| ▲ | stnikolauswagne 2 days ago |
| From the abstract: Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals. I.e. cats might kill more birds and mammals than humans. |
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| ▲ | platesmead 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Are they counting the loss due to human-induced reduction of biodiversity? E.g. wiping native land and replacing it with houses/cities/roads. Humanity has a cost on nature, that should be mitigated. Humans like domestic cats, which is one contributor to the overall human-induced reduction in biodiversity. I wonder also whether there's something about towns/cities that makes birds flourish, compared to other wild animals. |
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| ▲ | Tangurena2 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > I wonder also whether there's something about towns/cities that makes birds flourish, compared to other wild animals. Their predators are more scared of humans, enough to avoid urban areas. Most suburbs are kept in unnatural states with lawns and inedible plants, giving the predators no place to live. Some birds are capable of learning which humans are "safe" and which should be avoided. | |
| ▲ | stnikolauswagne 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >I wonder also whether there's something about towns/cities that makes birds flourish, compared to other wild animals. I would assume it has got do with the reason pigeons are sometimes called "flying rats", i.e. they can subsist on human trash, can survive in the environment and are not seen as negatively as rats and thus have less pest-control efforts pointed at them. | | |
| ▲ | platesmead 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If cats are killing wild animals that happen to flourish in human environments, is that such a loss to biodiversity? (Genuine Q. I don't know anything about what biodiversity folk look for.) | | |
| ▲ | stnikolauswagne 2 days ago | parent [-] | | An extreme example would be Maos Great Leap Forward, where there was a human-led drive to exterminate sparrows as part of pest control, which in turn led to famines because sparrows also served as pest control for insects. Humans are very good at introducing invasive species (domestic cat, kudzu) and pretty bad at forseeing the impact they have | | |
| ▲ | platesmead a day ago | parent [-] | | I suppose I'm wondering that since domestic cats are already well introduced, perhaps removing them can also have unforeseen negative impacts to the environment! |
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| ▲ | Tangurena2 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Pigeons were domesticated by humans. And abandoned. They hang around us because we bent their nature to like us. When we stop eating goat & cattle, they'll hang around us and poop all over our lawns & sidewalks. |
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| ▲ | bluefirebrand a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > cats might kill more birds and mammals than humans Well yeah obviously. Cats kill relatively few humans, they're too little |
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| ▲ | snvzz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Read that sentence carefully. They're counting cat-caused as anthropogenic i.e. part of anthropos-caused aka human-caused. And "single largest group" could be 1% if there are a lot of groups and each happens to be smaller than 1%. |
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| ▲ | stnikolauswagne 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I have read both the sentence and the abstract carefully, one of the other big antropogenic factors is "building colissions" which by itself is over one billion bird deaths. |
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