221–230 of 244 posts
Didn't New York just create a "Rat Tsar"? Surely you solve both problems by stopping feeding the cats.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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. S…
melrose st?
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. S…
> 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
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.
"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, a…
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 ju…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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 al…
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?
Earlier 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.…
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 groun…
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?
Earlier 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.…
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 gran…
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.