Broader adoption of keeping cats safe at home would have large benefits for cat welfare, human health, local wildlife and even the economy. So, should cat owners be required to keep their pets contained to their property?
The answer to the question is obviously “yes”.
Before pesticides cats used to just starve. Everyone knows this.
/s
Equally, before the post-DDT pesticides(when the decline started), housecats didn’t exist, never went outside and never killed anything.
/s
Go look at the other reply where I sourced my opinion.
You don’t think house cats existed before DDT pesticides?
You don’t think house cats, which have existed for 3600 years, existed before 1874?…
Do I need to math that math for you?
thats my point
If house cats were actually some kind of living natural disaster, birds would have driven extinct millenia ago. To solely blame housecats for the mass extinction of songbirds that have existed beside them for hundreds to thousands of years without any appreciable population effect is insane.
Also while DDT has its own host of issues regarding it building up in the food chain, my concern here is the post-DDT ones.
What a genius! You solved it!
Here I was thinking there are billions more humans than at any other time in history, many of whom have pet cats.
The increase in house cat numbers is surely unrelated to the increased predation on native wildlife!
No. I am saying it is not solved and that articles like this are skirting the real problem, which is probably pesticides and herbicides.
The decrease in bird populations of North America is new phenomenon and has only started some time since 1970. Notably, a lot of the songbirds affected are grassland species that dine on insects, seeds and berries, all of which are covered in or have ingested pesticides at farms. And is known, though not well documented, that insect populations are also plummeting but at a much steeper rate that songbirds.
Cat numbers go up, native bird numbers go down, you can’t explain that.
Also the article is about Australia. Sorry your American brain can’t handle that concept.
Its a global problem. Its been best studied in North America, so I use those studies.
Cats have made bird species extinct before pesticides existed.
Have you literally never heard of what happens when a non native species is introduced to a new environment where it has an advantage?
I guess you also think tumbleweeds aren’t a problem either.
Get yourself checked for Toxoplasmosis.