[HN Gopher] The First Cat War
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The First Cat War
Author : neovialogistics
Score : 35 points
Date : 2024-03-29 07:52 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (birdhistory.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (birdhistory.substack.com)
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| 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.
| kjs3 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Big cats might be apex predators, normal house cats are just
| predators/prey.
|
| Cat management is something worth working on; it's kind of
| annoying that many places don't have free spay/neuter
| locations.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I think that's exactly what I said...
| dist-epoch wrote:
| They are the apex predators of their particular size (big
| cats or small cats).
| kjs3 wrote:
| 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.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| This comment is unhinged.
| permo-w wrote:
| 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
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| They are objectively very aesthetically pleasing.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| They spend a large portion of their day licking their own
| buttholes, but sure.
| permo-w wrote:
| so are origami. you wouldn't catch me excusing them of
| the mass-murder of vital, comparably aesthetically-
| pleasing animals
| samatman wrote:
| 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/
| qiine wrote:
| Making cat not do something is really difficult
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Can't remember where I heard it but it rings true:
|
| We train dogs but we negotiate with cats.
| lb1lf wrote:
| Or, as a cat-loving friend of mine succinctly sums up the
| difference between dogs and cats and their relationship to
| us:
|
| Dog: The humans feed me; they must be God.
|
| Cat: The humans feed me; I must be God.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Counterpoint: Cats yell at you when it rains, because they
| have observed you make the rain (in the shower) start,
| therefore, you are a God that can control the weather.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I really liked a line in that Nope movie:
|
| "He got caught up trying to tame a predator. You can't do
| that. You got to enter an agreement with one."
| jprete wrote:
| Dogs are also predators. Quite a lot of large dog breeds
| should not be kept with cats, because they have enough prey
| drive that the cat will be in very grave danger. Dogs were
| historically bred for ratting and gophering.
|
| I'm thinking the reason dogs don't go for birds is that the
| birds are too small and fast; dogs are predators, but they
| aren't ambush predators like cats.
| bombcar wrote:
| Dogs are also pack animals (as wolves) and so they can be
| trained easier by abusing the pack instincts, even
| unintentionally.
|
| Cats are solitary and so even if you get them to not do
| something in front of you, once you're out of sight
| they'll quickly revert to doing whatever it is they want
| to do.
| munificent wrote:
| Dogs are pack predators. They know that to succeed they
| must be part of a cooperating team, so they instinctively
| work towards group harmony.
|
| Cats are solitary predators. Any other predator is just a
| competitor for the same resources.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Would be easier to make cat not
|
| Making cat owner do something is really difficult
| cortesoft wrote:
| It is pretty easy to keep a cat indoors.
| vundercind wrote:
| Add kids to the mix.
|
| Any cat with a strong interest in getting outside will now do
| so several times a year.
| devmor wrote:
| If you love cats, keep your cat indoors. They are quite happy
| when provided for - especially if you've got two.
|
| My wife works full time at a nonprofit no-kill shelter, and the
| amount of sick and miserable cats that come in rescued from the
| outdoors is mind boggling. Strays do not live happy (or very
| lengthy) lives.
|
| If you have strays around, consider enrolling in your local TNR
| (Trap, Neuter, Release) program, to help lower the population, as
| spayed males still hold territory and prevent intact males from
| breeding.
|
| If the strays are friendly, consider contacting your local no-
| kill shelter and seeing if they can take them in to be cared for
| and put up for adoption.
| tetris11 wrote:
| 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 much higher standard of living than my roommate's
| whateveracct wrote:
| 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.
| zachmu wrote:
| 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.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > and the alertness in its eyes makes me realise that it has
| a much higher standard of living than my roommate's
|
| Or else the alertness in his eyes may indicate the number of
| times he has come close to dying.
|
| I would guess a lot of kids in war torn parts of the world
| have more alertness in their eyes than kids in the US or EU,
| but it wouldn't indicate a higher standard of living.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Reminder that a cat named Tibbles once rendered an entire species
| of New Zealand wren extinct:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyall%27s_wren
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The article itself seems to disprove this? It wasn't all caused
| by a single cat.
| bombcar wrote:
| All Tibbles had to do was eat the _last_ one (or the second
| to last).
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Tibbles was the first cat brought to the island, and she had
| kittens, hence the feral cats.
|
| Tibbles didn't kill them all, but bringing Tibbles doomed the
| species.
| nullstyle wrote:
| My understanding is that the dirty little secret of these types
| of articles is that many song birds actually die because of the
| harshness of winter (and from what I gather, growing occurence of
| extreme weather events.) Unfortunately, that is much harder to
| study that than killing and cataloging the gut contents of some
| stray cats and doing some statistics.
|
| ---
|
| That said, keep your cat indoors and spread cat-proof nesting
| boxes for your local bird friends around your community. you
| don't have to pick sides :)
| permo-w wrote:
| do you have any evidence for this "dirty little secret"?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
|
| > Birds and larger mammals that eat insects can be directly
| affected by the decline.
|
| Yeah yeah Wikipedia is not a source or evidence but it's a
| good enough starting point.
|
| Pollution, global warming, ecosystem destruction, etc is
| causing bug population collapse which is at the basis of the
| food chain, including birds.
|
| Cats may be part of the problem, but they are not /the/
| problem. Compare also with the claims that windmills cause
| bird deaths (https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-
| turbines-kill-birds).
|
| See also https://theconversation.com/dont-blame-cats-for-
| destroying-w...
| nullstyle wrote:
| You seem to be an asshole -- people who think cat lovers have
| just caught a parasitic brain worm can eat shit. To minimize
| another person's opinions regarding animals who live on the
| interface with human society -- an incredibly complex subject
| -- to "Oh they just got the catshit-brain-bug, i understand
| why the think that way" is the sort of behavior that will get
| you an "Oh fuck off, prick" in my neighborhood. Despite that
| being said, here's what I have for you: https://esajournals.o
| nlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2307...
|
| "During three winters (October through April, 1982--1985)
| chickadees with access to supplemental food had higher
| average monthly survival rates (95 vs. 87%), higher
| overwinter survival rates (69 vs. 37%), and higher
| standardized body masses (an additional 0.13 g) than birds on
| control sites."
|
| Left on their own, it's nearly a 2 in 3 chance that any given
| chickadee will die each winter.
|
| ---
|
| If you plan on responding to say this link isn't sufficient
| for you; don't bother unless you've got a link about bird
| survival rates that doesn't filter it by to "Anthropogenic
| causes". I'm not interested in the arguing about something
| that seems poorly studied on the internet with a rando, but
| I'm willing to read papers or content that consider the issue
| holistically.
| praptak wrote:
| _" 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...
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> 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.
| zachmu wrote:
| 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
| eszed wrote:
| 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.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Our farm cats certainly did hunt rats, and rodents were a far
| larger part of their diet than birds. Rabbits, too. Never a
| chicken (in the article) - I can't imagine a cat hunting a
| chicken unless the cat was exceptionally large and healthy.
|
| We've also owned a couple "suburban" Chartreaux cats
| specifically bred to hunt rats. Fearsome beasts that hunted
| nothing but kibble in reality.
| zachmu wrote:
| > 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Dynamic ecosystems need predators, but this isn't an argument in
| favor of letting pets roam outdoors - it's an argument in favor
| of not hunting, trapping or otherwise killing foxes, true wild
| cats, and coyotes. Moving up the ladder into mountain lions,
| wolves and grizzly bears does fill people with rising alarm
| (while there is an active movement to protect mountain lions and
| re-introduce wolves to California, I have yet to see any 'bring
| back the Grizzly' proposals, even though it's on the state flag -
| and mountain lions are enough to keep deer populations in check).
|
| From an ecosystem perspective, cats are very successful hunters
| (the record for % of hunts that end in success is held by a small
| African wild cat^), but if there's a healthy coyote population in
| the vicinity, feral cats quickly become scarce (as do any overly
| fat squirrels).
|
| ^ https://youtu.be/nl8o9PsJPAQ
|
| Crows and ravens predate on baby birds and nestlings, but again
| this is a dynamic ecosystem norm. A backyard birdfeeder for
| songbirds tends to draw bird-hunting hawks too, which is fine,
| they're incredibly acrobatic and watching them hunt is quite the
| show - plus, natural (unsubsidized) predation removes the chaff
| from the wheat, improving the songbird population genetics. Young
| hawks in turn may be hunted by owls.
|
| That's nature for you - and an argument for not letting pets roam
| outdoors unsupervised. Additionally, letting cats eat wild
| animals tends to lead to internal parasites, fleas, viruses etc.
| bombcar wrote:
| Arguably the problem really isn't the cats so much as it is
| removing all the things that would eat feral cats.
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