Well…if you put it that way, there’s not much point about anything at all, is there? The universe is one big suburban cul-de-sac where everything is lame, as I sit moping and pouting with arms crossed, Amazon is “out for delivery” but hasn’t arrived yet.
Fortunately, there are healthier ways of looking at existence, courtesy of philosophies such as Buddhism and Stoicism, to namecheck two currently popular views on the matter.
The only cat I’ve had that I’ve felt okay with letting roam was a stray that came to us declawed, so he was mostly harmless. We still ended up making him an inside cat because we caught him sneaking into the neighbor’s house to steal their cat’s food and poop in its litterbox.
Not a lot of coyotes in our neck of the woods, but the little orange moron kept writing checks with the neighbor cats that his disarmed front paws couldn’t cash, so he was always coming back with scratches. One of the other reasons we stopped letting him out.
We actually found out when my wife was over visiting, and he came in through the cat door, locked eyes with her, froze, and slowly backed out of the house. 😅
I would never do it to a cat, but when this particular one wandered into my then-girlfriend’s house one night and decided he lived there, he was already declawed. He never seemed to suffer too badly from it, fortunately.
I know a guy who went through 5 cats in a few months because he was getting them, letting them out, and they were getting hit by cars since he lives on a super busy road that has heavy semi traffic.
It really reminds me of that one joke “I keep having to buy a new car because my neighbors dog keeps eating it” " it sounds like you’re just feeding cats to the neighbors dog"
Dude just didn’t seem to grasp simple addition that his new cat + outside in a bad area = squish
Do you get off on animals going extinct? What is wrong with you?
“Outdoor domestic cats are a recognized threat to global biodiversity. Cats have contributed to the extinction of 63 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles in the wild”
A stranger outdoor cat just walked with me for a few blocks on my way home from a dinner party. It was fun to have a five minute feline friend. It’s sad to know they will very likely die long before my indoor cat of a similar age.
Fwiw my childhood indoor/outdoor cat lived to 19 whereas my indoor only cats got terminal cancer at 13. But generally speaking I believe you are correct.
What’s that point of living more? You’d prefer to live more in a cage? That’s not a point at all. I can understand the wildlife reasoning, but then we should just forbid cats in those places then
Imagine getting a highly evolved killer as a pet, perfectly tuned for a life of exploration, combat and death, and forcing them to live a long, soft boring life.
The irony being that the surviving records of antiquity are literally just predominantly the royal propaganda because those were carved into stone which lasted and other writing formats didn’t survive.
The guy carving into the rock here in reality was doing so at the bidding of a guy who would have killed him if he didn’t write the version of reality he wanted recorded.
The idea that what was written down could be instantly disputed and checked against facts at all is the part this dude would find unbelievable.
Then the printing press fragmented and diluted the power of the elites. For example, I believe that it’s no coincidence that Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation came very soon after Gutenberg; in fact, I believe it was inevitable.
EDIT: well what do you know… it was Martin Luther himself who translated the famous Gutenberg Bible. Talk about one degree of Kevin Bacon.
Yes, Martin Luther did translate the Gutenberg Bible from Latin, Hebrew, and Greek into German. His translation was then printed at a high number and distributed in 1534. This was one of the first times that the Bible became accessible for the masses in their own language.
Yeah, cuneiform was interesting in terms of the medium and how much and how broadly it survived. Their folk tale in terms of how they received the writing was that someone from the ocean arrived and was trying to communicate and pressed reeds into the wet mud.
I sometimes wonder if there was an Aegean earlier Bronze Age/prehistory writing system (like the one found on the Dispilio tablet) that has been lost to the ages because it was on a temporary medium and then the Sumerians ended up with a version of writing that persisted in a loosely similar way to their folk history.
I cannot imagine having an indoor/outdoor cat. I’d worry so much about them while they were away. And if they just disappeared and didn’t return…I don’t know how I could stand it.
We have 3 indoor-only cats. Obviously I’m pretty attached to them.
Sometimes, you gotta do what’s best for your cat. We have one that just couldn’t handle being indoors full-time. We put a Tractive GPS tracker on his collar. It gives peace of mind and if anything happens, at least we’ll know when to find him. He’s living his best cat life.
I really understand that fear, and I do experience that with my outdoor cats. However cats tend to stick to their established territory and patterns and at least for mine, never go far and barely ever out of sight. In the summer being outdoor cats pretty much just means they sleep all day curled up in the garden.
Yeah, I can’t do it. We have fox around, and plenty of community cats (one evening, I walked down the ravine looking for our dog after he ran off, and I shined my flashlight upward to see about 6 pairs of eyes staring at me). We had a cat get some sort of blood borne disease, we think she got it from a tick that was in the house when we moved in (it’s our only theory, we have no idea what actually happened), and she spent a few days in the animal hospital, and barely survived. (It also cost several thousand dollars.) Unfortunately she passed away from multiple medical issues a few years later. :(
(We adopted another cat after she passed - we’ve never had more than 3 at once.)
Sorry to hear about your cat! I’m assuming you’re in the states, and I’d agree that I don’t think I’d let a cat outside there. One extra bit of support in the UK is that it’s pretty unheard of to not routinely vaccinate your cats to protect against random diseases, but of course it can’t cover everything.
I am. We always vaccinate our cats as well, and since that incident we give them regular flea and tick preventatives (well, two of them for the flea and tick - the third one is way too skittish to let us do that). In our case, there’s always a risk the dog brings something in, too, so it’s good to do.
Outdoor cats in the UK are driving your native wildcats extinct. Even if we ignore that the cat population is bringing foxes and badgers into human settlements because they make easy free meals.
You arent immune to having invasive species. In fact the british are pretty directly responsible for a lot of invasive species problems globally, so I would think yall would grasp the concept by now.
Wildcat extinction is an extremely specific issue. Wildcats only exist in Scotland now, driven to near extinction mostly by humans, not mating with other cats. This happened literally hundreds of years ago and has practically nothing to do with house cats. Now interbreeding is an issue for the preservation of the small number of wildcats left in Scotland. It’s sad but hardly a concern for keeping cats in most areas of the UK.
Secondly, I do ignore that cats are ‘bringing in foxes and badgers’. Can you present a source on this? I couldn’t find anything.
How am I hand waving it? I’m stating an obvious truth. What impact on wildcats do you expect to come from cats in Cornwall, Ipswich, or Manchester?
I think you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Yes, I would like you to google cat death counts and show me any evidence for what you’re saying. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find that cats sometimes get killed by other animals, but to suggest that it’s a significant cause of death or that they’re the reason that foxes are coming to ‘human settlements’ is complete nonsense. You make it sound like packs of badgers roam the streets of London at night.
Foxes in cities are very normal. They’re basically the UK’s raccoon. They scavenge things, including the bodies of cats hit by cars.
If you think foxes are normal in cities, I actually dont think a pile of dead cats in front of your house would shake you of your delusions, to be honest.
You keep on hand waving reality bud. Worked stellar for brexit, and its destroying what shred of ecosystem is left on the british isles. But hey, you havent been right yet, gotta keep pushing on until you are right?
Never seen any cat that chose to stay inside even 50% of the time when given a choice. I’d rather they enjoy their life than make me feel better be cause they’re penned up all the time.
Far better to die young under a car tire, bleeding out slowly and painfully alone on the asphalt. Totally agree, way better than living your entire lifespan.
If your house is a gilded prison to your pets, youre a shit pet owner and you shouldnt own any animal of any kind.
Like sorry bud, you can give a small mammal a fulfilling life inside your house pretty fuckin easy. Harness training a cat is so straight forward, too, so its not even a life permanently indoors.
I get youre probably so fuckin lazy that you would prefer your pet gets its guts ripped out and dies slow in the worst pain of its life. But any normal adult capable of washing their ass can do better than you, so maybe you leave the big boy responsibilities to better people.
My cats come and go as they please, one spends about 90% of her time indoors, the other mostly nights, but is gone during daytime. I usually see her when I walk my dog, she’ll creep up from behind a bush and finish the walk with us, come in for a snack and then be gone again.
we have an indoor cat. I was worried about it so started taking it outside. It would sprint back inside.
So then I took it out and closed the door. It clawed at the door.
I picked her up and moved her off the deck. She bolted under the deck and I had to take up one of the boards to get her out and she ran back inside faster than ever.
the most i’ve ever done is let my first cat go on the deck on a leash and even then i panicked the whole time. one time she got out of the slider at night and i couldn’t handle it thankfully she came back like an hour or so later
Model railroading is a fun hobby that combines a ton of various hobbies into one.
Posts of the hobby include researching historical things and visiting places to research, painting detailed backgrounds and models, electronic circuitry, tiny mechanics, wood working, sculpting, and many more skills I can’t think of.
It doesn’t have to expensive depending on how you go about it.
Try to draw each platonic solid inside metatrons cube without using a step by step guide.
Its surprisingly difficult till you get a more intuitive understanding of it.
It may not sound like it can give purpose but the flower of life pattern at its core is connected to almost al known human religions, including the ancient ones.
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