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Comment by Harvey-Specter | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why cats are allowed to roam the world unsupervised to kill birds and poop in my tomato garden.

History - pre litter boxes they were put out for the night. Plus their role has long been "grainery guard" and rats have caused major health problems. Even if cats aren't actively hunting them barring toxoplasmosis their scent scares mice. They auto-domesticated because agriculture made massive food reserves and the ones who didn't have the "Furless quadrupeds who constantly walk like angry bears, are about ten times your mass, have claws the size of your head and kill far bigger things! Run away!" sensible response to humans like most animals and had a reducded scatter distance which let them raid our grainery raidera were favored.

The fact of the matter is we have long /wanted/ their response be to kill all the scurrying rats and tiny birds weren't exactly a concern compared to not dying.

Because, along with birds, cats kill a lot of rodents. Rodents both carry disease and eat stored human food. Thus humans have, historically, been better off with cats around, and may in fact still be better off.

Cats are trash for rodent control. They spend too much time playing with their 'food' and not enough time actually killing it. Dogs are much better at killing rats yet we don't let dogs roam around outside willy nilly.

Most rodent control in the modern era comes from modern building techniques and materials, as well as waste disposal networks, that keep rodents out of our buildings and away from human sources of food. Go to a neighborhood with well maintained buildings but no cats and you'll find fuck-all rodents. Go to a neighborhood with run down buildings and a million cats, and you'll find a billion rodents.

Some dogs chase and harm human beings. Dogs also leave behind their feces, out in the open whereas cats try to bury theirs away.

And cats leave gory corpses of small animals in front of doorways. At least, they do whenever they're actually doing their supposed job of killing rodents. In practice it's enough corpses to make a mess but not enough corpses to actually hamper the rodent population.

The excuses made for cats seem to nearly always be characterized by a lack of critical thought. Saying that is probably considered controversial, but so is the toxoplasmosis hypothesis.

I was trying to answer "Dogs are much better at killing rats yet we don't let dogs roam around outside willy nilly.", but I was not as precise as I could be in retrospect.

The objective function that most human beings use is not "what animal kills rodents most efficiently", but "what animal kills rodents most efficiently and poses little harm to human beings most of the time". In my experience, most stray cats will likely run away from children and most stray cats will likely not initiate attacks against children. On the other hand, most stray dogs are more likely to do both of those things. As a result, cats get a pass for being less efficient rodent killers than dogs because they are also less likely to harm human beings.

> The objective function that most human beings use is not "what animal kills rodents most efficiently", but "what animal kills rodents most efficiently and poses little harm to human beings most of the time".

See, I disagree. I do not believe that killing rodents is a serious consideration for most modern cat owners. There are cheaper, more efficient and lower maintenance methods of exterminating rodents than cats. Most cat owners own their cat as a pet and think nothing of letting it terrorize the neighborhood birds because it's cute. Talk of rodent extermination is a post-hoc justification for their behavior.

Oh, I agree with that: most people who have cats have them for companionship, and they don't think about the things that said choice externalizes. However, the same can be said for people who have dogs for companionship. Some dogs routinely lunge at people passing by. In addition, despite the best efforts of those who walk their dogs, there are smears of dog feces on sidewalks. Both situations are examples how keeping a dog has externalities.

On a cycle path that was closed by floodwaters earlier this week, already last night there was dog feces. Dog owners DGAF.

If a rat comes in my garden I can kill it. If a cat comes in my garden regularly, sprays on everything, shits where my kids play ... then legally (UK) it seems there's very little I can do; I don't see why.

Empirical evidence shows that they're unbelievably terrible at killing rodents (...in at least one specific case): https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rats-and-cats

Cats catch mice. For rats you want a terrier.

Or a hungry cat that is used to catching prey. Our cat (on a small farm) used to bring in small rabbits to eat.

Cats are cuter. A clever strategy for any animal, but especially so for a murderous predator.

Cats are for killing birds - that's their niche. No more wrong than birds doing what birds do.

And face it, every bird pair has half a dozen chicks each year. Next year the bird population is about the same. That means, most new birds are going to die in the first year. Cats are just a part of that.

Domestic cats are an invasive species. They're not a natural part of the food chain, they're not doing any good by killing or even eating what they kill, they just do it for fun. They basically have no predators because they live where we live, and we chase off or kill predators.

Depending where you live cats have multiple predators.

Same can be said for humans.

There were some 500 species of cat, spread all over the world, when humans arrived. You cannot find a niche where cats are 'invasive'. How they kill, and what they eat or don't eat, is entirely up to the cat, not some misplaced human emotion about right and wrong.

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