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?
Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
121–130 of 244 posts
Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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.
Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#123This is just propaganda by the Pro-Rat lobby.
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Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#124I'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.
Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#125Be 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.
Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#126>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.
Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#127Flatbush 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.
Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#128The 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.
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.…
> NYT seems to be running an anti-cat agenda.
My sides.
Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wer…
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.
Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets
#130I'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.