Keeping cats indoors is a rare solution where everybody wins | Calla Wahlquist
www.theguardian.com
In the debate over protecting native wildlife from domestic felines, one thing is often overlooked: cats should be kept indoors for the sake of cats

I am not here to make the case that cats should be kept indoors for the sake of local wildlife – that case has been made over and over and over and over again. Cat owners know these arguments, and if they have not been persuaded by the fact that cats kill more than 6 million native animals in Australia a day they will not be persuaded by me.

There is a fairly tedious assumption that if you love wildlife you must hate cats, and visa versa. And nothing will turn cat people off faster than encountering a person who hates cats.

I understand this. I also hate people who hate cats. So let’s set the birds and the bettongs to one side for the moment, and consider the other, obvious fact: cats should be kept indoors for the sake of cats.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    CSIRO should either (a) generically engineer a cat that doesn’t function as an ambush predator (making them congenitally short-sighted could help, though iridescent fur that prey see from a mile away would also make them more appealing as pets), or (b) work on creating domesticable variants of sufficiently catlike native marsupials to replace cats as pets