8 ms·

The First Cat War

coolThingsFirst 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      I think that's exactly what I said...
  - dist-epoch 2y ago
    They are the apex predators of their particular size (big cats or small cats).
    - kjs3 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - permo-w 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      They are objectively very aesthetically pleasing.
      - 2024throwaway 2y ago
        They spend a large portion of their day licking their own buttholes, but sure.
      - permo-w 2y ago
        so are origami. you wouldn't catch me excusing them of the mass-murder of vital, comparably aesthetically-pleasing animals
- samatman 2y ago
  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/ https://going-medieval.com/2023/05/16/on-cats/
qiine 2y ago
Making cat not do something is really difficult
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  Can't remember where I heard it but it rings true: We train dogs but we negotiate with cats.
  - lb1lf 2y ago
    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_ 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
devmor 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
      - 2y ago
EdwardDiego 2y ago
Reminder that a cat named Tibbles once rendered an entire species of New Zealand wren extinct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyall%27s_wren https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyall%27s_wren
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  The article itself seems to disprove this? It wasn't all caused by a single cat.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    All Tibbles had to do was eat the last one (or the second to last).
  - EdwardDiego 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  do you have any evidence for this "dirty little secret"?
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations 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 https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds). See also https://theconversation.com/dont-blame-cats-for-destroying-wildlife-shaky-logic-is-leading-to-moral-panic-138710 https://theconversation.com/dont-blame-cats-for-destroying-w...
  - nullstyle 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - permo-w 2y ago
      the incredibly adversarial tone of this comment, combined with the myriad studies correlating toxoplasmosis with aggression and poor decision-making in humans doesn't exactly help your case, does it? go and shout at someone else
praptak 2y ago
"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Terrier [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146...
- rufus_foreman 2y ago
  >> 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-feral-cats-rat-crisis 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 2y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodents
  - eszed 2y ago
    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.
zachmu 2y ago
> 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.
- sixothree 2y ago
  I feel like I can’t travel on a rural road for more than an hour without seeing a dead bird in the road. Never mind all of the pesticides we use. After some neighbors complained, the mosquito spray truck ran our neighborhood three times in a row. The next day I found 5 dead blue jays in and around my yard. My blue jays still haven’t returned. I think they killed the entire flock.
photochemsyn 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  Arguably the problem really isn't the cats so much as it is removing all the things that would eat feral cats.
pg_1234 2y ago
Articles from 1916 and 1923 are not necessarily the "best source of truth". Understanding of "the facts" evolves with hindsight. After all ... Adolf Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938, and Joseph Stalin featured twice 1939, 1942. Times change.

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    I think that's exactly what I said...
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  They are the apex predators of their particular size (big cats or small cats).
  - kjs3 2y ago
    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 2y ago
[flagged]
- permo-w 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    They are objectively very aesthetically pleasing.
    - 2024throwaway 2y ago
      They spend a large portion of their day licking their own buttholes, but sure.
    - permo-w 2y ago
      so are origami. you wouldn't catch me excusing them of the mass-murder of vital, comparably aesthetically-pleasing animals
samatman 2y ago
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/ https://going-medieval.com/2023/05/16/on-cats/

qiine 2y ago

Making cat not do something is really difficult

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
Can't remember where I heard it but it rings true: We train dogs but we negotiate with cats.
- lb1lf 2y ago
  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_ 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago

devmor 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    - 2y ago

EdwardDiego 2y ago

Reminder that a cat named Tibbles once rendered an entire species of New Zealand wren extinct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyall%27s_wren https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyall%27s_wren

Nextgrid 2y ago
The article itself seems to disprove this? It wasn't all caused by a single cat.
- bombcar 2y ago
  All Tibbles had to do was eat the last one (or the second to last).
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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 2y ago
do you have any evidence for this "dirty little secret"?
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations 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 https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds). See also https://theconversation.com/dont-blame-cats-for-destroying-wildlife-shaky-logic-is-leading-to-moral-panic-138710 https://theconversation.com/dont-blame-cats-for-destroying-w...
- nullstyle 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - permo-w 2y ago
    the incredibly adversarial tone of this comment, combined with the myriad studies correlating toxoplasmosis with aggression and poor decision-making in humans doesn't exactly help your case, does it? go and shout at someone else

praptak 2y ago

"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Terrier [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146...

rufus_foreman 2y ago
>> 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-feral-cats-rat-crisis 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 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodents
- eszed 2y ago
  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.

zachmu 2y ago

> 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.

sixothree 2y ago
I feel like I can’t travel on a rural road for more than an hour without seeing a dead bird in the road. Never mind all of the pesticides we use. After some neighbors complained, the mosquito spray truck ran our neighborhood three times in a row. The next day I found 5 dead blue jays in and around my yard. My blue jays still haven’t returned. I think they killed the entire flock.

photochemsyn 2y ago

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 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 2y ago
Arguably the problem really isn't the cats so much as it is removing all the things that would eat feral cats.

pg_1234 2y ago

Articles from 1916 and 1923 are not necessarily the "best source of truth". Understanding of "the facts" evolves with hindsight. After all ... Adolf Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938, and Joseph Stalin featured twice 1939, 1942. Times change.