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Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

nytimes.com

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Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#181

Post by badpun »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #169
yabatopia wrote: post #125

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.

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.

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#182

Post by neuronic »

the_doctah wrote: post #148
stefan_ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#183

Post by gjulianm »

vjk800 wrote: post #166
yabatopia wrote: post #125

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#184

Post by danielbln »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #179
throwaway675309 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#185

Post by Cullinet »

gjulianm wrote: post #183
vjk800 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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'…

> 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.

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#186

Post by dmix »

ycombinete wrote: post #175
throwaway675309 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Time for foxes or bigger stray cats

And then we’ll be stuck with gorillas https://youtu.be/P9yruQM1ggc

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#187

Post by cgio »

oefrha wrote: post #152
yabatopia wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

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.

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#188

Post by fhe »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #169
yabatopia wrote: post #125

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.

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.

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.

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#189

Post by nirse »

midoridensha wrote: post #160
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 havi…

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

Re: Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

#190

Post by peanuty1 »

fhe wrote: post #188
throwaway675309 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 h…

> 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?

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