this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Science Memes

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submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It does. Travel to a 3rd world country and look at the difference. Dogs and cats everywhere due to no cultural expectation to keep them indoors or neuter them.

Here is an article better clarifying the effect of our cute little killing machines:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-kill-a-staggering-number-of-species-across-the-world/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maiq has heard its dangerous to be your friend.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

No lies detected.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That article seems very new-world-centric

Europe, Mainland Asia & Africa all have native small cats and so the birds and small mammals have evolved to deal with them, the issue is that in Australia & the Americas they haven't and so that's where all the risk of species actually being wiped out is - in the old world the cats largely just replace the larger predators that humans have killed off in the ecosystem

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Even in the Americas we have wild cats though. Bobcats are slightly larger but not completely dissimilar. We even used to have ocelots across much of the US, and neotropical migrants will still encounter those for part of the year. So I find the claim that mainland birds are not able to handle cat predation to be a bit questionable. However I am not fully educated on this topic.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I’ve seen a lot of stats about cats and it seems very likely they have important conservation implications in island ecosystems where birds did not evolve with similar predators.

But I’ve not seen evidence of conservation impacts on the mainland where we do and did have similar predators in the past. Just stating that cats eat a lot of birds doesn’t mean they’re a threat to overall populations.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

True, but that article says that over 350 of their prey species are at risk species, and that several of those are suspected to already be extinct.

I love cats—I think most people should have them—just be responsible with your furry murderers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Again it would depend on where those are—threatened species are disproportionately located on those islands I mentioned. Furthermore it doesn’t assign any causation to cat predation.

Maybe cats are a serious conservation threat on continental areas but I’m just saying I haven’t seen evidence of this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Here’s a study from Oklahoma State University specifically talking about the effects of mainland cats in contrast to island cats:

“Our review shows overwhelming evidence that, beyond causing island extinctions, where there were no native predators, and massive numbers of mainland wildlife deaths, cats can exert multiple types of harmful impacts on mainland wildlife species that are reflected at the population level,”

https://news.okstate.edu/articles/agriculture/2017/me-ouch-the-impact-of-cats-on-native-wildlife-species.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Thanks, this seems more in line with what I was wondering. But I’ll need to see if I can get access to the full paper. The example given in Australia actually fits my hypothesis since they historically lacked felid predators. So I’d like to see the full list to see the location and severity of the effects they’re reporting.