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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

> viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up

Don't have outdoor cats: https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/

From the cited source: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

> We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely __the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.__

(emphasis my own) Besides this, your cats will live longer and healthier. Like the average cat lives twice as long (or more) when indoor. Do it for the birds, do it for the squirrels and other small mammals, and do it for your own fucking cat.

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From the quote you cited, it sounds like we need to manage strays much more so than owned cats. Considering that indoor/outdoor cats are indoors some of the time, we would assume that owned cats are not really a priority here.

30-90 birds/cat/year seems extraordinarily high when considering the behavior of all the cats I know who spend time outside.

Well cats are definitely highly in-homogeneous hunters and some do A LOT and others very little. I'm sure the high end of that number is counting strays but I've known cats to grab a bird a few times a week. The thing is that many cats aren't showing you their spoils. Also, remember that cats sleep most of the day and their hunting is primarily done at limited hours. Though (indoor/)outdoor cats tend to be more active. You're probably not going to meet these cats though unless you've been to a rural area. Barn cats tend to be pretty effective predators. If you're in a bigger city, well there's not going to be as many birds (less opportunities) and you're probably less likely to see the spoils as if you have an adverse reaction one time then they won't show you again. They're just bringing back home a toy, not a meal.

One to two birds per week sounds low to me. Cats kill for fun.

There’s a bunch of statistics that just sound like nonsense and get repeated on the internet constantly. On the Mt. Rushmore of this list is the cats killing billions of birds a year. Another one is how efficient dishwashers are compared to hand washing dishes.

Well the cat number is cited from a paper and it does pass the sniff test. There's 45 million cats in America so that's 29 - 89 birds/cat/yr. That's not an unreasonable number, even taking into account a power distribution (I would buy that there's cats out there killing several birds a week, as I've seen this with my own eyes). The higher number probably over counts domestic cats though, but that's not too meaningful to my point given how these cats come to existence. Sure, publication doesn't mean absolutely correct, but there's nothing very suspicious about this one that I'm seeing at least. But I didn't do a deep dive either.

That depends enormously on what 'efficient' means. They certainly save a lot of time so that's an efficiency. They do use less water for the same amount of washing, so they are more efficient with water. The only problem with that is that, just with most efficiency gains, the result is more consumption. In this case, dirtying more dishes.

So I would argue dishwashers are demonstrably more efficient than hand washing dishes. Whether that means better for the environment is an entirely different question that has to take into account manufacture and use.

> So I would argue dishwashers are demonstrably more efficient than hand washing dishes

Yeah my argument is that this is nonsense. Just turn the tap off often when you’re scrubbing the dishes (use the water for rinsing) and it should be obvious that you’re using less water — particularly when you take into account the fact that a dishwasher uses 4 gallons of water no matter how many dishes are in it.

Under ideal conditions perhaps a modern dishwasher comes out ahead, but again maybe the ideal Rambo bird-killing-machine cat is also capable of decimating local bird populations.

I have always, and I'm sure most people at home do, filled the dishwasher up completely before turning it on. That's quite a substantial load of dishes each time, 2 meals worth + sundry in a 5 person household. The dishwasher I have says it uses 6 litres per wash on the normal automatic mode. That's just over 1.5 gallons, and even if a total lie and it uses twice as much that's still only 12 litres / 3 gallons.

Where it probably falls down is where they have dishwashers in office kitchens where they don't fill it up and chuck it on anyway so they have their favourite coffee mug ready for the morning.

I've measured my (previously owned dishwasher; don't have one at the moment), and compared it to handwashing in terms of water used.

How did I measure it? I had the DW drain into a bucket.

The DW won hands down. I also learnt to wash dishes without the water running when I was a kid.

Yes, the proviso that you should only run it when it is full is important, but I assumed everyone knew that.

The other twist on water 'waste' is where does it go afterwards for recovery?

Cities often have systems, we're in rural Australia and are water conscious- as far as dish and clothes washing go that's grey water discharge which goes onto a near house mulch pit for household rottables and garden waste, the water that reaches the pit bottom hits a crushed stone bed with slotted pipe that drains water to above the vegetable garden and fruit trees (between the leach drains ) where it moves through the soil making tomatoes, potatoes, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, etc.

No dishwasher, no tap running - but regardless of how much water we use in the kitchen none of that truly goes to waste, if we use more we just put less on the garden from the same source tanks (which are all level gauged).

Does that filter all the microplastics from washed clothes?

Microplastics shed from synthetic fibre clothes probably stay in the mulch, crushed rock and sand and don't reach the roots of the vegetables and trees and don't feature in the runoff (from sub surface water travel) at the base of the slope.

Mulch on garden with microplastics is likely ok as plants extract the minerals | elements they need.

I'd have to sample and check.

A great deal of our clothing, bedding, towels, etc is natural fibre in any case.

The average faucet puts out about 2 gallons per min. Even if i turn off the faucet between scrubbing it would take more than two mins of the faucet on for me. I do agree that it me use more dishes so there’s that.

You turn the faucet on at full blast every time you open it? I let out enough to rinse, but you do most of the mixing of soap and water for rinsing mechanically rather than just trying to blast it away with a high-pressure water stream.

Excellent point I don’t. But on the flip side I know I cannot use as little soap as a dishwasher since it’s down the drain

Repeated? They've cited their source. Why take issue with it like it's a whispered rumor rather than a paper with specificity you can disagree with?

I can totally accept the paper being wrong, but yeah this is how I feel. Fine to reject the claim, but if it's the word of a random commenter saying "trust me bro" vs that of researchers who published in nature and put all their evidence out there for everyone to see... I'm going with the latter (I'd even go with that were it not published).

Like at least make some critique about the study instead of: claims bullshit, refuses to elaborate, leaves.

In New Zealand, cats kill 100 million birds a year. We have 5 million people. I can easily imagine with US population, cats in the US could account for a billion birds.

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