![]() When asked what most surprised him about modern web usage, Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Internet, said “kittens.” Tell us how and why house cats are conquering YouTube. What needs to happen is for people on both sides of the equation to get together and work on the problem. People on both sides are passionate animal lovers who want the best for the Earth but cannot agree. But people on the other side, who are into birds or are avian scientists, say that trapping, neutering, and releasing isn’t an effective means and that still need to be euthanized according to the old, somewhat barbaric, model of killing huge numbers of cats. The idea is, if you can stop them from breeding, you can let these animals live peacefully and die a natural death. Since then the philosophy has shifted toward trapping, neutering, and releasing cats that then live in colonies. People did ghastly things, like drown or gas huge numbers of alley cats. This has been a problem in American cities for at least a hundred years. Cat colonies, on the other hand, can go on autopilot and create generations of alley cats. Puppies often die on the street, and wild packs of dogs are often sustained by recruitment, rather than generations of breeding within dog colonies. Why doesn’t TNR (trap, neuter, return) work and what is wrong with cat colonies?Ĭats are incredibly good at breeding and are excellent mothers in the wild, which distinguishes them from dogs. There are a number of ways of trying to control the feral cat population humanely. But cats have really got their claws into Australia. Today, the government is trying hard to eliminate cats from the landscape and is even involved in the invention of new cat poisons and gory things, which are upsetting to cat lovers. That means wildlife, particularly marsupials, are really susceptible to toxoplasmosis.Ĭats have participated in the extinction of an astounding number of Australian animals, especially small mammals. They’re damaging because Australia doesn’t have any native feline predators. There’s something like 18 million stray and feral cats in Australia. Australia, in particular, is one of these places where they run roughshod over the ecosystem. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy has even dubbed cats “the ecological axis of evil.” What’s their beef?Ĭats are extremely adaptable and good at getting along in all kinds of different environments, with and without humans. Cats aren’t just cute and fluffy house pets they are classified as one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species. I think all these ideas are our way of trying to come up with a reason for why we have 600 million house cats on the planet today. Some researchers argue that a parasite that cats spread can change human behavior in unforeseen ways. We see an echo of the idea that cats are working some kind of black magic on us in toxoplasmosis studies. But, as some animal scientists have pointed out, that could have just been evidence of cat allergies. Sometimes, in witch trial cases, a cat would show up and people would start to have trouble breathing. But there are some strange things they do to us that, maybe, could have been confused with witchcraft back in pre-Enlightenment times. ![]() Explain what science is telling us about cats’ demonic mischief.Ĭats are elegant, wonderful, amazing animals. Historically, cats have been accused of everything from killing babies to bewitching people, but there may be more science to those fantasies than we once thought. That tension between public passion and private violence reminds me of the Egyptians. But in America today about two million healthy house cats are euthanized per year because we don’t have a solution for what to do with them. We love cats and have a worshipful attitude towards them. You see a similar thing in modern culture. So the culture was simultaneously engaged in adoring house cats and throttling them behind closed doors. Some people have suggested it was a form of humane population control. And it seems they were also killing the cats in an organized way. Priests raised large quantities of house pets. The catteries at the temples of Bastet are our first efforts at raising cats in a manner of animal husbandry. So over time, the domestic cat became more important. She began her divine tenure at a time when farming intensified and environmental degradation increased. Tell us about the Egyptian goddess Bastet and how she relates to modern cat domesticity.īastet was an Egyptian goddess with the head of a cat, who became supremely important in late Egypt. ![]() Our domestic relationship with cats goes back thousands of years and seems to be linked inextricably with our worship of them. Watch what scientists discovered when they placed GPS tracking devices on house cats.
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