this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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Yeah, so, like I said, about once or twice a year, our ecological disaster kills a bird or a squirrel - usually a tiny baby one that had already fallen out of its nest. Meanwhile, if you watch, the hawks and owls are cleaning up, multiple kills nightly just in our yard. Raccoons will eat whatever they can get ahold of, Coyotes are a real hoot... even the turkeys eat more lizards than our cat.
You may be aghast at the statistics of what the 150 million cats, collectively, kill each year in the US- I'm aghast at what we've done to our wild spaces where vastly more killing is part of the natural order which dominated this continent until the last 200 years or so. This is what really needs to happen if we're going to have an ecology: https://eowilsonfoundation.org/eowbf-archive/half-earth-our-planets-fight-for-life
Whataboutism at its finest.
Doesn’t matter what wild animals do. Your domesticated animal should not be allowed to kill indiscriminately. What you see the cat bring back isn’t the full total of its destruction.
Your cat will also push out other predators and has no need to compete for resources with wild animals.
How many acres of habitat have you and your domesticated humans destroyed for your home, farmland to support your appetites, strip mines, highways, etc. Sure, my domestic cat kills the occasional vulnerable creature in my yard - it is part of the suburban ecology. If you coddle your baby squirrels that fall from the nest and nurse them back to health, that's your hobby - which is "better for the ecology" is a matter of opinion. Neither is significant.
Strip mines? Highways? What?
I’m not sure what you are going for? If I am reading this correctly, you are saying farm cause strip mines?
Yeah… not going to debate this with you if you are spouting nonsense
I'm saying people cause strip mines. People who use coal, and aluminum, and yes: phosphates for farms. How many people live in your house? The land your house is on isn't the only impact to the global ecology of your existence, you're also contributing to the construction of roads and the rest of the infrastructure that supports your life in that house, your job wherever you may work, the clear-cut tree farm used to make the toilet paper you use, all of it.
8.32 billion people on this planet, currently negatively impacting 75% of all land on Earth, that's 3.3 acres per person.
You want to make a difference, work from home, or go vegetarian, or choose not to fly when practical. Bitching about whether cats are inside or outside on the internet is about as meaningful as criticizing Brittney Spears' choice of eyeshadow color.
So Strawman or whataboutism (too tired to decide which one of those). Your debating techniques need some work, my friend.
How do you know I haven’t addressed these things in my life?
Either way, the best one can realistically do is to minimize harm. I don’t think allowing your cat out is minimizing harm. In fact, since you are actively choosing it, I would argue that it is worse than secondary or tertiary knock on effects. It might not have the same level of impact, but you are vehemently defending it. That’s much worse on my opinion
You are absolving guilt through ignorance, while that may be the social norm, it's far more insidious.
I actually care about the quality of life of my cat, and the cats we had before this one. What's a normal day for the spider is a calamity for the fly, this is life - everywhere - all the time. You can't save them all, I consider the negative impacts on my cat of keeping it indoors to outweigh the early termination of a few of the tens of thousands of creatures that pass our home, merrily eating each other as they go.
You can't give ignorant humans a pass for the damage they do and then hold a cat lover to task for the price of their cat's happiness.
Your example of the calamity of the fly and spider can be applied broadly to other scenarios like strip mining. Same with you can’t save them all. You are being hypocritical.
Dude, cats don’t know if you just keep them inside. You are actively choosing to hurt animals around you, that’s callous and selfish. Cats aren’t more important than other animals (I’d argue that non-native cats are lesser than native local animals).
Your argument is basically you bending logic, facts, etc to suit your point of view. Don’t be so entrenched.
Anyway, this is my last reply because you are behaving irrationally. It’s not that you won, it’s that I don’t care about someone who is so callous to animals.
That's what you think about your cats. I've had a dozen cats over the past 60 years, about 4 of them "inside only." In my experience, they most definitely know. The persian who wasn't really possible to let outside most definitely responded to things like flea-dipping, us not being home on time to feed him, etc. Overall, I see much more happiness and friendly disposition in the outdoor cats, but you do you. Box trained dogs "don't know any better" either, but does that really make keeping your big dog in a box 90% of its life O.K.?
Is that any worse than passively choosing to support the abuse that takes place in chicken factories? I can't stand modern chicken meat because it's disgustingly bloated, flaccid and flavorless - then think about how that chicken was raised, bred for fast growth and pumped with hormones to grow faster. If you ever have the stones, go visit a chicken factory and look inside one of the sheds - but wear a respirator, I wouldn't want you hurt by the toxic air.
On the greater scale, the (very few) animals around me that are getting hurt by our cat are out there in the wild, getting eaten by all kinds of other wild creatures in their environment. Just tonight, I encountered a large skink in the yard - they're in the yard now, far from the house, because we have a cat that spends his time mostly in and near the house the skinks don't take up residence in the living room anymore (like they did when we first moved in). They're not all dead, they're just living in places more protected from our (and our neighbors') cats.
Your argument is basically you bending logic, facts, etc to suit your point of view. Don’t be so entrenched.
Anyway, this is my last reply because you are behaving irrationally. It’s not that you won, it’s that I don’t care about someone who is so callous to farm animals.