According to researchers, coordinated critics have mounted a “misinformation campaign designed to purposefully fabricate doubt regarding the harmful impacts of outdoor cats and stymie policies that would remove outdoor cats from the landscape.”
The conflict stems from a groundbreaking study published in 2013 by scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That study evaluated the combined impact of the tens of millions of outdoor cats in the United States. The authors found that roaming outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year and are the leading source of direct, human-caused mortality to birds in the country. Similar results have since been confirmed in Canada and Australia.
To those of you still in denial about how bad outdoor cats are to wildlife not just in your own countries but globally here’s the cold hard scientific facts stating that you are apart of a movement of uneducated critics spreading misinformation.
Here’s the link to the open-source scientific artificial as well:
but what about…. all the rats, mice etc they kill… hmmmmm
Maybe click the actual scientific research and read it before leaving a comment hmmmmm it would have saved you the embarrassment of proving the point of research. Which was that people that criticise keeping cats indoors were found to have zero actual evidence to back up their criticisms, therefore all their claims were based on nonsense or emotions.
Yikes! Think this is a good lesson in clicking links before you comment!
This study is going to cause so many ructions in the public…. buckle in, guys
You have not seen ructions in public until you’ve seen me tell a bunch of farmers to keep their barn cats indoors and encourage black snakes to take care of their Rodent probs because at least the snakes don’t spread toxoplasmosis.
Nobody does a ruction like a six foot plus dude who is secretly afraid a five foot snake will casually slither by and be all “sup”
Anyway here is my Chief Rodent Control Officer after taking a tithe of eggs which she does when there’s not enough rodents around
Yeah it’s not too hard to predict how that conversation will go:
You: You know those cats running around your property that won’t let a human touch them if their lives depended on it? You need to bring them all in the house.
Farmer: haha good one. You know they’d freak the hell out, right? Assuming that I could catch them and drag them in in the first place. And how am I supposed to control the rats if all my cats are inside?
You: Bring in a bunch of snakes and…
Farmer: haha go away now.
I love it when people assume I am not in fact a farmer myself. I’m a shepherd, with sheep. I don’t have barn cats because, among other reasons, cats spread toxoplasmosis. You know what toxo does? Probably not. You’re probably not dependent on small ruminants for any part of your livelihood.
Toxoplasmosis causes abortion in sheep and goats. Every ewe or doe who fails to lamb or kid is lost milk, lost meat, a lost replacement animal in the flock, lost cash from the sale of a new herd sire to someone else. When you have rare breed primitive sheep like I do, each lost pregnancy is also the entire breed slipping closer to the brink of disappearing.
You also appear to be unaware that there are live traps for catching the very feral barn cats - I’m SO glad someone who knows my profession, life, and attendant tools so well chimed in - we also use them to eg trap raccoons, foxes, and possums who are predating small livestock like chickens and rabbits. Incidentally, did you know cats can shed salmonella which can go on to infect your chickens? Why are you raising your own chickens for eggs and meat if you’re just going to get the same salmonella roulette you could get at the grocery store without all the goddamned work?
Chickens will also eat mice and young rats, incidentally. If you’ve got an honest to God adult rat infestation in your barn your husbandry practices are fucked up six ways from Sunday and you need to build better feed containers before you do anything else. The country isn’t the city. We do a lot more mice here.
You could of course also get yourself a nice working terrier and while you’re doing chores let the dog go to town on the rodent population.
Because if you actually have barn cats you can’t get near, they’re serving as a potential reservoir for rabies (which will pass to any mammal including you, including cattle), feline distemper, toxo, salmonella, and a host of parasites starting with coccidia and running out to various worms that don’t much care if they infect a barn cat or, yknow, a pregnant cow worth $2000.
So no, actually, that’s generally not how the conversation goes. But thanks for chiming in, city kid, assuming I was not in fact a working shepherd.
The Do’s & Don'ts of interacting w/ content creators, & other people you don’t know well mutually I slapped together for Twitter.
This ended up being more Don'ts than Dos but I feel like people need more help learning what NOT to say once they stray away from simple compliments and questions.
so much for the regular posting lol anyway, did some ms paint sketches for fun would anyone be interested if they were ,,pay what you want’‘ comms, cuz I need mone for a new PC,,,
