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?
> The bat roosts are very vulnerable, as they contain more potential prey within a single area. If these roosts were found by a predator, they could experience mass mortality events; in one incident, 102 lesser short-tailed bat deaths were caused by a single house cat in central North Island.
Yep, although I don't think bans on outside cats are a good idea for several reasons.
The key issue is controlling feral populations in a cultural context where large-scale hunting programs would never be tolerated by the public for obvious reasons.
To do this we need to a) control the supply of fertile human-bred cats into the feral population and b) remove and neuter extant feral cats from the environment.
We can accomplish both of these goals by mandating neutering and ID chips as you suggested, and temporarily banning or placing heavy restrictions on cat breeding.
This will shift all the demand for pet cats onto rescued feral cats, which will finally provide the funding needed to put a dent in feral populations. In addition it should stop the flow of lost fertile cats into the environment.
Now, it's not necessarily doable to train a formerly feral cat to spend the rest of its life inside. My cat lived most his life in the woods, and he completely loses his mind if he's stuck inside. No amount of toys and catnip can compensate for the ability to roam freely. And it's obvious that a feral cat kills orders of magnitude more wildlife than an outside cat with a cat flap and consistent access to food.
There are also plenty of measures that can be taken like restricting outside cat ownership in areas with vulnerable animal populations, mandates for cats to wear bells etc.
> And it's obvious that a feral cat kills orders of magnitude more wildlife than an outside cat with a cat flap and consistent access to food
(Genuine question) source?
My impression from our neighbourhood is that outside cats - who also come and sit in our garden - are interested in birds because that's part of who they are, not just because they are hungry.
Tame outside cats certainly still hunt, but it's really only a hobby. Feral cats hunt for survival. N=1 here, but in about 3 years of ownership my (formerly feral) cat has killed maybe 10 house/forest mice, 2 squirrels, and 1 small bird(he presents all his prey to me, and I keep a rough count to monitor his behaviour), and most of that was before he got a flap 2 years ago. Obviously a feral cat would need to kill a lot more than that just to survive. And he's a large Norwegian forest cat living on the edge of a forest. He could go on an absolute spree if he wanted to.
I think he hunted considerably more before the flap because it was often hard to tell for me he wanted to come inside. So he'd get stuck outside for longer and get hungry/bored.
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.
A primary difference is that cats were introduced into environments as a non-native species and have become the apex predator. This is especially true in New Zealand and Australia. Unlike native carnivorous mammals such as the Tasmanian Devil, Quall's, and Bandicoots, cats hunt for food and sport rather than act as scavengers. Cats in Tasmania have no natural predators other than humans. I've had many cats for pets and yet in an unbalanced environment short of predators, they really can cause tremendous damage.
Short of an all out ban, keeping them indoors or in a catery or controlled in some manner seems reasonable.
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 point of view, but nature adapts pretty well to this, it's kinda _what it does_, even if in the short-term and from a human lens it causes damage. What does damage mean exactly.. a drop in population of some particular species or plant that we are used to having in an area. Are we sure that's damage and not just normal evolution of ecosystems?
I certainly prefer that to happen than have local governments pass laws saying cats must be kept inside, lest they upset the environment that us humans are used to.
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 human settlements (large areas), quickly (industrialization and the green revolution in just a few decades), and at a huge scale (not just cats but climate change and deforestation and pollution all leading to habitat loss), it is very very hard for other species to cope.
If a few individual wildcats crossed a land bridge, sure, they'll have a field day as they gorge on unsuspecting prey. They'll do well and reproduce, and their kittens will eat more prey. But eventually there are more wildcats than prey, a harsh winter or drought comes along, and a bunch of kittens die and the prey have a chance to recover over the next few years. It reaches a dynamic equilibrium.
That's different than when humans settle a new place and suddenly introduce hordes of rats and start breeding pet cats, at numbers far above what the prey population can sustain (because we feed them pet food). The unwanted ones become feral and enter the system at a rate higher than they would've through normal migration, and then we keep breeding more and more of them with an outside input (more pet food). Pretty quickly the feral cats will kill off a lot of the unsuspecting prey (the dumber, more exotic birds, often) and leave a bunch of human-adopted species like rats and corvids and squirrels that can coexist with cats, often having immigrated with the humans for hundreds of years. So you end up swapping the local wildlife for the introduced ones in just a decade or two, way faster than the dozens or hundreds of years it usually takes.
On islands or where settlements and road networks form unnatural barriers, this is especially bad because the escaping prey have nowhere to run to, being isolated to smaller non-contiguos pockets that can individually be trapped until the whole species is extinct or at least extricated (locally extinct).
Of course there are gray areas. The Hawaiian Islands, for example, are a mix of species that ended up there naturally, some a long time ago, some more recently. They have different times of introduction, just like humans do. But because it's a young island chain (in geologic time), its whole timeline is compressed and the species there have different, eh, degrees of "native"-ness, I guess. And among the various introduced species, not all of them are considered invasive. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/
Anyway, it's not an exactly cutoff date or algorithmic formula for determining nativeness. It's just a case by case judgment call based on the relative time of introduction compared to the ecosystem age, and also the effects of the introduced species on other preexisting ones. It's a human judgment call subject to errors, like any others, but still a useful consideration in ecology.
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.
> 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?
Cats typically roamed free in Eurasia and Africa, where small wildcats were common millions of years before humans ever showed up. This means large populations of feral/semi-domestic cats aren't as disruptive to the ecosystem: birds and rodents have already evolved specifically in response to predation from small cats. This is not true in Oceania, and only barely true in the Americas: bobcats really aren't the same thing as small cats since they are much more widely dispersed. (Especially feral domestic cats, which mostly kill for fun, and live in big dense colonies.)
Only in limited areas, though, and in limited numbers. Introducing feral cats to new places in numbers supported by human breeding is totally different than a natural slow extension of their range.
Wildcats that evolved in an ecosystem have their place within it, at numbers supported by the prey population there that co-evolved with them.
When humans suddenly introduce housecats to a new environment where the prey never had the chance to co-evolve, the overnight influx (in evolutionary time) will rapidly decrease the prey populations.
Some birds on long established migratory paths are especially vulnerable too, since they have limited options for resting grounds along the way.
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 large I don't think I can truly fathom.
We can do this slowly, first pets needs to be desexed. For cats there's no exception. For dogs the exception would be breeding working dogs, or therapy/guide dogs. With cats they must be kept in doors at all times. These laws should extend to larger animals like horses.
In Australia we have a huge problem with horses and camels. But the public do not support culls of horses, even if it's for their own benefit (eg to stop them from starving in winter). But the horse racing industry is huge here, they've got clout and political pressure.
Uncontrolled breeding of animals for human enjoyment is amoral. Animal companionship is of course the exception but this comes with issues.
Where I live, the environment has been paved with concrete for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. Yes, cats kill whatever scavengers manage to eke out a living in the ashes of their old environment. Why does it matter?
> 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 large I don't think I can truly fathom.
What? That's a ridiculous "solution".
I'm absolutely in favor of mandatory spay/neuter, and much stricter regulation of breeders. (I would say, outlaw breeders entirely, but I don't think laws like that will fly with voters when it comes to dogs, at least.)
But I don't think "eliminate two species of animal" is a good solution to anything, outside of some narrow cases (disease-carrying mosquitos). And regardless, the idea that it would be politically possible to ban having cats or dogs as pets... that's naive, at best.
I agree that uncontrolled breeding is a problem, but "phasing out" cats and dogs entirely is not a solution; that too is barbaric.
> the damage these animals do to the environment is so large I don't think I can truly fathom
Industrial farming just entered the chat.
> Animal companionship is of course the exception but this comes with issues
This is, I think, a significant point, especially for people who are lonely, depressed, disabled, antisocial, etc. Its far more improtant than enjoyment of eating a burger.
Yes, people whose opinions are formed by propaganda still think their opinions are informed. And they are. By propaganda. Something does not have to be untrue to be propaganda.
There’s quite a bit of anti-pet propaganda put out ironically by two groups that have diametrically opposed viewpoints: ones that love animals and ones that hate them. But that’s not what I was referring to mostly.
There’s also a lot of environmental propaganda that makes people feel as if every little thing that brings them joy must be curtailed because it contributes to global warming or they’re evil. That is propaganda from the people who make trillions off of fossil fuel or the energy derived from it, they want you to worry about your dog’s environmental impact despite the fact that climate change is 98% a matter of public policy. As long as you’re focusing on whether or not you should take that plane trip or have a dog you’re not worried about why there isn’t a carbon tax, and why the emitters get by year after year without being forced to pay for their negative externalities. And if that all sounds a little too tinfoil hat for you I totally understand, but read all the recently released documents from the plastic industry about how they promoted recycling, knowing full well that it neither worked nor helped the environment when it was done, so that you’d feel better about using their products.
They want you to think climate change is your fault and can be fixed if you just drive a more efficient car, or install a heat pump, or don’t have a dog. It can’t. We can all spend all our time doing all the little things we’re told matter, but at the end of the day our personal choices are a drop in the bucket compared to industrial/agricultural choices we have no say over. You can only make a difference in climate change at the voting booth. They know it but they don’t want you to.
Responsible pet ownership has relatively low (and certainly not unfathomable) environmental impact. One does not have to eradicate entire species just because some assholes let their cats roam free. Just don’t let your pets roam free.
Keep loving your dog and letting others love theirs. Pick up after it, don’t let it off leash, certainly don’t let it murder local fauna all day, and don’t worry about the CO2 emissions involved in its food. It’s negligible.
Side note: I do agree that breeding dogs should be regulated due to animal neglect/abuse so much so that I’ve actually started the process of creating a not for profit to do a ballot initiative in my state to create a regulatory agency. I have worked with animal adoption agencies and no-kill shelters and my state has a horrible puppy mill problem. I am unfortunately very aware of the state of the breeder dogs that come from those.
I will put that stuff out of business or die trying.
If one was to replace "cats/dogs/animals/horses" in your statements with "humans", one could get another informed opinion. A bit cynical perhaps, but informed nonetheless.
While sometimes eradication is in fact moral (hey smallpox), it’s not one of those solutions you want to look to without a truly thorough understanding that probably isn’t possible for non-pathogens.
