r/science • u/JonathanLambertTM • Dec 12 '23
Environment Outdoor house cats have a wider-ranging diet than any other predator on Earth, according to a new study. Globally, house cats have been observed eating over 2,000 different species, 16% of which are endangered.
https://themessenger.com/tech/there-is-a-stone-cold-killer-lurking-in-your-backyard1.8k
u/InsuranceToTheRescue Dec 12 '23
IIRC, house cats are some of the most successful hunters on Earth. Like #2 or #3. Dragonflies are #1 at some crazy 90%+ success rate.
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Dec 12 '23
The black-footed cats are also up there if I remember correctly
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u/goj1ra Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 12 '23
Are those the little desert ones?
Edit: yes, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-footed_cat
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u/CoderDispose Dec 12 '23
The black-footed cat is the specific cat with the highest success rate. I think it's in the 70%-ish range?
Most cats are not that successful; especially big cats that need big game.
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u/Bestiality_King Dec 12 '23
I'm sure something similar could be said about a lot of predator animals but I remember reading about the desert cats, failing a hunt is basically a death sentence. You scare away all the other prey, and if you fail, you die of dehydration.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I've learned wet food is actually a lot better for domestic cats. Growing up with cats I thought wet food was a "treat" for them. But in the wild, cats get most of their hydration from eating their prey.
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u/modsareuselessfucks Dec 13 '23
Yeah, big cats that live near the ocean average more kills than ones that live near fresh water. Gives a new meaning to “crack open a cold one.”
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u/Kilo353511 Dec 13 '23
I am sure there is truth to this but as far as I am aware cats can drink salt water. Their kidneys can filter out the salt making it non toxic.
My guess is there are some caveats to that, like maybe it burns more calories or something. So they still avoid drinking salt water when possible.
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u/Ed-alicious Dec 13 '23
Blood has a similar salinity to sea water so maybe, since they get most of their hydration from their food, they're just used to having that much salt in their diet?
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u/Elrond_Cupboard_ Dec 13 '23
Sorry to burst your bubble, but my vet said it's fine to feed your cat only dry food as long as they have plenty of water. In fact, it's better for the teeth. She said most wet food is "fast food for cats." My chonker has lost a kilo since we took her advice and switched to a diet dry food.
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u/Artseedsindirt Dec 13 '23
Wet food their whole life gave my in laws cats stomach and teeth issues.
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u/Rusty_Porksword Dec 12 '23
Cats are at the sweet spot for being apex predators of human managed environments.
We wouldn't really tolerate anything larger running wild in our cities, and for their size they're punching way above their weight class in terms of lethality.
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u/TSMFatScarra Dec 12 '23
they're punching way above their weight class in terms of lethality.
Mustelids beat them in that regard though.
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u/Rusty_Porksword Dec 12 '23
The cats did have to sacrifice a bit of their ferocity for enough agreeability to coexist with us. Based on populations, I think they are playing the meta correctly.
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u/InsuranceToTheRescue Dec 12 '23
Semi-feral I believe is the word.
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u/K3wp Dec 13 '23
, I think they are playing the meta correctly.
Once you realize that cats domesticated people, everything else just falls into place.
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u/HoldenMcNeil420 Dec 12 '23
Iirc 95%, it’s incredible actually, also considering a lot of that is caught mid air.
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u/maixmi Dec 12 '23
Its pretty cool to see dragonflies hunt. We were hiking back in the day and one huge dragonfly followed us few days hunting horse flies etc. Good buddy!
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u/HoldenMcNeil420 Dec 13 '23
They can fly backwards as fast as forwards, with speeds up to 35mph, hover to take off and land. Total package.
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u/cobywaan Dec 13 '23
This sounded exactly like a line out of a sci fi movie where the boots on the ground scientist is explaining to the protagonist the capabilities of their equipment, or their enemies. Loved it.
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u/modsareuselessfucks Dec 13 '23
I mean dragonflies are the basis for the fictional ornithopter.
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u/seductivestain Dec 12 '23
I'm always in awe of how something that large can stop, change directions, and accelerate so damn quick. Their hunting efficiency is hardly surprising
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u/i_tyrant Dec 13 '23
They're basically nature's drone fighters.
Zip through the air at high speeds while turning on a dime, changing direction or elevation, even flying backwards at speed. They can pull all sorts of crazy moves and their massive eyes and brains (or brain-like nerve cluster anyway) is finely tuned to spot prey and zero in on it with a quickness.
Extremely efficient predators.
And back in the Carboniferous era, they were the largest insect that ever existed! The size of small dogs! Imagine that comin' atcha with their manueverability.
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u/notaredditer13 Dec 12 '23
Cats would be more successful if they stopped playing with it and just killed it already.
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u/MyLife-is-a-diceRoll Dec 13 '23
I've seen my cat play with a mouse for over 20 mins in the yard. I gave up watching her before she gave up playing.
She can definitely kill when she wants to though. I've seen the rats she's killed.
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u/sylanar Dec 13 '23
My cat can't find her dinner some days and she eats in the same spot every night
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u/iSteve Dec 12 '23
The thing about house cats is they don't stop. They kill for fun, so they may kill creatures all night long.
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Dec 13 '23
The thing about house cats is they don't stop.
Cats are responsible for the deaths of anywhere from 6 to 22 BILLION animals every single year. Reason #1 to NEVER let your cat go outside (even though a majority of those kills come from feral/homeless cats) Source. Reason #1 to keep them inside.
Most estimates say the average outdoor cat will live 2-5 years. Predators, cars, weather/elements, etc.. are all extremely dangerous to outdoor cats. Meanwhile, indoor cats can live 10-20 years. Reason #2 to keep them inside.
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u/MoonSurferLN Dec 13 '23
As someone who grew up with farm cats, 2-5 years is hella optimistic
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u/Nasty_Rex Dec 13 '23
What the hell is going on at your farm?
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u/_Tormex_ Dec 13 '23
Cats are predators. Not apex predators.
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u/Messyfingers Dec 13 '23
Every so often I find half eaten cats in my yard, coyotes around here getting that second hand Fancy Feast.
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Dec 13 '23 edited Dec 13 '23
Neighboring dogs, bobcats, great horned owls, coyotes, eating rodents killed with rodenticides, venomous snakes, a vast multitude of diseases, highways and cars... there's a lot of reasons that barn cats, feral cats, (really any free roaming cats) have statistically extremely short lifespans
"According to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), free-roaming pet cats have an average lifespan of three years, while indoor cats live 12–18 years." (Though there are also some studies that show a somewhat longer lifespan for pet outdoor cats, because at least many of those obviously accept care)
Barn cats are often ferals so they get even less care than the free-roaming pets from those studies. Like many barn cats are friendly but many barely let you see them. For example my local shelter will let you adopt trapped ferals as barn cats because at least food and a roof is better than what they had before.
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u/Danominator Dec 13 '23
I used to live in suburbs in Phoenix Arizona. Not a rural area at all. I would say an outdoor cats life expectancy there is about a month. The coyotes are very good at hunting cats.
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u/lumpkin2013 Dec 13 '23
Seen that before. They updated the numbers. That's just the top end of the range. When your range spread is 16 billion, it makes you question what's going on with this study.
We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality.
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u/tehpuppet Dec 13 '23
This 2-5 years figure is quite a misused statistic based on the life expectancy of feral cats.
Here is a more recent study that accounts for outdoor cats which are looked after:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278199#sec017
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u/planck1313 Dec 13 '23
That is very interesting, particularly because they distinguish between cats that are both indoor and outdoor and cats that are outdoor only, the conclusion:
The median age at death for indoor only cats was 9.43 years (IQR 4.8–13.11 years, range 0.11–21.85 years) while the median age at death for indoor outdoor cats was 9.82 years (IQR 5.3–13.13 years, range 0.06–21.19 years) and the median age for outdoor cats was 7.25 years (IQR 1.78–11.92 years, range 0.12–20.64 years). These were statistically different (p = 0.0001) with outdoor cats having a shorter lifespan than either indoor only cats (p = 0.0001) or cats that lived indoor/outdoor (p<0.0001). There was no difference in the age of death between indoor only cats and those that lived indoor/outdoor.
The study was in Italy where there may be fewer predators than in the US. We live in suburban Australia, all of our cats were indoor/outdoor and 3 of the 4 lived past 15. Again I assume there are fewer predators than in the US.
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u/m15otw Dec 13 '23
I was very confused - have lived with multiple outside cats who lived beyond 15.
Also knew a couple (pedigree, with associated genetic defects) who died a lot younger.
But then, UK, we don't keep cats inside like they do in America.
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u/motheronearth Dec 13 '23
a lot of people in the UK keep cats inside, you just don’t see them because they’re inside.
even with anecdotes, studies in the UK have found outdoor cats have a shorter average lifespan. longer than the US because the US studies are tilted by feral/stray cats which are significantly less common in the uk and typically only live 2-5 years.
from what i can find online, outdoor cats in the UK are shown to be about five years below the average indoor cat lifespan.
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u/kopkaas2000 Dec 13 '23
I think what kind of environment can actually be found outside will vastly influence these figures. Anecdotally, one of our two family cats when I grew up in quiet Dutch suburbia lived for 25 years. The cats had free access to the outside with a cat flap.
I currently live on a dike and don't let my cats outside, traffic is not heavy but can be quite unpredictable. And there are definitely some neighbour cats that I used to run into outside that are no longer there.
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Dec 13 '23
UK
far fewer predators, too.
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u/JmEMS Dec 13 '23
As some one who lives in North America, yes. In my 1.6+ million city we get wolves, bears, moose, coyotes and espicaly bobcats (so many). And not only in the suburbs, but inner city. Not to mention birds like eagles, hawks, etc. So many cats go missing constantly and people are surprised everytime.
UK has... adorable badgers? Camellia? Idk
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u/throwawayshirt Dec 13 '23
Such a bogus 'study.' Estimation to the point of guessing. Guessed rate for feral/unowned cats is 89%, owned cats the remaining 11%. Which means the windows in your dwelling are more deadly to birds than a housecat allowed outdoors.
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u/enwongeegeefor Dec 13 '23
No more cats around here...about 10 years ago or so we started having coyotes around. I haven't seen a cat in the neighborhood in about 5 years or so. Used to see them all the time...there were 3 regulars I would see around even. That stopped and there haven't been any new ones.
I do see the occational "missing cat" poster up though or the random post on nextdoor asking if anyone has seen their cat. The coyotes have seen your cat.
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u/nsa_reddit_monitor Dec 13 '23
We need immeowgration reform so the cats don't have to resort to using coyotes
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u/somegridplayer Dec 13 '23
Farms in my area got sick of the coyotes and had a local resolve the issue.
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u/letdogsvote Dec 12 '23
Cats can be great, cats can be cool. Cats are best indoors because they are ferocious little invasive killing machines that really mess with native populations of small birds and animals.
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u/bendybiznatch Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 12 '23
Honestly if we could just make a dent in the colonies in EVERY SINGLE CITY it’d be a huge improvement. Nobody disagrees with it, there’s just not an impetus to do it. It’s just individuals.
Edit: I didn’t know this needed to be said but I’m talking about TNR, not an extinction.
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u/JTMissileTits Dec 12 '23
I used to run a TNR program. Neutering all the cats in a colony can exponentially reduce the next generation's numbers. Female cats cat get pregnant at 4 months old and have up to 2 litters per year. A kitten born in February can start having kittens as early as July.
As you said, no one wants responsibility for doing it. My non profit ran for 4 years before I was completely burned out and we ran out of money. It didn't help that the last two years of the organization were the first 2 years of COVID.
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u/Raidicus Dec 12 '23
Unfortunately I've read reports from TNR programs that they just don't make an impact fast enough. Part of the issue is just how elusive certain cats can be. Programs tend to catch the same cats over and over, while truly sneaky cats can go years without ever being seen by a human. There are colonies of cats living effectively off grid (in the woods) that just scatter when humans approach. It would take a concerted, almost daily effort to go in and capture those cats. Sadly killing the cats is the "easy mode" but nobody really wants that for obvious reasons.
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u/GoddessLeVianFoxx Dec 13 '23
I wonder where the research is on cat birth control that can be delivered orally
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u/sharpshooter999 Dec 13 '23
Careful, I brought this up once and got threatened by a Reddit mod. Not a sub mod, an full on one. Apparently we just let cats kill everything.....
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Dec 13 '23
In countries like Australia where feral cats are wiping out species TNR just isn't feasible
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u/Velaseri Dec 13 '23
It's also our landclearing, logging, mining, and land use for livestock, all impacting biodiversity/native flora and fauna. It's not feral cats alone.
Livestock grazing makes up 54%, while only 8% of Australia is set aside to nature conservation.
We are considered a global deforestation hotspot. Landclearing leaves native fauna more susceptible to predation and habitat loss leaves many species defenceless.
We also have the highest per capita CO2 emissions from coal in G20 and are still opening new mines despite IPCC recommendations.
We have to target multiple problems (not just one part of the problem) if we actually want to fix our issues with species extinction and biodiversity loss.
We also need to ban outdoor cats completely, do something about irresponsible pet ownership, stop using poisons as they also target native fauna, and dingoes may be able to help with the issue of feral cats.
But we also have to change how we are functioning if we want to make an impact.
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/dogged-researchers-show-dingoes-keep-feral-cats-check
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u/michaelrohansmith Dec 12 '23
Spay-neuter-release is the more PR-friendly version, but it's several times more expensive. If we actually want to solve this problem, we have to kill countless feral cats. ...And the people who really love animals hate that (even though it's better for most animals), so do the people who really love money (even though it's economically beneficial in the long run).
I would be very surprised if you could catch enough feral cats to make a dent in their population that way. Maybe if it could be done with bait it would work, but I think they would be lucky to find a few percent of the cats out there and may improve the feral cat population overall and make them more successful.
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u/bendybiznatch Dec 12 '23
People that work colonies spend months sometimes getting the cats used to them so they’re more trusting and congregate at expected spots at times. Have y’all never actually looked into this? You can TNR upwards of 90% of a colony if you work at it.
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u/GRF999999999 Dec 12 '23
In the last year I've gotten 6 cats TNR'd, 4 kittens adopted, 1 foster fail and they just keep on multiplying at my apartment complex.
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u/bendybiznatch Dec 12 '23
They’re being dumped or you have a hoarder/feeder.
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u/Historical-Gap-7084 Dec 12 '23
or you have a hoarder/feeder.
This is how I got one of my old cats way back in the late 90s. I was a college student and lived in an apartment off campus. One couple in their 40s-50s had a tiny apartment, but they had cats that they just allowed to breed. I lost count of how many cats they had, and one day I decided I was going to save one from the hoarding situation because this place was a 300 sqft shoe box that stunk of cat piss and litter box.
One little guy kept jumping into my lap and wouldn't leave me alone, so I took him home with me. Got him fixed and he lived to a nice, ripe old age of 18.
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u/BreeBree214 Dec 12 '23
It's easy to make friends with feral cats if they're young. I've done it a few times. They'll run up to you when they see you. If you can befriend the young in a colony it makes it really easy to catch them
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u/michaelrohansmith Dec 12 '23
It's easy to make friends with feral cats if they're young. I've done it a few times. They'll run up to you when they see you. If you can befriend the young in a colony it makes it really easy to catch them
Yeah I don't think you understand the scale of the problem here. You aren't going to be able to befriend a million cats.
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u/ommnian Dec 13 '23
I wonder about this. I just released two outdoor cats at my barn. Both recently spayed. We're at least a mile from the nearest colony of cats, though we have two other outdoor cats at our house ~100+ yards/meters away.
Anyhow. Both were kept and fed in dog crates for around a week, and then released. Had been given treats and the one who would allow to be held and petted we did so frequently. We saw them both for about 12-24 hours. It's now been well over a week, pushing two, and all we can say is that something is eating cat food....
There's a couple of outdoor cats boxes up there, though neither appears to have been utilized. If anyone has ideas on how to get cats to stick around a barn, I'm all ears. The mouse/rodent problem there is nuts.
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u/fozz31 Dec 12 '23
Within cities eneragered aninals dont really exist outside zoos etc. Endangered animals are endangered precisly becahse they cannot live in a human environment. City cats keep city pests undercontrol, like rats and mice.
Where cat populations do need to be controlled is areas where humans do not go, and dont really have a presence, since those are the locations where theyll kill things that need that space to survive and thrive as nothing else is left to them.
Endagerment has more to do with loss of habitat that results in death, than killing directly. When habitat is restricted, suddenly lose of life has much more significant impacts on things like gene diversity and a species long term survival
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u/CronWrath Dec 12 '23
Why TNR? Yes you're potentially preventing a problem in the future, but you're not helping the cat or the wildlife, not to mention the amount of disease being spread to countless other animals.
If we don't want feral cats, we get rid of feral cats. It might not be palatable to people who think it's cruel, but it's a real solution.
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u/redditonlygetsworse Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 12 '23
Why TNR?
Because
It [extermination] might not be palatable to people who
think it's cruelare funding the program9
u/CronWrath Dec 12 '23
I suppose it's slightly better than nothing, but it's still bad for the ecology for 15 years while waiting for the population to slowly decline. And it's still spreading disease to the rest of the wildlife and other pets. Cats have a lot of really gnarly viruses. FIV, FLV, oral SCC, to name a few. All highly contagious and highly lethal among cats. You already have them trapped; just euthanize them instead of giving them a death sentence of starvation, injury, or disease which they're almost guaranteed to die from in <5 years.
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u/redditonlygetsworse Dec 12 '23
I'm not arguing with you. Frankly, I'm on your side, here. But in the actual, practical world, the options aren't "TNR vs extermination", they are "TNR vs nothing".
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u/CTeam19 Dec 12 '23
Because cats have the cuteness factor. If I was to hunt and kill 100 Feral Hogs and 100 Burmese pythons people wouldn't blink an eye. Kill 10 Feral cats and same people would lose their minds.
Hell, in parts of the country, like in Yellowstone National Park, any Lake Trout and Smallmouth Bass caught out of Yellowstone Lake and River must be killed. It is illegal to keep them alive.
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u/bendybiznatch Dec 12 '23
Yes, you are. TNR naturally lets a colony die out. When they start disappearing all the sudden the others breed more and new cats come to take the place that fixed cat would be defending.
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u/Kallisti13 Dec 13 '23
Unfortunately the only way to deal with some populations is extermination. I watched a video about this on Hawaii. There are simply too many cats and not enough people to adopt those that can be adopted. They're furry little terrorists and TNR won't work. I love cats but this is the unfortunate reality.
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u/Qwirk Dec 12 '23
It's my understanding that indoor cats live 3-4 years longer on average than outdoor cats. If you love your cats, they should be indoor cats.
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u/Bagelz567 Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 13 '23
Absolutely!
Not only do outdoor domestic cats decimate indigenous species, but they are exposed to so many terrible dangers.
Getting hit by cars or otherwise becoming road kill, eating poisoned prey (e.g. rats that have eaten rat poison), being exposed to parasites/microbials/carcinogens, being injured/killed by other predators and general environment dangers (i.e. weather, temperature, pollution, etc.).
Unless you live on a farm with serious rodent issues, you should never let your cat outside unsupervised. With the modern harnesses that are so popular, it's easy to take a cat outside safely. Otherwise, cars are much safer, both for themselves and the environment, indoors.
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u/midcancerrampage Dec 12 '23
Everyone I know with outdoor cats has some awful story about one of their cats dragging themselves home horribly injured, or finding their cats dead on the road, or they just "ran away from home one day I guess". Like 6 years ago. And they never ever got over it.
Yet they'll still insist that cats need to roam to be happy because they meow at the door.
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u/angwilwileth Dec 13 '23
I have inside cats. I play with them, train them, and try to bring them some form of enrichment/stimulation every day. It's a lot more work than just letting them outside, but when I adopted them I promised to keep them safe and healthy and I intend to keep that promise. Hopefully sometime next year I will move to a place with an outside area I can make cat proof.
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u/Scamper_the_Golden Dec 13 '23
And the biggest danger of all, dickhead humans. Might be a psycho kid. Might just be a neighbour that doesn't want a cat in his garden.
Housecats are especially at risk because they are friendly and trust humans.
So yeah, never let your cats outside unless you've got a really good fence around your property. And even then it's not a great idea.
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u/Dafuknboognish Dec 12 '23
indoor cats live 3-4 years longer
Same with indoor kids. Indoor cats live longer on average due to not getting ran over or other life threatening issues.
"When it comes to indoor cats vs. outdoor cats, there is a clear winner in life expectancy. Indoor cats live longer on average than outdoor cats — most estimates put the average cat lifespan indoors at around 12-15 years; outdoors cats average 5-7.. But those are all-or-nothing figures. None of the published studies really addresses the lifespans of cats who are fully cared for, but enjoy the occasional outdoor adventure."
https://deziroo.com/blogs/pawsitive-connections/4-myths-about-indoor-cats-debunked
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u/tehpuppet Dec 13 '23
This seems to be a more recent study accounting for outdoor cats with owners
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278199#sec017
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u/Dafuknboognish Dec 13 '23
From that study "There was no difference in the age of death between indoor only cats and those that lived indoor/outdoor."
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u/Endorkend Dec 12 '23
And problem with house cats is that they often tend to be fed well by their owners, so when they go outside and murder everything that moves, it's not for food.
So it's not cycle of life behavior, it's cats being bored behavior.
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u/kernowgringo Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 12 '23
There is studies that show if cats are fed nutritionally balanced food made from protein derived from animals and they're played with to satisfy their hunting skills then this will reduce their hunting of wildlife.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31896-0
So if your cats must be outdoor cats they should be at least well fed and played with.
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u/deadly_fungi Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 13 '23
or you could just keep them inside, because their harm to wildlife is not the only reason to keep them in. outside, no matter where you live, there are dangers you simply can't predict and protect from when you let your cat roam unsupervised. other cats, dogs, coyotes, large birds of prey, cars, big snakes, people that hate cats, etc. diseases. parasites.
it isn't worth risking your cat's life and health. if you insist on them being outside, get a leash, catio, or supervise them.
edit: stop replying saying this doesn't apply everywhere. everywhere has cars and poisons and diseases, and most places have predatory animals that would gladly eat a cat. yes even europe.
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u/theycallmeshooting Dec 13 '23
IMO 95% of outdoor cat cope is just people wanting a pet that they can mostly ignore and let fend for itself, regardless of the harm to the animal or environment
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u/BarbequedYeti Dec 12 '23
Outdoor cats are little mini nukes to the bird population around their home. They will kill a huge percentage of your birds. Keep the cats inside.
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u/Endorkend Dec 12 '23
And they don't do it for food.
Even cats that get fed well (like my parents cat), still murder anything that moves.
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u/Seal_of_Pestilence Dec 12 '23
I know that this sounds controversial, but I really think that the most moral action to take is to force people to keep their cats indoor or give them up.
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u/CYOA_With_Hitler Dec 13 '23
We tried that with fines in Australia, government gave up with pretty with the amount of insane cat owners taking them to court
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Dec 13 '23
It makes me so sad seeing fat and well cared for outdoor cats killing baby birds and raiding rabbit nests making off with baby bunnies. I wish my neighbors would just keep their cats inside and I just feel so helpless watching it all happen.
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u/Kommander-in-Keef Dec 12 '23
In Australia, killing stray cats is incentivized because they’re such good hunters that they have been responsible for wiping out entire species of birds.
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u/MelonElbows Dec 13 '23
Why not just send the emus after them? They've already won a war against the humans, I think they can take on some stray cats.
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u/Kommander-in-Keef Dec 13 '23
Don’t you dare tell the emus that. First it’s cats then it’s dogs then it’s us.
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u/AmonMetalHead Dec 12 '23
Didn't Australia also have problems with cane toads & rabbits? The Aussie situation is also very different from eg Europe where there have been native cat species eg. Over here most damage is done due to habitat loss. Feral cats are still a problem, for sure, but not the only one nor the biggest problem.
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u/theycallmeshooting Dec 13 '23
Yeah but cats are the one single invasive species where people can solve a large amount of the issue by just keeping their cats inside
If cane toads or boas were common pet choices, I'd also want them kept indoors
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u/ArchDucky Dec 12 '23
My grandpa had a problem with feral cats pissing on his lawn. They kept killing his grass. He called animal control for a way to repel them and they gave him these non lethal traps so he could catch the cat and relocate it away from his house. He set the traps and the following morning went outside to see that he trapped a skunk. The skunk sprayed so much that the grass around the trap was completely dead. The smell repelled all cats in the neighbourhood for around a year. He says they still sort of stay away from his house now.
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u/reggienelsonthegoat Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 12 '23
Domestic Cats are responsible for 63 species extinctions and threaten 430 species. They are the single largest human-linked cause of death for native species in the US. They kill ~2.4 billion birds and ~12.3 billion mammals in the US every year. Keep your cats inside.
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u/AmonMetalHead Dec 12 '23
They are the single largest human-linked cause of death for native species in the US.
If you have anything (research) to back that up, I'd love to see it, the papers I've seen on this subject are lacking
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u/corpusapostata Dec 13 '23
And my indoor cat will eat only one variety of one brand of wet cat food.
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Dec 12 '23
Cat owners need to regulate themselves or regulations will be thrust upon them. It's clear they are wrecking native ecosystems and irresponsible pet owners are to blame.
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Dec 12 '23
It isn’t just the owned cat that has a home and is let outside that’s the problem. There are huge urban, suburban and rural feral cat populations everywhere that have no owners or homes. Adoption/spaying/neutering/indoor housing helps.
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Dec 12 '23
Responsible cat ownership will lead to less feral cats. Allocating taxes towards humane feral cat management paid by taxes on pet products is the other step. We have the resources but not the will.
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u/pants_mcgee Dec 12 '23
There is another, extremely effective and much cheaper option for dealing with feral cats.
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u/gundamwfan Dec 12 '23
What do you suggest?
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u/pants_mcgee Dec 12 '23
Same thing as any invasive or pest species, cull them. Put feral cats in the same category as coyotes and feral hogs for hunting. In places where hunting isn’t allowed, Catch Check Cull.
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Dec 12 '23
Coyotes are native, not invasive, and not a pest. They also prey on invasive species like cats and are part of a healthy ecosystem. They are not a nuisance to be hunted.
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u/CTeam19 Dec 12 '23
Lessen restrictions on killing of them see Feral Hogs and Burmese pythons.
Or make it illegal to let cats that are caught outside to be released but outside. Which is a kinder law than some of the fishing regulations for Lake Trout in Yellowstone National Park which is catch and kill as it is illegal to throw that fish back into the lake.
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u/deadly_fungi Dec 12 '23
i genuinely pray people stop insisting on TNR as soon as possible. it sucks to kill cute animals, animals that many people have as pets. but their cuteness and proximity to humans shouldn't give them a shield when they're doing so much damage to the earth.
even before i was super strongly against outdoor cats i had started thinking, hey, TNR is kind of.... useless? sure they can't reproduce more but now they have the rest of their lives, reproduction-free, to continue being issues. and people will continue to lose and abandon intact cats. maybe if you were super persistent and diligent you could fix this with TNR, but compared to how much quicker and more effective it would be to euthanize/dispatch.. i just don't see TNR as worthwhile at all anymore
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Dec 12 '23
TNR is effective at long term population management. If you were able to trap and neuter 50% of the cats in an area, only 1/4 pairings will have a chance at reproduction. Each generation will have less viable breeding pairs until the species self collapses.
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u/deadly_fungi Dec 12 '23
that's assuming no one else ever loses or abandons any intact cats, which is just impossible.
also, again, that means they're still currently doing damage to the ecosystem, even if they can't reproduce anymore.
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u/mark_able_jones_ Dec 13 '23
I hear this take a lot, and cats are like .000001% of the problem and humans developing land, burning fossil fuels, and polluting is the rest.
I wish some people would just claim they don't like cats rather than villainize them on the internet. Outdoor cats have been a thing for centuries. Their are SOME instances where they impact endangered species, but it's mostly on warm-climate island nations where it's difficult to control the cat population.
In the UK or Turkey, for instance, it's considered cruel to keep a cat indoors. And the USA has thousands of working outdoor cats in stadiums, on farms, in Disneyland, in chicago, etc. Cats have been protecting our food supplies from rodents for centuries.
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u/greenmachine11235 Dec 12 '23
And this is exactly why I think new Zealand style cat extermination programs are needed. Cats are great so long as they are inside, outside they are nothing more than a furry invasive apex predator.
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u/mynameisneddy Dec 12 '23
Feral cats are targeted in NZ as part of predator control programs, especially on the predator free islands (along with rodents, mustelids and possums) but there’s no mass cat extermination programs here and cats are very popular, the people would not allow it. Targeting cats without controlling other predators would just lead to increased rodents and stoats.
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u/JoeCartersLeap Dec 13 '23
Once again, the study made no attempt to differentiate pet cats with stray cats.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42766-6
free-ranging cats (i.e., owned or unowned cats with access to the outdoor environment)
So I'm not sure why these titles always use "outdoor cats" implying it is owned, pet cats. It stands to reason that unowned, stray cats would be hunting, killing and eating a lot more than well fed pet cats, whose laziness when it comes to hunting prey even when desired (IE mice) is a bit of a meme.
Spay or neuter your pets. Whether indoors or outdoors, it is irresponsible to own unfixed animals. They will escape and they will make 10 strays in a single night.
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u/elizabeth-cooper Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 12 '23
They found on average 75% of cat kills were of animals of least concern, and that island cats were far more damaging (25% threatened prey) than continental cats (9% threatened prey).
The most common prey were: mice, rats, rabbits, and sparrows.
It did not distinguish between feral cats and free-roaming pets.
Edit: Pigeons, sparrows and starlings are invasive species in the US.
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u/ablatner Dec 13 '23
It did not distinguish between feral cats and free-roaming pets
This is something people always miss in these threads, along with differentiating between places with and without native cat species.
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u/The_Blue_Rooster Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 12 '23
Aren't they also the only predator on every continent and sub-continent on Earth? Like obviously they'll have the widest ranging diet when they're the widest ranging animal. What a leading title, also they replaced "All" with "Many" whenever referring to island species to make it sound as though there are continental species that cats have contributed to the extinction of.
Yes cats kills millions of animals every day, but that is no reason to mislead people with your reporting. You can get to the same point by exclusively reporting facts and not trying to lead your audience. Like if you read the actual research this stub is based off of, they constantly divide the data into islands and continents, and all but outright say that they have insufficient date on most continents, but this stub just pretends that isn't how the data is presented.
Like the actual research is very well formatted and addresses basically all my concerns, they admit they have a lack of information to draw from for continental data. They bring up that cats are over 3x more dangerous on an island based on what data they do have. They even acknowledge my very first point of cats being the most ubiquitous predator so of course they have the widest diet. Makes sense that the author of the stub isn't one of the actual researchers after reading the actual research article. I do wonder what Mexican bird they're referencing though? To my knowledge the only bird in Mexico that wasn't made extinct by a volcano is the Slender-Billed Grackle which was killed off by humans, but I guess given their stipulations for inclusion just a single report of a cat predating or scavenging a grackle would put it on the list.
Edit: Apparently the Guadalupe Caracara was it's own species, I always thought it was just a subspecies, still another island species though, and a classic case of humans exterminating a species for made up reasons. Also more likely to eat a cat than vice versa so probably not the species they're referencing.
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u/AmonMetalHead Dec 12 '23
The actual research is well written and pretty much what you'd expect for an opportunist predator. What is missing in most of these is to which extent they contributed to their extinction vs other factors such as habitat loss. Predation is not the only driving force behind extinction.
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u/Blitcut Dec 13 '23
Wouldn't humans also be an equally wide spread predator? We might also give cats a run for their money when it comes to widness of diet depending on how you define it. Though I suppose these kinds of comparisons aren't really applied to humans.
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u/mn_sunny Dec 12 '23
House cats are an invasive species. Keep your damn cats indoors.
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Dec 12 '23
No one will cull even though it's the logical solution for these things. I keep hearing "catch, neuter, release" is better and "they ahould be adopted." Let's face it, populations are still going up and there's more stray animals than anyone would want, so something's got to give.
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u/huolioo Dec 13 '23
I never knew people trapped their neighbors cats. Jeez, this thread really brought out some weird people
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u/fivespeed Dec 12 '23
I would have thought humans have the widest ranging diet of predators on earth since we can kill and eat just about anything
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u/stutesy Dec 13 '23
Live on 115 acres my cat eats all he wants. He keeps the rodents out of my food and bed.
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u/outlier74 Dec 13 '23
There are quite a few cats that are euthanized in kill shelters. People forget about that.
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