this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Witches VS Patriarchy
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Cats and dogs are pretty serious predators. And butterflies are formidable prey, because many are poisonous. And saying "dinosaurs" is like saying "mammals." My son loves his clothes with stegasauruses and triceratops on them, which are both herbivores and prey. Almost all dinosaurs were prey, in fact.
And for that matter, a pretty big fraction of even the popular dinosaurs were prey.
I edited my comment to say this before I saw you had said it. Here here!
Where, where?
I was gonna say, 'have you ever lived with a cat?'
When they like you they show love the same way silver screen mafiosos threaten to kill you if you dont do what they want.
Cats are monsters. I wish i had one right now.
Literally letting your cat outside is an ecological disaster in north America, because they just will not stop killing.
Also a great way to kill your beloved family member.
Having to explain to your grandkids why mommy keeps leaving the door open and letting cats escape to their death never gets easier.
Thankfully long in the past, but not forgotten.
Well, at least she wasn't using her hands; that's much harder on a kid.
... insects?
It's the first time I hear of cats endangering insects.
Hard for me to imagine them being efficient enough at hunting them or caring enough for them it would matter.
Couldn't find anything with a quick search either, do you have some source?
So you definitely wanna mention mammals and reptiles way before insects.
It's also regional, in Europe and North America insects don't really register. I assume the cause would be comparatively few larger insects.
This also only measures numbers of species, so does not directly mention individual counts nor factor in size of the animals. Biomass eaten would be a far better measurement here, and I would expect see insects placed far lower due to smaller body-sizes.
To me this doesn't seem like cats are a notable danger to insect life.
That is quite obviously not what I said.
It's pretty shitty to argue in bad faith like that.
The study tells nothing of danger, it tells of consumption. This might come as a shocker but in nature everything consumes something, often something alive. When talking about endangering, that means destroying the ecological balance, so by reducing a species numbers or even bringing it to extinction. It means an unsustainable load.
Roaming cats eat a lot of birds, enough to change the balance of the ecosystem.
The study now told us that cats eat comparatively a lot fewer insects in number. However smaller animals have vastly greater population numbers, a more constant value across species is biomass.
To simplify, if your insects are 1000x smaller that means you need to eat 1000x as many to cause the same damage.
I am calling the amount of insects consumed by roaming cats likely sustainable based on what the study presents. Cats don't hunt enough insects for it to matter to the entire ecosystem. Not (only) because they hunt fewer insects than rodents or birds apparently, but (much more) because they would need to hunt thousands of times more insects for a similar impact as they have on birds. Just due to the difference in population numbers stemming from the difference in size.
can, not necessarily will.
Don't worry, you are not wrong and they are insane.
I'd rather not speculate on their sanity. However, yes, this is based on the observation of always living with cats. The ones we have lived with do not hunt that often and are not that successful at it when they do.
It very much depends on where cats live, how long they go outside and for what reasons. The cats I've lived with do not go outside often except to relieve themselves and they are well fed, so they feel less of the need to hunt.
In cities or other urban areas I imagine this is more of a problem. However, where I have lived it seems not to be as much.
It also comes down to temperment, training, and efficacy of the cat(s) and how well you feed them, most people are so utterly convinced and repeat the same inane talking points that all cats will wipe out populations of other species that they never let them out, but I've seen that other species are completely fine where I live. Maybe if all cats everywhere were allowed outside, sure, but it's not so much of a problem here.
I've always read "don't let your out or they will commit ethnic cleansing on your neighborhood fauna" as similar to "treat all firearms as if they are loaded". While it is obviously situational (some cats don't hunt/hunt well, obviously some guns aren't loaded), the consequences of getting it wrong are pretty bad.
Sure. We wouldn't choose to live with cats. But currently it's not our choice, so we do what we can.
All this coming from a species that eradicates more living beings than any other living creature on this planet. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Keep telling yourselves that cats are the ones destroying other living creatures and their habitat. I'm sure it helps you people sleep at night.
Ok, now do humans.
Humans have so much capacity, even though we are not human, we think they are capable of much good.
Ah yes, cats. The prey animal that kills billions of animals every year.
Dogs and cats are. Puppies and kittens are technically predators but they don't really do much preying until they are grown.
Don’t take it so literal. It’s how these images are perceived by regular folk is what the post is getting at. Perception of what’s tough versus soft.