Cats on the streets suffer. Badly. Cats on the streets are a disaster for the bird population. And contrary to what cartoons have taught us, cats are not an effective way at keeping rats at bay (in fact, the threat of dead cats makes rat poisoning efforts far more difficult to implement).

> Cats on the streets are a disaster for the bird population

and still pale in comparison to the effect us and our cities have on their populations. cats are not the big problem, we are, people just don't like to admit it and would rather blame them. As is likely us destroying the insect populations many species depend on.

> threat of dead cats makes rat poisoning efforts far more difficult to implement

the reality of dead owls and other small natural predators is a more real issue here, and why rat poison should not be used and be banned. It just was in my city Vancouver because it was doing more damage to owl populations then cats were.

In contrary. It is you who doesn't like to admit it. Makes sense in a way, as cats are our cute pets and thus emotionally much closer to us than random wild birds. Ironically, those huge cat populations are caused by humans, so in the end humans indeed are to blame.

From https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

"Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals."

or you are just eating up one random study the media went wild with because it made good headlines?

windows - https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mor...

Habitat Loss, pesticides and other chemicals, then invasive species not just cats (including plants), then windows https://www.birdscanada.org/conserve-birds/major-threats-to-...

and i could go on. this will of course change with the country you are in, cats in a country like australia or small island are going to have a much different effect then NA/UK/EU and thus lots of organizations and scientists for these areas do not put cats as the number one cause because it really is not established fact.

I knew exactly what paper you were linking because it is always the one people trot out, as the only one making such wild claims with numbers that big from some imho wild assumptions.

There are others who also correctly pointed out that it is alarmist paper that needs to be taken with a large grain of salt: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9794845/

some of the choice quotes:

"both implied or were interpreted by others to indicate alarming predation of house cats on prey populations."

Churcher and Lawton (2) investigated predation by ca. 70 cats in one English village over a 1-year period, .... The authors estimated that 30% of the sparrow deaths in the village were due to cats, but stated that the village sparrow population was much higher than the average in other British villages. Although the authors were cautious in their interpretation, the media took off with alarming extrapolations of these very limited data across all of the UK."

"Loss et al. (3), .... stated that the magnitude of mortality in mainland areas was largely speculative. .... stated that un-owned cats (as opposed to owned pets) cause the majority of this mortality and concluded that free-ranging cats are likely to be the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals. However, most of the field studies in their literature review and in their data extrapolation have not taken the above-mentioned known facts about cat predatory behavior into account, .... Among the various studies they considered many lacked a correction for prey eaten or left when away from home, different methods of gut analysis, no control for habitat where the data were collected (suburban, city, farmland), or other causes of prey decimation (e.g., habitat destruction). "

"But the most serious criticism of all such studies is that none of them even mentions a rough estimate of the total population size of a prey species (supposedly being threatened by cat predation) or of the yearly reproduction and replacement of lost individuals. What good does it do to headline that “Cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds annually” if the estimated total population of birds in the USA is at a minimum 10 billion pairs breeding every year and that as many as 20 billion are in the country during the fall migratory season [US Fish and Wildlife Service (18), cited January 19, 2011]? Free-ranging cats might be taking about 10–15% of the population of birds annually, but that is not exceptional for a normal predator-prey relationship and is insufficient to eliminate a prey species. Further, estimates of the owned and non-owned free-ranging cat populations are just that–rough estimates."

"Fitzgerald (7) and with the addition of even more field studies (28) have countered that there is simply no evidence that free-ranging cats on the continents are the main cause of species disappearance (and biodiversity reduction) since there is usually a suite of predators utilizing the same prey species and other causes can be cited"

To keep the cats out

To enjoy more rats, I guess.

Dogs must be eradicated. They're dangerous for human. Cats are not and should be tolerated.

During the pandemic irresponsible morons adopted cats to alleviate the loneliness only to abandon their new friends on the street once the restrictions waned. This inhumane treatment has resulted in thousands of feral cats added to city streets. This is not good for the city or the cats.

Which is also something I can just not comprehend as a pet owner (cat / dog). I already feel bad leaving my dog alone for a few hours a week lol. (With a cat, less so. They are less dramatic about being left alone.. :) )

EDIT: forgot to close a parenthesis and the LISPer in me panicked.

I’m not alone in rereading for mismatched parens!

I need a plugin for the browser that adds closing parens when you type an opening one like many code editors do.

> With a cat, less so. They are less dramatic about being left alone.. :) )

I have two male cats, brothers, of which one becomes very needy and whiny after I'm gone for a few days (hes a needy little guy). He stays close, follows me around, whines and mews for attention, and sleeps on the bed with me or next to it. After a week this behavior dies down to normal levels of attention and he goes back to sleeping in the basement or the living room. His brother doesn't exhibit this behavior even though he is equally affectionate.

Was camping just recently and away for a week the other month and both times I get an ear full on return in the form of loud yowls as if he's yelling "where the hell were you!"

I can relate 100%. Cats are amazing creatures

This smells like a moralism that has very little real impact on the population (which is driven by food supply and neutering efforts).

My guess is that the lockdown halting spaying/neutering operations was 100x as impactful as additional abandoned cats.

Depends whether the abandoned pets had already been desexed. If not then each additional fertile animal could outpace any linear effort by humans.

1. Create a bookmark, name it anything, and put this code in its URL field:

  javascript:location.href = '//archive.ph/newest/' + location.href.split('?')[0];

2. When you encounter a paywalled page, click the bookmark.

3. Read article.

Cat content is a human right.

https://archive.ph/rBadP

To pay the journalist, perhaps?