this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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I wonder what percent of those cats are strays.
the vast majority. feral cats are about 50-65% of the cat population, but people take stats like this and demonize their neighbors who let the cat sit on the porch outside.
i was banned from reddit 5 years ago for posting a picture of my cat chilling on my porch, because the anti-cat nutjobs reported me to admin for 'inciting violence'. it's frequent that in the past few years when photo see my cat outside chillin' or even a photo of him in my backyard chill, they ream me out about how I am a anti-bird Nazi.
my cat has never killed a bird. he killed a couple of baby rabbits which were in my garden.
Where do you think feral cats come from? They are domestic cats which live outside, sometimes by choice, sometimes because they are abandoned, and sometimes because they are born to an outdoor/feral car.
Feral cats come from other feral cats. They don't come from domestic cats in homes.
Same with feral hogs and other feral animal populations.
No. There are no native cats of this species outside of the area around Turkey (and even there I don't know if there is anymore, but that's where the housecat came from). Any feral domestic cat you see came from a pet at some point in time. They were not just there as a feral animal to start with.
right and all human beings that aren't in africa are invasive species! we should kill all the humans who don't live in africa!
Impressively stupid. 👏
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_cat
but please tell me again how stupid i am and how smart you are... because you know, the facts of reality don't exist or something, because clearly only you know the truth of things.
we can't all be big brained geniuses communists like you .ml lot.
How does linking a wiki page, that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand (besides proving feral cats anywhere else came from domestic cat pets, which is contrary to your original argument) prove that you aren't stupid?
Mods, this guy literally asked for it.
You're genuinely stupid as fuck. And arrogant. Doubling down is hilarious over something so trivial and unimportant but here you are. Thank you for the entertainment at your own expense!
I especially appreciate you somehow bringing politics into this, lmfao.
Did a .Mler fuck your wife or something? Is she our wife now, comrade? Another .world account proving reddit isn't sending their best.
Do you think humans should have an obligation to minimize their impact on their environment? If yes, cats are included in that, and cats aren't capable of making that decision.
Edit: also holy whataboutism! What the fuck was that about? It has nothing to do with the comment except that cats are involved.
No. I don't think that at all. Anymore than I think the environment has an obligation to accommodate humans.
I don't think there is such a thing as nature without people. A lot of the 'humans are evil and the environment is good' is based on false assumptions. Do you think a volcano cares when it explodes and wipes out entire local ecosystems or is any under obligation to not explode?
As the other comment explains, it isn't about morality. It's about practicality. We have the ability to attempt to reduce our impact to keep the planet healthy, so we have an obligation to do so. A volcano doesn't have that ability.
If we are absolute hedonists, with no long-term considerations, then the world won't be livable for humans, or many other animals, in a short period. It's already getting to the point where many previously inhabitable places aren't anymore, and that's with some amount (not enough) of harm reduction.
Let's reduce this to just you, for an example. Let's say you're driving your car. Do you have an obligation to attempt to not harm others with your vehicle? Should you try to not run over children, for example? If so then what's the difference to the original question? If not then there's something wrong with you.
Oh man I've got some really bad news lol.
Nature preservation isn't about being virtuous or "good".
Maintaining the greatest possible diversity is how you give a biosphere the best chance to continue adapting, instead of catastrophically collapsing. In case of a volcano erupton, for example.
As an a example, having more than one insect species that pollinates, means losing some of them won't mean large-scale crop failures. But the fact that there aren't infinite of them means we could conceivably, run out of them.
No-one who takes minimizing human impact on the biosphere seriusly, is doing it out of a mere desire to not be "evil".
It's critical simply in terms of our own self-preservation. The more species exist, the more ways there are for the biosphere to continue functioning.
Which we kind of need it to do in order to eat and breathe.
A guy like that isn't going to understand any word over 3 syllables. You're gonna have to use shorter, dumb-friendly words.
I'd love for you to go into more detail here, lmao.
You need to look up what the word "feral" means.
They aren't called "wild" cats. Because "wild" animals are where they are supposed to be. In an environment they evolved into.
"Feral" animals are where they aren't supposed to be. Introduced by humans. As a result of domesticated animals being left to fend for themselves in an environment they didn't evolve into.
Literally the first sentence on wikipedia, when looking up feral hogs: "A feral pig (Sus scrofa) is a domestic pig which has gone feral".
That doesn't mean they're all escaped or abandoned pets. Maybe their ancestors were, but cats breed, and some places have significant populations of breeding feral cats that have never been inside a home.
Your point being?
That feral cats are not necessarily escaped domestic cats like you claim. Many are the distant descendants of domestic cats, born from a long line of feral cats. Like the person you responded to claims, and like you seem to want to deny. Those cats are not immediately wild cats like you suggest; they're feral. You and the person you reply to focus on only part of the feral population.
I made no such claim.
The person I'm responding to was trying to equate the word "feral" with the word "wild" in order to argue that feral animal populations aren't a problem, and one caused by humans.
They are, and it is.
You make this mistake as well when you write "Those cats are not immediately wild cats".
They are not wild. They will never be wild. A feral animal cannot become "wild" except by the words casual definition. Feral animals are invasive species introduced by humans. Something which the word "feral" inherently includes by definition.
Whether they are first or later generation is a distinction without a difference.
No, you were the first person to start about "wild" animals. The person you responded to never mentioned wild animals and was talking about feral cats. You're the one who equated that with wild cats. They also never said feral cats weren't a problem; quite the opposite: that those were the cats that ate birds, and not the domestic cats that came outside. I don't know whether that's true, but that's the argument they were making, and not the strawman you're making out of it.
That is an extremely generous reading of what they said, which completely ignores the context provided by their other comments.
This being the classic "if invasive species bad, then humans bad, kill us all I guess" that you often see people who don't take the concept of invasive species seriously.
Again, this person is in favor of the status quo, and is under the false assumption that "feral" cats, and free roaming pet cats, are either a normal part of local ecosystems, or if not that, harmless. Which is why I think they need the distinction explained.
They make several statements where they openly admit to indifference where nature preservation is concerned.
Where did all those stray feral cats come from?
They're pretty much all feral. Our well-fed house cats are killing at anything like that frequency.