watervole | Room 101 meme

Room 101-f
As lifted from <[info]>melston and <[info]>nisaba and <[info]>swisstone by

dougs, where I saw it.

For those that haven't seen the UK TV show: Select just three things that the world (or just you)
would be better off without. Dump them into Room 101 and they will be eradicated. Your readers
must then try to persuade you that you're being unreasonable and that there might be unforeseen
consequences if your choices were allowed.

If you do this meme - increment the letter in the title so that 'Room 101-a' becomes 'Room 101-b', and
so on. Copy and paste the above text into your own journal.

People who believe their cats never catch birds

I love cats as individuals. As a species, I've come to really dislike them, or rather their owners. Cats, on average, kill 30 small mammals and birds per year. That's an enormous toll on wildlife, especially given the density of cats in the average housing estate.

Most owners (apart from those who have indoor cats) have a touching, but misplaced faith in their beloved moggies. Few bother with bells (which reduce kills by around 30% and almost none use sonic collars (which reduce kills by a further 10%)

Aviation fuel

There is an international agreement forbidding tax on aviation fuel. The net result is effectively an artificial subsidy for the least environmentally friendly form of transport.

TV Advertising

TV advertising drives much of our consumer culture. It encourages greed, lack of responsibility (ads for endless easy credit) and encourages people to spend money on 'food' with close to zero nutritional value. It substitutes the sound-bite for genuine information.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Further, if you live in a country to which cats are native, the other native species have had time to evolve suitable responses for escaping feline predators: it's a different situation for people who live in countries to which cats are not native.

I can't offhand think of a large landmass bar Aus/NZ (and Antarctica, of course) that does not have native cat species. Feral cats are a significant threat to some seabird populations on oceanic islands.

But the evolution of escape responses isn't really the problem. Wild cats hunt to survive, so their population is controlled by the availability of prey. The ecosystem reaches a point of dynamic equilibrium.

Domestic cats, by contrast, have their food offered to them on a plate (literally!) and their numbers are regulated only by the popularity of cats as a domestic pet. (Road casualties, poisonings etc only lead to a lost pet being replaced.) They can therefore predate with impunity. Given enough cats (which there aren't, as it happens)they could wipe out prey species to the verge of extinction. Wild cats wouldn't get anywhere near doing so.

I've never understood the logic of this - I can believe that it's been shown to be so, though I'd prefer to read the study that shows it - but why should a well-fed cat with a fairly small home territory be more of a threat to the species it predates on than a feral cat, hunting for food?

I don't have reference to any study, but it's a straightforward extrapolation from basic ecological principles. The population of a predator is regulated by the availability of prey, which is why predators tend to be rare.

Domestic cats are predators, but not reliant on catching prey. Nevertheless, they still hunt, and what's more they're in better shape to hunt successfully. At least sometimes - some moggies are so fat they'd have trouble catching an unusually lethargic toad.

I don't know if domestic cats have a smaller hunting range than wild ones. Probably they do, but that would be in part because of the higher density of cats per square mile than there would be in the wild. More cats = more hunting = more prey taken.

Room 101 meme

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