Just ned a recipie
A proper sauce, and a butcher willing to sell them, and we could be rid of the feline problem once and for all. My wife and daughter have 12 of the cash to crap factories and I want them to all die now.
It's well known that if all the cat videos and porn disappeared from the internet there would be only one site left and it would be called whereareallthecatvideosandporn.com. All the huge data centres, all the fat pipes, all the amazing new digital technologies of the global information infrastructure are only there, really, so …
Oh ... here it is:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/09/kittycam_discovers_killer_cats/
This garnered 286 comments, many of which I read first time round and many of which are similar to those on this thread.
Now I have to go. I have a cat to worship in an hour.
Colin
...who published an appallingly bad bit of scaremongering stats on bird deaths by cats a couple of years ago? Using every trick in the stats book on a base observation of 70 fledglings?
I would like to see someone from el-reg analyse the stats in the paper critically. This lad has got form.
Oh, and, by the way, how many birds NEED to be killed each year? That's the way nature works. If it didn't, the earth would be a mass of pigeons expanding at a large fraction of the speed of light. Once we know what the appropriate predation rate is we can then decide if cats, or squirrels (which I thought killed twice as many fledglings) , or glazed windows (which kill a significant number) are doing it to excess or not...
City dweller fantasy much?
On my farm I kept/keep cats for rodent control. Useless things said screw the mice and rats they take work and immediately ate all the frogs, lizards, rabbits and then I started seeing larger native wildlife show up dismembered including birds. All the while my house walls and roof got infested with succeeding population and mice and rats (the later would move in and eat the former) leaving me exposed to both disease and house fire (countless rats pulled from roof cavities bitten into the electric cabling of the house).
Then I got Jack Russels, they were picked on as pups by the pups but when they grew up from the more agressive cats who would swipe out or otherwise attack a pup. But they eventually got their own back. Most of the cats ended up killed or chased away.
There is no more active and enthusiastic mouser or ratter than a Jack Russel, I was amazed at how enthusiastically they hunted the vermin and my house infestations have become a rarity. The side benefit is they are also aggressively protective of the property against foxes while the farm cats would just hang back and be lazy and let the animals on the farm get kille by foxes.
And to the people who think animals are so much more holier than thou above humans on a moral scale and only kill for food, you are again misguided city people far removed from reality and plugged into you tellies as the only input into what's going on in the outside world.
I've seen foxes eat baby lambs as they are being born and during lambing season they eat the brains and leave the rest of the animal to rot while going on to the next baby lamb. You lot need to wake up and stop your fairy tale life beliefs in what is happening out here in the real world.
My cat (custody from my ex-) was a wonderful "lap-cat" for almost 18 years. Yes, he did his share of dispatching both birds and mice (just a few), but overall a nice animal.
As for cats in general, one theory is that the great plague ravaged Europe because cats were "unwelcome". They previously did a job of cleaning up vermin, and had a partial immunity to the Plague. Maybe that is their great purpose.
I do understand that cats have domesticated us humans quite well when we keep them as pets.
As compared to the replacement rate? I doubt they are doing any damage that matters except to crazy PETA types who like to think that no animal would "murder" another in the wild and it is somehow the fault of us nasty humans importing animals into areas where they didn't occur naturally.
The common house cat may not be native to the US, but bobcats and panthers sure as hell are, and there used to be a few orders of magnitude more of them around all over the US than exist today (for some reason ranchers don't like having their livestock killed so they shoot them) If you figure one cat is as good as another in hunting prowess, is a few million panthers and bobcats killing much larger mammals better than 50 million house cats killing small mammals? The big cats kill fewer animals because there are fewer of them, but they may win in pounds of animals killed. What if saber toothed tigers, also native to North America until 10,000 years ago or so, were still around? A few of them could supposedly kill a mammoth. That seems worse on the murder scale than a robin or squirrel, but maybe that's just me.
I wonder how many sparrows and rabbits equals one mammoth in their feline murder equations?
Nearly all animals removed from their native to somewhere they have not evolved have the potential to become an ecological blight. Humans have been spreading animals to places they should not have gone for millenia. Personally, I think if you want to keep a vicious killer like a cat as a pet you ought to need a license to do so with conditions that include not allowing it to roam freely. Feral cats and free-roaming pets cut bloody swathes through the vulnerable, unique, and endangered native animals of my country, Australia. I would like to see government appointed professional cullers whose job it is to shoot unattended cats on sight.
Here we have Cat lovers that think it's animal cruelty to cull the mass murdering domestic cat. When in fact it's the cat owners that are the sick cruel perverts that think nothing of the billions of lives lost to these furry monsters, nor do they think about where the meat they feed them comes from.
Putting cats into bags and drowning them is pretty sick ... but then how sick is ripping a poor defenceless bird apart. Just because it's your pet doesn't mean that you should be allowed to ignore the suffering of others animals.
My personal bug bear is the fact that these so-called owners allow their cats to spread their toxic faeces all over the neighbourhood, so that children can be contaminated by potentially lethal Toxoplasmosis ... and of course the law perversely stops neighbours from killing the vermin when they trespass onto their land!
It's about time that the law was changed so that the cat owner has a responsibility to ensure that their monster isn't allowed outside of their property.
Cat owners are not animal lovers.
Millions of years ago, when Mars still had its atmosphere and the Martians visited Earth, (You know the Martians had wings like "Angels"?) anyway, these "Angels brought these little "Devils" along with them for entertainment and some of them got out when they got to Earth. Well, to make a long story short, evolution took over and wallah, we have Mr. Muggles and all his descendants.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00037/mcam/0037MR0162000000E1_DXXX.jpg
There was a plan to help migratory birds in Minnesota (IIRC) some years ago by allowing hunters seeking other game to shoot feral cats. The Fluffy lobby -- and a little logic -- shot that down. (Can I say that here?).
The logic came in when it was noted that old Man Winter kills many more times the number of feral cats than hunters could.
Fluffy? I like cats. I even talk to them. Sometimes they answer -- but I have promised not to reveal what they tell me.
Paris, because cat house is on topic.
Right?