy of the General Post Office in the UK at one time.
Stanford once had something known as the Stanford Cat Network, now called the Feral Friends Network, which sounds like something from the Camp Wedontwantcha comic. This group caught feral cats left on campus and tried to find them homes. Some of the cats that were too feral to become cats ended up at the Stanford horse barn.
Some of the barn cats would hunt. I've been presented with a dead mouse. Others managed to get people to overfeed them, and they'd get fat and lazy. Once I saw a mouse, found a cat, and put the cat down near the mouse. The cat did nothing. Useless cats accustomed to free food were sometimes placed as house cats and replaced with new hunters. About four good hunting cats could clear the entire property of vermin.
You have to manage the cats to get results.
Cats are ferocious predators of mice and birds and other small animals. Maybe management is helpful, but even supposedly indolent cats do a lot of hunting.
They aren't good at hunting rats in particular. Rats are big and cats are scared to fight them.
From the article:
> Do feline predatory instincts have an upside? While New York’s feral cats kill lots of mice, they are no match for the city’s rats, which greatly outnumber them. Popular notions aside, cats rarely attack rats, though rodents do avoid nesting near often-pungent cat colonies.
Not to be confused with a "Rat King".
Go one step higher on the chain and develop a refuge system appropriate for the 21st century then you can knock out three in one go.
I dont know who this depressed but throwing trash bags on the street is something the modern world solved many years ago.
pssp pssp pssp x 500,000
Thanks for that. I cracked up
Opportunity for a new children's book: The Pied Pssp Psst Pssper of New York.
But would the logo for that company have a tiny penis tucked behind its ear?
for reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3RwX06wcBs&t=107s
They need a new Pssp Tsar.
My neighbor is involved with a local program that does exactly this.
It takes a long time, but is effective, and fairly humane.
Cats breed like crazy. Even with a high mortality rate, they can still end up dominating their food chain.
Now ... NYC also has a bad rat problem ...
I'm reminded of the Gay Talese essay that opens with an account of vast numbers of feral cats waking up all over New York. I'm surprised the story didn't mention that the city used to be full of them.
> Rattling off statistics that she has internalized as a volunteer, Ms. Adams points out that eight out of 10 street kittens die within their first six months. Those that survive are often disease-ridden. Winters here can be deadly for a species that originated in the Mediterranean climate of North Africa. And traffic takes a big toll.
I wonder if those kitties show genetical adaptions specific to their challenging environment? Is their population and breeding speed enough to allow for useful (micro) mutations to appear?
I would guess yes. A species can change pretty quickly when you have a new generation every year, a population of thousands, and some factor that kills ~50%.
After all, these moths[1] evolved their markings to match polluted industrial cities in just a few decades (and just 7 years in a follow up experiment)
When I lived in a, erm, more eventful part of Philadelphia, three kittens popped out of my neighbor's shed. We kept one, brought another into the office, and the third one was too wild for us to manage. We've since moved, but when we lived there, we did trap and release for dozens of cats.
The one kitten we kept has distinctive fear reactions to sirens and gunshot type sounds (we live next to 95 and deliberately backfiring your exhaust is, for some reason, a popular choice) in ways that our other cats don't. It's noticeable enough that we've joked about it being epigenetic.
Given the push to sterilize and kill them, their best bet is to evolve away from being friendly to humans.
That would be counter-productive. The main driver of cat population are humans. Cats evolving to being hostile to humans might in the end diminish public opposition to extermination programs.
>Popular notions aside, cats rarely attack rats, though rodents do avoid nesting near often-pungent cat colonies.
So the amount of places that rats nest will increase.
Does increased nesting come with increased disease?
Do they breed significantly more when they have found nesting places they are comfortable with, and if so, by what factor?
I wondered about this myself. Cats don't often attack rats, but rats apparently change their behavior dramatically when cats are around. Just making rats afraid to come out of hiding would surely make them less efficient scavengers and would reduce their population.
Don’t we have a rat problem too? I live in Manhattan, send us some of these cats!
Having had (pet) rats as well as a cat (briefly), I don’t think that cats are generally sufficient for rats. Fully grown adult rats are too big for cats to handle and they only take 10 weeks to reach a size that will make them troublesome for average cat.
Remember that a feral cat does not have access to health services. If they are injured trying to take down prey, they will probably be dead shortly after.
That having been said, if NYC has a rat problem, then it should also have a mouse problem. The problem here though is that trying to use feral cats to tame mice in the places where they’d be stubborn would be either troublesome, inhumane, or just disgusting (e.g. subway tracks).
To expand, cats also can't (don't prefer to) take on a lot of fully grown birds.
What they can do easily is kill young, like most predators.
It's simple: NYC just needs to introduce lots of mountain lions or panthers to deal with the rat problem.
2030 NYTimes headline: Clearing 500k mountain lions from New York’s streets
Rats generally avoid areas where cats live, though.
Most rats are too big for the average cat to prey on. Mice sure. Rats get quite large.
Imagine trying to fight a medium sized dog. You'd probably win, but after 2 or 3 encounters like that you'd probably get hurt. That's a bad proposition when there's smaller, easier prey. And just like, human garbage full of food too.
Can we give the cats a few months to take down the rat problem first?
Absolutely love their youtube channel, would highly recommend it.
Bring in a cat and you get a burger!
After a while the hamburger's will taste different. That's the point when you will surely know the program became self sufficient...
lol
That’s how you get more kitty mills.
Could you really induce a cobra problem if the only reward were a burger? Raising a few hundred kittens every year just to eat a steady diet of burgers doesn't seem very efficient.
“…we feed the rats to the cats, and the cats to the rats, and we get the skins for free!”
I was under the impression that expressing a sense of humor was not allowed on this site. Can someone clarify :)
It is not, the appropriate response to this post is to downvote and reply with a terse comment on the misuse of the apostrophe.
Generally correct, especially if it's too subtle for the varied age groupings and interests - everyone's hair-triggered to get butthurt about some triviality. Eventually the adults will show up in most threads and will occasionally be bothered to correct the karma injustice.
I’ve noticed it depends on your karma score and reputation
I don’t think people check karma scores. (I never do.) More likely it’s a factor of being on the site long enough to learn what jokes you can slip in without getting downvoted. That would correlate strongly with karma and good reputation.
Headline sounds like a google interview question
Just cancel the cat project and abandon all the users, the cats will move on.
Now lets do it in Ologn computation time
you cant have that many cats without a decent number of mice and rats. I doubt they are aware of the level of sophistication in rodent reproductive capabilities. As it's nyc one should probably think of it as 800% compound interest every other week.
A gift for soon to be many multiples of the currently estimated 2 million rats in NYC.
One meeeeeeeellion stray dogs.
Let them fight
how about they start earning their keep and start hunting the 5M rats out there.
I'm gonna guess the main problem is the rats are smart and will stay in sewers and other places cats can't get to them.
I imagine that rats will become way more visible to humans after elimination of cats
Well the obvious solution is bigger sewers that cats can get into, and meaner cats.
American minks will solve this without need to enlarge the sewers....
Didn't the zika virus cause sterility? We just need a cat variant.
And a vax of course.
Kill the feral cats and you end up with rats becoming the overlords.
Only until the snakes that we’ll introduce take command of the situation.
Follow by lowland gorillas to manage the snakes?
In other news: Mysterious rats & mice plague in NYC...
I'm totally fine with at-home cats. However, cats that roam outdoors are, by definition, an invasive species. Australia acknowledges this problem and kills outdoor cats to protect native species.
No one is culling house pets. However feral cats are culling cockroaches and rats in New York which are huge pests.
At least 15 of the current posts in this thread (>1/10) repeat the misconception dispelled in the article that cats reduce rat populations.
Or they don't believe it. I don't.
The article is paywalled - but why would you ever want to do that?
Cats on the streets suffer. Badly. Cats on the streets are a disaster for the bird population. And contrary to what cartoons have taught us, cats are not an effective way at keeping rats at bay (in fact, the threat of dead cats makes rat poisoning efforts far more difficult to implement).
> Cats on the streets are a disaster for the bird population
and still pale in comparison to the effect us and our cities have on their populations. cats are not the big problem, we are, people just don't like to admit it and would rather blame them. As is likely us destroying the insect populations many species depend on.
> threat of dead cats makes rat poisoning efforts far more difficult to implement
the reality of dead owls and other small natural predators is a more real issue here, and why rat poison should not be used and be banned. It just was in my city Vancouver because it was doing more damage to owl populations then cats were.
In contrary. It is you who doesn't like to admit it. Makes sense in a way, as cats are our cute pets and thus emotionally much closer to us than random wild birds. Ironically, those huge cat populations are caused by humans, so in the end humans indeed are to blame.
From https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
"Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals."
or you are just eating up one random study the media went wild with because it made good headlines?
windows - https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mor...
Habitat Loss, pesticides and other chemicals, then invasive species not just cats (including plants), then windows https://www.birdscanada.org/conserve-birds/major-threats-to-...
and i could go on. this will of course change with the country you are in, cats in a country like australia or small island are going to have a much different effect then NA/UK/EU and thus lots of organizations and scientists for these areas do not put cats as the number one cause because it really is not established fact.
I knew exactly what paper you were linking because it is always the one people trot out, as the only one making such wild claims with numbers that big from some imho wild assumptions.
There are others who also correctly pointed out that it is alarmist paper that needs to be taken with a large grain of salt: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9794845/
some of the choice quotes:
"both implied or were interpreted by others to indicate alarming predation of house cats on prey populations."
Churcher and Lawton (2) investigated predation by ca. 70 cats in one English village over a 1-year period, .... The authors estimated that 30% of the sparrow deaths in the village were due to cats, but stated that the village sparrow population was much higher than the average in other British villages. Although the authors were cautious in their interpretation, the media took off with alarming extrapolations of these very limited data across all of the UK."
"Loss et al. (3), .... stated that the magnitude of mortality in mainland areas was largely speculative. .... stated that un-owned cats (as opposed to owned pets) cause the majority of this mortality and concluded that free-ranging cats are likely to be the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals. However, most of the field studies in their literature review and in their data extrapolation have not taken the above-mentioned known facts about cat predatory behavior into account, .... Among the various studies they considered many lacked a correction for prey eaten or left when away from home, different methods of gut analysis, no control for habitat where the data were collected (suburban, city, farmland), or other causes of prey decimation (e.g., habitat destruction). "
"But the most serious criticism of all such studies is that none of them even mentions a rough estimate of the total population size of a prey species (supposedly being threatened by cat predation) or of the yearly reproduction and replacement of lost individuals. What good does it do to headline that “Cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds annually” if the estimated total population of birds in the USA is at a minimum 10 billion pairs breeding every year and that as many as 20 billion are in the country during the fall migratory season [US Fish and Wildlife Service (18), cited January 19, 2011]? Free-ranging cats might be taking about 10–15% of the population of birds annually, but that is not exceptional for a normal predator-prey relationship and is insufficient to eliminate a prey species. Further, estimates of the owned and non-owned free-ranging cat populations are just that–rough estimates."
"Fitzgerald (7) and with the addition of even more field studies (28) have countered that there is simply no evidence that free-ranging cats on the continents are the main cause of species disappearance (and biodiversity reduction) since there is usually a suite of predators utilizing the same prey species and other causes can be cited"
During the pandemic irresponsible morons adopted cats to alleviate the loneliness only to abandon their new friends on the street once the restrictions waned. This inhumane treatment has resulted in thousands of feral cats added to city streets. This is not good for the city or the cats.
Which is also something I can just not comprehend as a pet owner (cat / dog). I already feel bad leaving my dog alone for a few hours a week lol. (With a cat, less so. They are less dramatic about being left alone.. :) )
EDIT: forgot to close a parenthesis and the LISPer in me panicked.
> With a cat, less so. They are less dramatic about being left alone.. :) )
I have two male cats, brothers, of which one becomes very needy and whiny after I'm gone for a few days (hes a needy little guy). He stays close, follows me around, whines and mews for attention, and sleeps on the bed with me or next to it. After a week this behavior dies down to normal levels of attention and he goes back to sleeping in the basement or the living room. His brother doesn't exhibit this behavior even though he is equally affectionate.
Was camping just recently and away for a week the other month and both times I get an ear full on return in the form of loud yowls as if he's yelling "where the hell were you!"
I can relate 100%. Cats are amazing creatures
I’m not alone in rereading for mismatched parens!
I need a plugin for the browser that adds closing parens when you type an opening one like many code editors do.
This smells like a moralism that has very little real impact on the population (which is driven by food supply and neutering efforts).
My guess is that the lockdown halting spaying/neutering operations was 100x as impactful as additional abandoned cats.
Depends whether the abandoned pets had already been desexed. If not then each additional fertile animal could outpace any linear effort by humans.
1. Create a bookmark, name it anything, and put this code in its URL field:
javascript:location.href = '//archive.ph/newest/' + location.href.split('?')[0];
3. Read article.
To keep the cats out
Cat content is a human right.
To enjoy more rats, I guess.
Dogs must be eradicated. They're dangerous for human. Cats are not and should be tolerated.
To pay the journalist, perhaps?
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