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Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

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Re: Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

#71
post #34
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mandatory spay/neuter with steep/progressive fines, plus ban free-roaming cats? that's a lot more achievable, and nearly as good.

How exactly do you expect to enforce the ban on feral cats? Having giant cat killing operations? Because spay and neuter isn’t going to cut it. Even if it didn’t just result in selecting for not getting caught, there would still be 10-15 years of depredation while you wait for the die out.

First of all they said free-roaming cats, not feral cats.

You can't ban feral cats any more than you can ban rats or trees.

And you're excluding the middle too. It's not as though any policy which isn't perfectly and totally enforced is completely ineffectual. And it's also not the case that policies that don't solve a problem completely should be discarded as pointless.

In the end, to have any solution at all, you need something that a) works to some extent and b) can be agreed on by enough people to actually end up being executed.

Far too often the discussion gets completely bogged down in a where a has to be accomplished utterly and completely or we shouldn't bother at all. But the only thing that's pointless is having the discussion that way, because the world just doesn't work like that.

Re: Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

#72
post #5
post #2

I've read multiple times that there've been discussions in a few places around the world to ban cats, or certain breeding of cats to save wildlife, or birds specifically. But I haven't heard any law become real, anyone?

Unfortunately, no me neither. I think this issue extends beyond cats, it's the uncontrolled breeding of animals, which imo leads to all sorts of abuse. I find it amazing that anyone can decide I'm going to buy a breeding pair of cats with the end goal of making money. We need to phase out cats and dogs completely. This saddens me deeply because I love my dog but the damage these animals do to the environment is so la…

Uncontrolled breeding of humans is a problem orders-of-magnitude worse for the natural environment. Shall we start a cull of those too?

(This is obviously satire)

Re: Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

#73
post #10

Cats have been domestic pets in the UK since at least the times of Roman civilisation, and have been allowed to roam free for much of that time. It's odd to me that there's such a contrast between attitudes towards cats roaming in Europe (which I would say is completely the norm, particularly in e.g. the UK) and the United States (and now Australia), though perhaps this is just down to different native fauna. > The E…

That doesn't mean that every bird or squirrel killed by a cat was unable to reproduce and raise healthy offspring.

Given that we are already facing falling population and widespread extinction of just about every category of animal, and native ecosystems the world over are under threat from invasives of some kind, maybe we shouldn't be adding pressure to that.

I'm sympathetic, I grew up with outdoor cats and they clearly enjoy roaming free, but is that worth it?

Re: Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

#74
post #38
post #10

Cats have been domestic pets in the UK since at least the times of Roman civilisation, and have been allowed to roam free for much of that time. It's odd to me that there's such a contrast between attitudes towards cats roaming in Europe (which I would say is completely the norm, particularly in e.g. the UK) and the United States (and now Australia), though perhaps this is just down to different native fauna. > The E…

> It's odd to me that there's such a contrast between attitudes towards cats roaming in Europe (which I would say is completely the norm That is because even in the UK, small cats have been there for thousands of years. I just heard about a Scottish wild cat being introduced. Small Cats in Australia and the Americas have only been there for about 400 years. Wildlife was unable to adapt quick enough. so a lot of extin…

It's not like Americans are uniformly opposed to outdoor cats either. It's a relatively new thing for people here to know and care about the ecological impact.

Re: Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

#75

The flipside of these cat bans is that people suddenly discover they have a rodent problem that they didn't realize before. Mice start appearing everywhere, invading homes, chewing on wires, boring holes into buildings, etc...

Seems like a testable hypothesis. Neighborhoods with more outdoor pet cats should have fewer rodent problems in homes.

Re: Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

#76
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole argument of 'non-native' irks me, with animals and plants. Most everything was non-native at some point. I mean of course it depends on (potentially huge) timelines but at some point in the past land bridges between continents didn't exist and then existed and then didn't exist. At some point some seed got lucky enough to be carried across a sea either by an animal or just wind. I know this is a naive poin…

I dunno why you were flagged. It's a totally valid question IMO, and I asked it a lot in school too (environmental science undergrad). To me, the difference is the RATE of change and expansion. Nature and evolution can pretty easily deal with small changes in small areas happening over hundreds or thousands of years, which was normal before human population explosions. But when that change happens across multiple hum…

I agree with most all of that, and maybe a different way to frame it is, 'human induced changes in ecosystems can cause problems for humans'

I don't really agree its damaging to or causing problems for nature/ecosystems, or that its unnatural, because it implies that humans themselves are not part of nature or ecosystems, that we are something different in kind than the rest of nature (you can argue this in some dimensions sure). I don't think humans settling a new place and introducing bands of cats who are fed from petfood is _that_ different from a landbridge opening up for a couple of centuries. Things will stabilise it's just a matter of timeline.

I think maybe the part that annoys me is that it's humans trying to control the ecosystem under the guise of keeping it in some idealised 'natural state' when that's cleary not a thing in nature, and how we end up having people advocating mandatory neutering of cats and dogs and laws that people must keep cats inside, practises which kinda disturb me tbh.

Re: Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

#78
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno why you were flagged. It's a totally valid question IMO, and I asked it a lot in school too (environmental science undergrad). To me, the difference is the RATE of change and expansion. Nature and evolution can pretty easily deal with small changes in small areas happening over hundreds or thousands of years, which was normal before human population explosions. But when that change happens across multiple hum…

I agree with most all of that, and maybe a different way to frame it is, 'human induced changes in ecosystems can cause problems for humans' I don't really agree its damaging to or causing problems for nature/ecosystems, or that its unnatural, because it implies that humans themselves are not part of nature or ecosystems, that we are something different in kind than the rest of nature (you can argue this in some dime…

> human induced changes in ecosystems can cause problems for humans

I mean, there's totally some degree of selfishness in us wanting to keep nature at some idealized level of "pristine": It has value to us as humans, both in terms of resources and ecosystem services, but also just at an emotional level -- some of us really value nature (as we roughly know it).

Even if you don't use loaded terms like "damaging" or "unnatural", you can still objectively measure a decrease in biodiversity (as in the # of different kinds and numbers of inter-species populations and cross-dependencies and an ecosystem's overall ability to respond dynamically to challenging events like harsh weather or wildfire). When big changes are introduced to a small system too quickly for it to handle, it doesn't so much matter what you call it... the same thing typically still happens: local flora and fauna, which are often endemic to an area (only found there), are displaced by "generic" versatile scavenger species like rats, pigeons, and crows. (Or in this case, predatory cats).

Is a marbled murrelet, a kind of bird, more worthy of preservation than the common crow? I guess that depends on who you ask. Yes, there's some amount of value judgment there -- most of us don't want to see a world with only like twenty remaining species because we killed the rest. We don't have de-extinction technology yet either, and we don't have the capability to regrow old-growth forests in human bureaucratic lifespans. It's true that we don't have all the answers, and all the proper "values" so to speak, to be able to measure the worth of any one species over another, necessarily.

> I don't really agree its damaging to or causing problems for nature/ecosystems, or that its unnatural

But even then, there are some we know to be "keystone" species whose disappearance will cause cascading effects across its local ecosystem, while others just have roles we don't fully understand yet (or maybe really are just "worthless"). But once we kill them off, we don't have any way to bring them back, and that's a few million years of evolution potentially lost forever. A simple precautionary principle might also apply there; we shouldn't necessarily go around destroying everything just because we don't see its immediate value or how other parts of the system depend on it.

This is the kind of thriving, diverse life that many people, environmentalists or not, value. Is it "natural"? If you don't like that word, don't use it, and maybe biodiversity is another metric we can use instead? Does THAT have value? Again, it's a judgment.

A roundish rock with magma lakes is also "natural", but it's not exactly teeming with life. A planet with only microbes is also alive, but not very diverse. Or a city with only imported palm trees and glass windows. The modern web of life took a looooooong time to get to this point, but we can easily lose a lot of it in a few short years. A lot of species value biodiversity -- not just humans, but many animals will prefer certain kinds of forests over others, and decomposers will converge on different kinds of debris, different birds have favorite foods, etc. -- life begets more life. If you don't value any of that, that's totally within your rights, but maybe I'd ask "Why not?"

Is it that you really love cats, and don't want to keep them inside all the time? (I have a cat too and I feel bad that it's an indoor cat... but for entirely different reasons, not biodiversity). Even then there are tools to limit the damage they can cause (like silly poofy collars that birds can easily see: https://www.birdsbesafe.com/)

Do you just not care for nature, feeling kinda meh about trees and birds and shit? That's fine, though it does seem like jumping to conclusions a bit quickly. How do we know these things are worthless?

Is it a more philosophical stance on nihilism and accelerationism...? Like if "nature" goes through cycles and things live and die and eventually our sun will burn out and entropy will increase and the universe will reach its heat death anyway, what does it matter what we do now?

I dunno. I shouldn't put words into your mouth. What do you think?

Re: Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world

#80

The flipside of these cat bans is that people suddenly discover they have a rodent problem that they didn't realize before. Mice start appearing everywhere, invading homes, chewing on wires, boring holes into buildings, etc...

Seems like a testable hypothesis. Neighborhoods with more outdoor pet cats should have fewer rodent problems in homes.

Humans have been testing this hypothesis for milennia. There jury is very much in.
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