More scientific evidence has surfaced to show that while mittens may be your sweet angel, letting her roam outside is also a big threat to biodiversity.
Keep your cat indoors and/or supervise them outdoors. Don’t be a shitty pet owner.
The coyotes in my neighborhood disagree. Let
dinnerkitty roam!Its fine. Good pet owners will never have their cats inside for too long.
Catios are a win-win situation for housecats and wildlife.
OTOH, I have a cat who can’t effectively jump onto the bed by himself. Your mileage may vary. :)
I have had cats who live with murderous intent, but then I also have this football.
You’re probably solely responsible for the extinction of an entire species by letting that murder machine outside.
If only, he could use the exercise, but he’s terrified of outside.
The word we use for ours is “institutionalized.”
Ha. We call our dogs our prisoners. When they go outside they’re going into the exercise yard.
We need to get outdoor cats off the streets. They’re Argentine ants with a cute face, which makes them all the more sinister.
Agreed. Maybe we could convert unused office space into giant stray cat condos.
Some days after our old cat passed away we noticed birds singing in our garden.
Cats are apex predators even at an old age.
House cats are highly effective hunters. They are by no means apex predators.
House cats are NOT apex predators. Apex means they’re at the top and nothing preys on them. Cats are preyed on by cougars, wolves, coyotes, foxes, eagles, etc.
Idk. I think it could be argued that they are the apex preditors of the garden
Three letters that keep my cat on a leash outdoors.
F.eline
I.mmunodeficiency
V.irusIts cat aids, its real, and if caught your mittens is not going to have a good time.
While I definitely lean towards not letting cats roam free (not even possible in our current living situation), I’d say that FeLV and FIP scare me way more than FIV. FIV+ cats can live relatively normal, long lives when living in safe, caring homes with some very basic precautions
FIV is primarily transmitted via saliva in deep bite wounds when one cat bites another, and the majority of those bites occur when an intact male cat bites another intact male cat, so if your cats are spayed/neutered, the risk of contracting FIV drops significantly. With proper slow introductions between altered cats, FIV+ and FIV- cats can live together with minimal risk of transmission.
I only mention this because there’s so many FIV+ cats that get stuck in the shelters due to stigma, and wish I could save them all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feline_immunodeficiency_virus
This story always gets spicy comments. Every. Single. Time.
Yeah, folks gets tetchy about being told they need to keep their cute little murder fluff inside for both its sake and the local wildlife.
And being told we’re poor owners and don’t deserve to have a pet. You should really knock that shit off.
If you would just be a responsible owner you wouldn’t hear it.
According to my vets, I am a fantastic owner, doing the best for my pet. So, again, you and everyone else who doesn’t like it can get over it.
I don’t give a shit about your cat, you could have the healthiest, happiest, best-cared-for, or the sickliest, most miserable, abused and neglected cat in history, that’s between you and your cat and effects no one else.
I care about the environment, which is and should be everyone’s shared concern and responsibility to care for. Allowing your cat to run free outside is no different than throwing your fast food trash outside. It affects everyone, and while one or even a few people doing it might not make a significant difference by themselves, it’s a death by a thousand cuts, and you’re one of the people holding a knife
Not every cat is the same. I currently own two murder machines. Any pest in the house is a dead pest. If one doesn’t get it, the other one will.
Our third cat can’t catch his own breath. He wheezes just rolling over.
While all three are indoor only, I have allowed others to go outside and they proved to be completely ineffectual hunters.
One really wanted to catch crows. I mean really, it was like she could taste it. She would also start stalking them from 50 feet away and the crows would just look at her like “Are you serious right now?” She never did get remotely close to catching anything. Probably for the best, the crows would have kicked her ass.
Her littermate was convinced dead leaves on the ground were helpless animals. I think fluttering in the wind and the tail like stems. He’d do the chatter talk at them and then bring them in the house and deposit them in the living room. “I killed it!” Yes, good boy.
Cool, didn’t read it, bye.
If you didn’t care about what we’re saying as much as you’re pretending not to, you wouldn’t bother replying at all. I think you know you’re in the wrong but you’re too stubborn to admit it or change anything about yourself.
No, you’re wrong
If you can’t get over it, that’s not my problem. And again, my vet’s opinion is more important than yours is.
i don’t remember you at all
Let’s see what the vet says when fluffy gets pancaked by a car or torn to shreds by a coyote. You’d be responsible for that.
oooh, fear-mongering, no one has tried that before.
There are no coyotes on Maui, moron, or any other animals that would attack him except dogs, and all those he would encounter are cat friendly, and I am far from the road so that’s no issue.
Try again, asshole.
edit: seriously, dawg, this island has cat colonies everywhere because they have no predators here. There are volunteers just to feed all the feral cats.
I’ll just leave this here
https://www.mauiforestbirds.org/invasive-small-mammals-on-maui-cats/
Go try to restart fights elsewhere, because I’m not biting. Goodbye.
I didn’t start a fight. I provided feedback about how my cat’s health exists outside your rules with my vet’s approval, and you insisted on being the way you are about it. You can still get over it.
Holy shit, these people are fanatically stupid.
How dare you imply they are over generalizing and exaggerating consequences! To hell with those people downvoting you.
I definitely monitor my cat when he is outside, but that’s because he thinks he is safe and I know he’s going to make a feast for some coyote if I don’t.
I wish he could catch that fat ass squirrel that won’t leave my garden alone, but he’s about as graceful on his feet as a newborn horse.
That being said, people need to spay and neuter their pets. I live in Houston, and it is a plague here, because people are lazy/stupid.
Anyway, over development has done more to destroy wildlife than any fucking cat, but these people want to blame cat owners.
Must be nice to have so much free time to waste on bullshit.
Thank you, exactly! Appreciate the note, that was fun to read!
Hey, really quick.
Check out the by-far number one killer of birds per year.
Right, and it is because people don’t monitor their pet cats, and not because of the rampant cat colonies, due to people not spaying/neutering their pets.
You people are bitching up the wrong tree.
I can’t believe y’all are so desperate to feel elitist over someone that this is what you settle on.
I’m pointing out that you’re wrong saying development causes more bird deaths than cats. That’s it.
And if you think I’m not for spaying/neutering, oh boy, are you wrong.
And folks like you sure do get defensive at anyone pointing out it’s dangerous - for them and local wildlife - to let cats outside UNSUPERVISED.
You mean when I said wildlife?
A lot more wildlife than birds.
I don’t really care what your feelings are, my comments aren’t about you.
My comments are about morons blaming cat owners, that let their cats outside.
It is seriously stupid, like voting for Trump stupid.
That’s because it’s clickbaity bullshit posted to drive engagement. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature 😉
Clickbait - yes Bullshit - no
Can confirm.
What a trashy headline.
Found Mittens’ owner.
I adopted a stray recently. She has expressed zero interest in Outside ever since. She just wants love and cuddles. One less on the streets.
People get absurdly angry when I bring out this fact, street cats are pests, and pest must be controlled.
“There were even cows on that list, though they were probably the result of scavenging rather than hunting.” I’d like to think that no, house cats took down a 2000 pound cow.
But of course. Australia alone proves this.
Thank goodness moles, rabbits and squirrels aren’t endangered, or my dog would never be allowed outside again.
Predators do what predators do.
I had two cats from the same litter. The female was superfocused on birds, rarely paid any attention to mice or voles which are pretty abundant here in the countryside. She very rarely managed to catch any birds in the wild, but if one made the mistake of flying into the house, it was game over in seconds. She could jump surprisingly high.
The male on the other hand was only interested in rodents. It was like to him birds didn’t exist. For yeard he kept our house totally free from mice, roaming the yard and doing his thing very effectively. I’d pay good money to have a cat like him again.
I wouldn’t let my cats out in the city, but out here I’ll let them live by their insticts. The nearby highway kills a lot more birds and mammals daily than they ever could.
Collisions with cars kill approximately 214,500,000 birds per year in the US.
Cats kill 2,400,000,000.
They very obviously weren’t talking in total across the US. Just their property and their nearby highway. I find what they said to be quite believable even with the total amount of birds cats kill across the US
Anecdotes are not data, however. They might think cars kill more, but data shows that nationwide, the opposite is true by an order of magnitude.
You see birds killed by cars on the road because the dead birds stay where they’re hit. You don’t see the ones killed by cats because cats don’t usually leave them there.
