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.
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.
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 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.
In countries where cats are native, they have significantly less impact on wildlife, or at the very least form a part of an ecosystem rather than being a manual introduction (admittedly one complication here is cat populations grouping up in suburban areas). As for safety for the cats, in their native countries they don’t have any serious predators to harm them.
I loved that doc! It was fascinating seeing the vast differences in territory. I remember one cat who travelled something like a mile back and forth every day on a really narrow area. There was also a pair of cats that had worked out a little territory share amongst themselves, patrolling the same area but always 12 hours apart from each other.
I’m a outdoor cat person but in fairness one issue to consider is that while cats are natural in Europe, their current numbers and general location are something that’s pretty unnatural. I definitely err on the side of not being concerned about it, but I do think it’s something to consider as people have more pets.
Personally I have one cat that has brought in a single frog, and another that exclusively brings in recycling.
This is so worthwhile talking about. I used to struggle with this stuff quite a bit until realising what you’ve said here. The right frequently seems to mischaracterise pro-choice as pro-abortion, and that is completely wrong. No one likes abortion. And yet, it happens. Conservatives should do some introspection on those two facts.
I think brutal science is implying that while you’re likely right, you’re also being strangely aggressive and pretty uncharitable to the people you’re replying to. See your three paragraph response to a one liner as an example.
In additional to the other comment, I think there’s also a traditional fear of corruption in open source. If the code is public then malicious parties are free to read and take advantage of holes in the security. Secondly it would be possible to contribute code with secret functionality that goes unnoticed. These are fairly easily debunked but seem to remain in people’s heads.
I think there’s a big one that you’ve missed and it’s that most people are not like most people here. Believe it or not there are many people out there whose first instinct is to search their app store for what they want. They walk among us.
If I’m McDonald’s, and a significant number of my customers search for me and instead get KFC and Burger King as top results with no McDonald’s app in sight, it’s seen as a marketing problem.
Ironically I was grateful for a custom rom to turn off the light. It was useful but I hated it at night because at least on my phone it was stupidly bright
Me too! Thanks for the info. I was never a part of that community and I have to admit I’ve been wondering when someone was going to realise my 3 year membership should’ve finished