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The First Cat War

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Re: The First Cat War

#31

Post by zachmu »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #23
praptak wrote: post #19

"Most cats were considered working animals, and were expected to rid houses and barns of mice and rats" Cats don't generally hunt rats[0]. Before modern pest control the working animal to kill rats was a dog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Terrier [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146...

>> An animal shelter in Chicago has released 1,000 feral cats throughout the city to combat a rat crisis. ... >> While the deployed felines will sometimes kill rats, the mere presence of these repurposed alley cats is usually enough to scare off pests. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/14/chicago-fera... To a rat, a house with a cat that probably won't kill it is less attractive than a house with no cat…

Unless the rat is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, which makes them attracted to the smell of cat urine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodents

Re: The First Cat War

#32

Post by eszed »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #23
praptak wrote: post #19

"Most cats were considered working animals, and were expected to rid houses and barns of mice and rats" Cats don't generally hunt rats[0]. Before modern pest control the working animal to kill rats was a dog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Terrier [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146...

>> An animal shelter in Chicago has released 1,000 feral cats throughout the city to combat a rat crisis. ... >> While the deployed felines will sometimes kill rats, the mere presence of these repurposed alley cats is usually enough to scare off pests. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/14/chicago-fera... To a rat, a house with a cat that probably won't kill it is less attractive than a house with no cat…

Can confirm. We had a cat, at a shared house in San Francisco, which our landlord (mainly to be a jerk) forced us to get rid of. Rats immediately appeared, rummaging through our pantry and tearing up our clothes. I remember one cheekily glaring at me from a piece of furniture in the hallway. They were wood rats, quite fortunately, so kind of cute and not particularly disease-ridden, but absolutely a nuisance.

I dutifully collected confirmation and quotes from exterminators, and forwarded them to our landlord, along with a note saying, "look, we never saw these while the cat was here, how about you let us send back the pet deposit you forcibly refunded [yeah, he'd known about the cat all along; he'd found a loophole, and I told you he was doing it to be a jerk], and we bring him back?" He did. We did. We never saw another rat.

Re: The First Cat War

#33

Post by zachmu »

whateveracct wrote: post #11
tetris11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My old roommate has two british shorthairs, they're basically his kids. They live on the top floor of a four floor house, and never leave the 50m² apartment. They spend their days sleeping and doing not much else. Down on the street, a neighbour also has a shorthair, almost an identical clone to my roommates. The cat has free reign of the neighbourhood, and the alertness in its eyes makes me realise that it has a muc…

All cats spend most of their day sleeping. It is true that cats thrive when engaged. But it's very possible to engage indoor cats.

Not in the same way.

I've had indoor and outdoor cats. And I've had indoor cats that we started letting outside. The change in their behavior when they have access to the outdoors is palpable. They come alive in a very obvious and dramatic way.

This isn't really surprising when you stop and think about it. We seldom make the argument that zoo animals are living their best lives compared to their wild cousins despite the objectively safer conditions of a zoo.

Re: The First Cat War

#34

Post by coolThingsFirst »

permo-w wrote: post #30
2024throwaway wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

all my instincts tell me that the parasite cats can spread to humans - toxoplasma gondii - really genuinely does change some humans' brain chemistry to make them unconditionally love cats. obviously instincts mean little, but some of the conversations you can get it in with cat people really beggar belief

They are objectively very aesthetically pleasing.

Re: The First Cat War

#35

Post by kjs3 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #29
kjs3 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cats (domestic ones, at least, and most that aren't 'big cats') aren't apex predators; those are predators with virtually no predators of their own. Cats are predators, but lots of things eat cats. Not that my cats don't think they're top of the food chain.

They are the apex predators of their particular size (big cats or small cats).

No. Small domestic dogs like terriers routinely kill cats. I've seen both a fox and a hawk kill a cat. The fox was perhaps slightly larger but not much; you maybe could say the hawk was 'bigger' by wingspan only but couldn't have weighed more than a third what the cat weighed. Owls take cats as well.

Cats are just predators.

Re: The First Cat War

#37

Post by 2024throwaway »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #34
permo-w wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all my instincts tell me that the parasite cats can spread to humans - toxoplasma gondii - really genuinely does change some humans' brain chemistry to make them unconditionally love cats. obviously instincts mean little, but some of the conversations you can get it in with cat people really beggar belief

They are objectively very aesthetically pleasing.

They spend a large portion of their day licking their own buttholes, but sure.

Re: The First Cat War

#38

Post by permo-w »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #34
permo-w wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all my instincts tell me that the parasite cats can spread to humans - toxoplasma gondii - really genuinely does change some humans' brain chemistry to make them unconditionally love cats. obviously instincts mean little, but some of the conversations you can get it in with cat people really beggar belief

They are objectively very aesthetically pleasing.

so are origami. you wouldn't catch me excusing them of the mass-murder of vital, comparably aesthetically-pleasing animals

Re: The First Cat War

#39

Post by zachmu »

> A paper that appeared in Nature in 2013 put the number of birds killed by cats in North America at somewhere between 1.3 and 4.0 billion birds every year, a total that is mostly driven by unowned cats.32 If this figure were accurate — a big if — it would dwarf the toll of every other direct cause of human-driven bird mortality.

The chart which follows this quote does not include "habitat loss" among the "direct causes" of human-driven bird mortality, which is an odd framing considering its undeniable impact. Humans replace forests and prairies with residences and roads and monoculture crops, then blame cats for why there aren't enough birds around. Sure cats aren't exactly helping the situation but it seems bizarre to lay the blame at their feet like this.

Re: The First Cat War

#40

Post by samatman »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #2

They are the funniest creatures on earth. Manipulative, hilariously small, arrogant and lazy. Yet apex predators, god must have a sense of humour. They went as far as manipulating prophet in islam so he placed them as ritually pure and a sign of faith for people who like them. Christians killed them so bubonic plague came and ravaged europe. Coincidence, I think not.

The last paragraph is one of those commonly-believed things which did not, in fact, happen. https://going-medieval.com/2023/05/16/on-cats/
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