31–40 of 73 posts
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This. People in suburban and urban areas should be banned from having outdoor cats, period.
Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds... As if the problem is the loss of birds in Manhattan or Queens, and not the loss of birds in millions of acres of rural USA (where cats are not really the problem), for example...
Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss, pesticide use (associated decline in insect population), and large scale change in available food and climate. I think the easiest to address would be pesticide and herbicide use -- widely known to have other negative side effects, s…
Cats, as cute as they are, are a major contributor as well. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-bird... > Feral cats on islands are responsible for at least 14% global bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions and are the principal threat to almost 8% of critically endangered birds, mammals, and reptiles. https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x
- How Cats Used Humans to Conquer the World - -- Ancient DNA from 209 cats over 9,000 years tell the story of their dispersal. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/cat-domi...
- The End of Cats: An Interview With the New Zealand Economist Calling to Eliminate All Kitties -- "The cat lobby here is just as feral, self-centered and as balmy as your gun lobby is" https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-end...
Are birds actually so scarce elsewhere in the world? My experience in a small city on the east coast of Australia is that birds are everywhere and in great variety. On a recent morning, I counted 10 different species of bird walking 500m to the shops and back. And it is hard to ignore the noise from the large flocks of sulfur crested cockatoos and rainbow lorakeets that frequent my town. I understand that what I see…
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While that paper singles out cats, any introduced mammal species (rats, foxes, dogs etc.) on an island with ground-nesting and/or flightless birds is a huge problem...
Yes, that's a massive issue in New Zealand. We have a programme called Predator Free 2050 aiming to address it. There are some very interesting organisations working on solutions, such as the Cacophony Project ( https://cacophony.org.nz/ )
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-end...
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Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds... As if the problem is the loss of birds in Manhattan or Queens, and not the loss of birds in millions of acres of rural USA (where cats are not really the problem), for example...
We shouldn't be making like for pets more miserable. We should be explaining to people the damage that cats to to the local ecology and dissuading them from having them. A fun talk I had with my kids.
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Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds... As if the problem is the loss of birds in Manhattan or Queens, and not the loss of birds in millions of acres of rural USA (where cats are not really the problem), for example...
We shouldn't be making like for pets more miserable. We should be explaining to people the damage that cats to to the local ecology and dissuading them from having them. A fun talk I had with my kids.
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We shouldn't be making like for pets more miserable. We should be explaining to people the damage that cats to to the local ecology and dissuading them from having them. A fun talk I had with my kids.
Kids are far more destructive for the environment than cats, though.
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Kids are far more destructive for the environment than cats, though.
Allowing one damaging thing isn't a good enough reason for allowing another damaging thing. In both cases the costs and benefits need to stand on their own merits.
Are birds actually so scarce elsewhere in the world? My experience in a small city on the east coast of Australia is that birds are everywhere and in great variety. On a recent morning, I counted 10 different species of bird walking 500m to the shops and back. And it is hard to ignore the noise from the large flocks of sulfur crested cockatoos and rainbow lorakeets that frequent my town. I understand that what I see…
I've been in places in the USA and Europe that just feel devoid of birds or often insects. Lift a log in Australia and there are dozens of living things crawling around. In parts of the US, more often than not, there's nothing. I have a pretty routine suburban backyard in South Australia and there are loads of birds, as with your experience - lorikeets, wattlebirds, etc.
Although, it is sad we don't notice the decline of birds, or anything else.
The book "Whittled Away" has a fantastic description of how ridiculous it is people where I live think the fisheries are abundant. They're a wasteland compared to what once was, but since humans have short lives and shorter memories we don't know what we're missing.
Same goes for light pollution (how many stars is a lot? I still can't quite make out the milky way in a field an hour from the city), or noise pollution (how many birds were driven from the city by the infernal noise of cars?) or just... sight pollution, I guess (how few leaves do you see in a day?)
https://books.google.ie/books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline