Outdoor cat: “today I killed 300 birds and permanently altered the local ecosystem”
Indoor cat: “hehe I shit in a box”
And so begins a new battle in the eternal war between Americans with indoor cats and others with outdoor cats.
It’s pretty difficult to actually find an indoor cat in the UK. In the US it’s common.
I guess we in Finland are Americand now lol
We’re more worried about the cats wellbeing though than the birds.
With a name like Kusimulkku I should have guessed. I wouldn’t call you American but you are one of the weirdest countries in Europe. A language designed to confuse with an obsessive dedication to double-consanants. I assume your cats are as unsociable as your people.
Which is fitting because, in the end, when the hell have the British cared about the fallout of anything they do
Our cats are indoors. They used to be outdoors then some cunt shot one with an air rifle.
I hope you found the miscreant and shot them in the arsehole with a cricket bat!?
That cunt was in that moment a better person and more responsible manager of your animals. Cats are a manmade plague that destroy the ecosystem.
I’m not so sure both about Americans having their cats indoors, and “others” having it the opposite way. I have never been to the UK or the US, but most owners I had seen kept their cats indoors. Except for Georgia (the country), where cats seem to be treated as some sort of weed that grows on it’s own
Except for Georgia (the country), where cats seem to be treated as some sort of weed that grows on it’s own
I like this phrasing. I’d love to hear more about how you came to this conclusion.
Nope. And the RSPB doesn’t believe cats are a concern:
The UK’s largest bird charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), is not particularly concerned about the impact of cats on the British mainland.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/14/cats-kill-birds-wildlife-keep-indoors
And a Bristol study found cats kill the “doomed” weak and sick birds - not healthy birds: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1474-919X.2008.00836.x
Old world animals evolved alongside domesticated cats. New world animals did not.
And thats why the wild felines are going extinct in the british isles.
Ay, but tradition right? Fuck the natives, as is british tradition
Yeah the British really do have a history of royally fucking over whole eco systems. Brought rabbits to Australia thinking they would be a good food source.
Except they bred like well rabbits. And destroyed whole eco systems. So the British imported foxes to eat the rabbits. Except literally every other native species is easier for a fox to kill than a fast rabbit.
Fucking morons.
Indoor cats are generally healthier, if you give them enough enrichment. I live in a tiny little house but my cat has boxes to hide in, toys to play with, multiple spots to look out windows, etc. She won’t get sick or injured as much as an indoor/outdoor cat and will probably live longer.
Our 3 cats kill maybe a total of 5 birds and 10 mice a year. They can’t reproduce and prefer to stay inside for most of the year. They’re not a problem, as many new studies have found out. At least in northern Germany. It might be a bigger problem elsewhere though. Just trying to point out that your criticism may only apply to certain areas.
More like “today someone left food out for me as usual so I didn’t hunt like I would if I were starving”.
70% of bird deaths are from fetal and stray cats, not just “outdoor” cats.
30% of bird deaths is still a lot of bird deaths. I would much prefer if cats were only responsible for 40 small animal extinctions rather than the 60 or so that they’ve caused so far
Not how cats work. Nice job getting butthurt about a funny comic on the internet, though.
And just so you can be better informed in the future. Feral cats are the ones affecting the ecosystem. Outdoor house cats have a negligible influence on wildlife. Let your cat go outside sometimes.
And, just a guess, you should probably go outside sometimes too.
"The magnitude of mortality they cause in mainland areas remains speculative, with large-scale estimates based on non-systematic analyses and little consideration of scientific data. Here we conduct a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. 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."
Downvoting doesn’t make you right and it doesn’t make your cats less miserable.
Thats exactly how cats work.
The comic is funny and cute, but dont get it twisted. The science is pretty firm on the destructive effects of invasive domestic cats.
"The magnitude of mortality they cause in mainland areas remains speculative, with large-scale estimates based on non-systematic analyses and little consideration of scientific data. Here we conduct a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. 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."
Maybe don’t believe every sensationalized social media article that’s really just a barely disguised cat litter ad.
“The science is pretty firm” lmao
"The magnitude of mortality they cause in mainland areas remains speculative, with large-scale estimates based on non-systematic analyses and little consideration of scientific data. Here we conduct a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. 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."
The 1 to 4 billion animals killed by outdoor cats every year: X_X
Not to mention all the outdoor cats that are themselves killed or horribly injured.
I know a guy who went through 5 cats in a few months because he was getting them, letting them out, and they were getting hit by cars since he lives on a super busy road that has heavy semi traffic.
It really reminds me of that one joke “I keep having to buy a new car because my neighbors dog keeps eating it” " it sounds like you’re just feeding cats to the neighbors dog"
Dude just didn’t seem to grasp simple addition that his new cat + outside in a bad area = squish
The only cat I’ve had that I’ve felt okay with letting roam was a stray that came to us declawed, so he was mostly harmless. We still ended up making him an inside cat because we caught him sneaking into the neighbor’s house to steal their cat’s food and poop in its litterbox.
Declawed cats are a coyotes favorite meal. Big enough to feed the kids and cant even fight back
But what if he was a guest there? Maybe the neighbour’s cat told him “make yourself at home?” Did you even ask him? Psh …
Absolute environmental disaster, they need to be spayed and neutered and occasionally culled by any competent local government.
You’ll also need to ban pet cats from walking outside without a leash. Our cats were neutered, didn’t stop them from killing any mice or birds they could get their paws on.
The reason they need to be spayed and neutered instead of outright killed is because culls don’t really work on animals that reproduce that quickly. Whenever a spot opens up for another cat to make its territory, it gets immediately claimed. There are a ton of research papers that show spaying and neutering is more effective at lowering stray populations, and that euthanization is more costly on top of being less effective.
I miss the internet where people could laugh at a silly comics instead of writing and upvoting this.
They’re projecting. There is an industry killing billions of animals which is also very bad for the environment and ecosystems. If only they could be as passionate about that as about someone else’s cat…
“Who cares that I club seals? Johnny next door clubs 50 walruses. Sure theyre both going extinct now, but he gets 50 a day! I only get 1!! How could you care that Im clubbing seals with all those dead walruses?”
Do you get off on animals going extinct? What is wrong with you?
“Outdoor domestic cats are a recognized threat to global biodiversity. Cats have contributed to the extinction of 63 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles in the wild”
Pretty fuckin low on the priority list to be honest. Cats have been doing this forever. Humans are way worse.
Agreed, lol. These people are way too sensitive about pests and birds dying.
Why are you proud of lacking empathy for other living creatures? Are you hollow inside? When will you become part of figuring out a balance, instead of being proud of the problem?
Realistically, outdoor cats don’t travel much. They just hang out in their neighborhood, chill in their favorite spots, etc.
Cats have their territory and that’s where they spend their time, doing cat things. It’s just that an outdoor cat’s territory isn’t limited by walls.
There was a BBC documentary a few years ago where they gave GPS tracking collars to a bunch of cats in a neighbourhood and tracked where they went. Each of the cats had their own territory and favourite locations.
I loved that doc! It was fascinating seeing the vast differences in territory. I remember one cat who travelled something like a mile back and forth every day on a really narrow area. There was also a pair of cats that had worked out a little territory share amongst themselves, patrolling the same area but always 12 hours apart from each other.
I think you’re referring to this scientific experiment.
Murder local wildlife, cause property damage to neighbors, kill neighbors pets, spread disease. Roaming cats suck, and so do their entitled owners who think that everyone’s property belongs to their pet
While we’re at it, let’s get rid of birds that shit on everything, deer that eat our gardens, raccoons that get in our trash, skunks that dig up our grass …
They brought up how cats disturb the ecosystem and spread disease. You brought up how other animals can disturb people’s capital. These two are not equivalent.
These people are fucking insane. Like they don’t go outside ever.
Can you believe an ANIMAL killed another ANIMAL? 😱😱😱😱
I guess some cats love to piss on doors but I don’t think much if any property damage is being done by pet cats. I don’t think I have ever heard of a cat kiling a pet either.
Cats should be indoor only because they are murder hobos when it comes to wild birds and small animals.
Spreading diesease I can’t comment on. What diesease do cats kept as pets spread?
Roaming pet cats scratch screen doors, destroy door mats, piss on doors, shit in gardens, kill wildlife for sport, fight other cats, catch diseases from other cats (pet and feral), get pregnant, get hit by cars, get mauled by dogs. All of these things happen even in countries where cats are “native”.
My neighbors cats used to wreck my herb garden and such. One of them once tried to rip through my window screen to get inside my house and get my pet parrot. I would have made that cat disappear if he had gotten in, and his owner would have never known what happened, and that would be their own fault
Can you imagine if dog owners just opened the door at night, and let their dogs fuck off to do whatever? They’d rightly be charged and have their pets taken away
It’s entitled of YOU too think that the land, plants, wildlife, and ecology these creatures have lived off of for millennia belong to you. We all share a planet, it’s not up to humans to be the arbiters of who can have what and how much and at what time etc etc .
Cats may not be sapient animals, but they are sentient.
No, sorry. We’ve unintentionally thrown so much of the world off balance by importing creatures that were never in certain places, that we must bear responsibility to bring things back to the balance they were at before we got there, particularly now that we know better.
If that’s not possible, we’ll do our best to get there. Where are the dodos, buddy? Keep your stupid cats indoors, and stop bothering the local ecosystem more than we already have.
Working in the office vs working from home.
Cat owners who let their cats roam are irresponsible and entitled
Cats survived before us by hunting small mammals and small birds, and they are very effective at getting fed.
The motivation at the core of naming owners of outdoor cats as irresponsible is a sharp decline in songbird populations in direct proportion to the increase in outdoor cat population.
Cats survived before us by hunting small mammals and small birds, and they are very effective at getting fed.
And, conversely, the prey evolved to avoid cats. So it is only a problem if you take cats to a place that historically did not have them. In fact, removing a predator from an ecosystem it used to keep under check can be just as devastating as introducing a foreign species.
There’s no evidence of this. Pet cats mostly take weakened or frail prey.
The danger isn’t to the cats, it’s to everything else. Ecologically speaking, cats are an invasive apex predator. They absolutely wreak havoc on local bird populations.
Cats aren’t apex predators. But yes, they can be quite damaging in araes where they are invasive.
You’re uninformed. Cats co-evolved with humans to serve a job (pest control, in exchange for safety and the occasional bit of food). There have only been fully indoor cats for a few hundred years. Not all cats have to have a job, but some WANT one, just like dogs. We should let them.
My cat is angry with me if I don’t let him spend at least 12 hours a day roaming and catching bugs and mice. He has neighbor cat friends that he goes to see. Why would I deprive him of that?
I think we have different definitions of irresponsible or entitled behavior if you think giving the cat what it wants or otherwise doing whatever our selfish uninformed ancestors did is the correct option.
You should deprive your invasive manmade predator the option to kill local wildlife for sport because the local ecosystem takes irreparable damage every time a species goes extinct due to human incompetence. Cats naturally belonged to a small region of northern Africa and the Mediterranean before humans spread them across the entire earth and let their population boom from hundreds to hundreds of millions.
Yes, as we all know cats never went outside before they were domesticated by humans…
“Outdoor domestic cats are a recognized threat to global biodiversity. Cats have contributed to the extinction of 63 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles in the wild”
You shouldn’t be proud of contributing to the extinction of animals…
Dude the trash animals are getting killed, oh noooooooo.
Think of the stupid rats,mice,lizards and birds! Oh no! The worst problem we’re facing right now!
Your cat is your property. Keep it in your property. If your pet becomes my pest, it will be dealt with as such. I once had a neighbor’s cat almost rip through my window screen to get inside and go after my pet parrot. If the cat had made it inside, he would not have made it out alive.
Then I could return it’s corpse to you, and you can tell me all about how they evolved alongside humans, and how that means you’re entitled to let your pet fuck up my yard, home and pets
Wherever there’s birds, it’s irresponsible to let cats out. NZ in particular, it’s a damn massacre out there.
In the UK, the RSPB determines no negative impacts on bird populations. And the ecosystem is irrecoverably damaged from 3000 years of human impact on a relatively small island. Unlike new colonies like NZ, USA etc.
In countries where cats are native, they have significantly less impact on wildlife, or at the very least form a part of an ecosystem rather than being a manual introduction (admittedly one complication here is cat populations grouping up in suburban areas). As for safety for the cats, in their native countries they don’t have any serious predators to harm them.
They’re saying that only people from the United States believe that outdoor cats are a net negative.