this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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"Outdoor cats" are an invasive species that kill billions of animals every year, are a significant contributor to dozens of species' extinction, and live shorter lives than cats properly cared for (i.e. kept indoors) including nearly 3x the risk for infections.
It's a plague. We can't keep normalizing this.
You should be aware this is an extremely American sentiment bordering on ignorant. Nowhere else in the world do you find people berating people for letting cats go outside.
Even in America, you won't find it. It's only coming from chronically-online people who are afraid of everything.
I'm sure if you could communicate the dangers to your cats, most of them would still choose to go outside. Locking cats indoors their entire lives is cruel.
You're absolutely wrong. They're native to the region around Turkey, so it's not really an issue there. Everywhere else, it is. Yeah, a lot of third world countries don't give a shit because they have other problems to worry about. It doesn't make it not an issue though, and many countries have issues caused by them.
What
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopard_cat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_mountain_cat
The cat that became the house cat is obviously what I'm talking about, not random distantly related species. I assume you know those aren't the same species, right?
I thought the point was bird killing?
Yeah, house cats killing birds in regions they aren't native to. Your comment still has notthing to do with that.
Those regions had wild cats killing birds already. China had domestic cats 5000 years ago.
They're part of that ecosystem. The domestic cat is not, except in the regions around Turkey. The ecosystem has developed to not collapse with the species that currently exist in it. When you add an invasive species, things can go horribly wrong very quickly as the native species are not adapted to defend against them and the native predetors or not adapted to hunt them. Their populations typically grow out of control and their prey often collapse.
But I'm sure you're aware of this and know this about other invasive species. You're just being annoying about domestic cats.
Broski these countries already have lots of stray cats and dogs. Number of domestic cats is dwarfed by them. No need to keep the focus on domestic cats.
And people who adopt cats shouldnt be adding to the problem. Outdoor cats have a much lower life expectancy than an indoor one, if you let your cat outdoors youre actively putting them in more danger and you shouldnt have them.
Domestic cat is the name of the species. It includes the stray ones.