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Comment by 9cb14c1ec0 | Hacker News Reader

God forbid animals should be allowed to have any freedom. As we all know, they best taken care of by forcing them to remain indoors 24/7.

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Taken to the other extreme, you have feral dogs. We don't think of them much in urban areas, or even most rural areas, since we will rarely encounter anything more wild than a stray. Being stalked by a pack of feral dogs is not pleasant.

We tried to adopt a cat once from a local shelter. If there was any indication that you would let the cat outside, for any period of time, they would reject the application. Also, if there was any indication you would ever leave the cat alone for 10 hours or more, they would reject the application. So, we left all those cats in the shelter, where there were almost certainly terminated, and bought a kitten from some random people on craigslist.

After that cat passed, we tried to adopt a dog from the local shelters. All required an interview and house visit, with random unscheduled visits within the 6 months after. We bought a puppy from some random kid.

edit: "any indication that you would let the cat outside" and "outdoor cat" are not the same thing. I failed because I said we had a patio we would let the cat sit on, in nice weather, on the second floor, or because we were going to see if we could leash train it (my friend had with his cat). I don't know, the lady seemed very angry the whole interview. The leash training failed before it made its way outdoors, but the sun was enjoyed.

You're allowed to lie on your application to the shelter. But you should also not let your cat outside because cats are bird murder machines.

A house visit to adopt a dog seems excessive. But this might be organizational scar tissue: mentally ill people adopting and hoarding animals, for example.

Depending on the jurisdiction, any adoption contract that says you have to allow unscheduled visits 6 months after may not be enforceable. Treat your adopted pet well and tell anyone who interferes to f off.

This is wild speculation and almost intentionally muddy.

- Cats are natural, suburb density is probably not. Homestead cats have a place as long as we stock food.

- Anything involving money to support AN org should have stringent red tape.

- telling people to fuck off is okay

By what metric are domesticated cats "natural"?

In a lot of ways typical farm cats are more natural than dogs. The distance between those cats and the undomesticated variety isn’t that wide.

Most domesticated cats demonstrably have no issues thriving while feral. They are not well-adapted to every environment they’ve been introduced but they do pretty well in many. Their main issue in places like North America is prodigious predation in the wild, which is mitigated when living near humans.

Farm cats are working animals, and they make up a tiny fraction of the “outside cat” population. Not really a fair comparison. Roaming/feral domestic cats in residential area are an invasive species and “do pretty well” the same way other pests do.

The shelter is doing its job: outdoor cats live a shorter life due to fights, cars, disease, predation, etc. And not only that, but they also decimate the local songbird population, which is already in great decline.

If songbirds are your concern, you'd do worlds more for them by getting your neighbors to replace their lawns with shrubbery than by fretting over a couple spoiled cats too stuffed with tinned food to catch anything.

Obviously you don’t actually have a feral cat population around you. They are generally good hunters that kill for sport. Cats, foxes, and humans are the only species that do that.

The discussion is about house cats and whether owners are obliged to keep them inside.

Feral cats have different behavior, and in fact having sterilized house cats marking and protecting territory tends to reduce the number of feral cats that take residence.

And yet they have the exact same effect on the local environment. Feral and free roaming cats are not meaningfully distinct except to their owners

Do you think people should let their dogs roam free?

That's simply not true, and as I wrote originally, habitat loss through human landscaping and chemical pest/weed control has an absurdly larger impact on bird population and diversity than all the guileless house cats that will ever prowl a neighborhood.

Bringing up habitat loss from humans is a classic whataboutism. Do you care about neighborhood dogs shitting in your yard? Cause I’m tired of cats doing it

And they dig up gardens and poop everywhere. People get so up in arms about dog owners not picking up poop on walks you’d think they would understand it’s not cool to let your cat do the same thing on other people’s property.

Outdoor domestic cats are a crime against nature (and songbirds).

Cats are a part of nature.

In some parts of the US outdoor cats are an essential bulwark against rodent invasion. It is healthy for the cats and very effective organic rodent control. They do get some birds but the bulk of their activity is rodents. There are places you can’t live without them.

Depending on the situation, outdoor cats can also live a long time. We had farm cats when I was growing up that spent a large part of their time outdoors during the day. They were smart, social, and typically lived 15-20 years before old age caught up with them.

Predation mostly impacts cats that are either obviously stupid or aggressively anti-social in my experience.

> Cats are a part of nature.

Domestic cats are only a part of civilisation, not nature.

> Predation mostly impacts cats that are either obviously stupid or aggressively anti-social in my experience.

In our neighborhood, the coyotes are very efficient at taking out any house cat outside after dark.

> Outdoor domestic cats are a crime against nature (and songbirds).

As much as red tailed hawks are. And crows (which I've watched eat songbirds).

Domestic cats aren't native to any part of North America. They are an invasive species.

Cats are non-trivial to contain in the owner's yard, and will attack other animals. Sometimes that is the intention (e.g. barn cats), other times is unwelcome attacks on wildlife (e.g. birds). My family also had to deal with vet bills due to a cat that attacked our dog. While I wouldn't consider letting a cat outdoors abusive, it is certainly disrespectful to neighbours.

The other thing about shelters is they often deal with animals from abusive or neglectful homes. Random visits are likely excessive, but they are just trying to prevent the animal from enduring the same situation with new owners (and likely trying to ensure the new owners can handle an animal that has a history of being abused).

When I was a kid we adopted two kittens from a local cat rescue. They made us sign a document saying we would never allow the cats outside. One got out when she was a few months old, and she developed an obsession with the outdoors and would spend hours each day scratching at the door and licking her fur off, and occasionally she would escape and us kids would chase her around the yard until we could get her back in. We did the exact same indoor cat enrichment activities with her and her sister, who never developed a desire to get out.

Eventually we took the one with the outdoors obsession to the vet who told us we could either put her on Prozac or start letting her out. At that point we started letting her out (in our quiet suburb nowhere near a major road), and she instantly became an extremely happy cat. Her sister lived as a happy indoor cat, while she would go out during the day and come in at night. She came back every night and they both lived to pass of kidney disease when they were 15.

I know a lot of people are extremely against cats going outside, but compared to some of my college friends who kept "emotional support" cats in minuscule dorm rooms, I would much rather let a cat out than imprison it. I don't really buy the songbird thing in built up suburbia.

Not all cats can even hunt. They all like to think the could, yelling at birds, but its an actual skill. Of all 10 cats I had over my life only 1 could actually hunt at all. Even that cat’s own brother could not hunt at all.

They are usually trained by their mother.

We're pretty sure her indoor sister could hunt but she couldn't. She never brought us a dead bird or mouse, and we watched her jump at and fail to catch birds frequently. Her sister would deliver us a mouse once a year or so.

I don't get it. I sooooo don't get it. I grew up in a rural area, we had many cats and we really loved all of them. Cats had complete freedom - they'd leave whenever they'd feel like it, they'd go wherever they wanted to go, engaged in social life with other cats including fights over territory and mates, hunted, played, explored, sometimes they'd be gone for days, but they'd always return, love us, stay with us and enjoy our company. I was so happy to let the cats be cats and I am not getting a new cat because I live in an apartment complex and I cannot let it be a cat there, I'd feel horrible about confining it to 40 square meters. I really like to think that the cats I owned got to be cats to its fullest. Unfortunately, they also haven't lived for long, with 4 years being tops due to stray dogs around, cars, other cats, etc, but I'd rather have it that way than treat it like a house fixture.

Oh, and we never took a cat from a shelter or from some other institution, we exclusively either adopted stray cats or took one from friends whose cat gave birth. We haven’t sterilized or castrated our cats either and were very responsible about giving away born kittens to people that will take care of them.

Some people like birds. If you look at the cat density in suburbs or villages it is essentially like a horror movie for birds. We feed those cats, so they can exist in a far higher density than the prey population would support but they still have the passion to kill every prey with gusto after toying with it for as long as possible.

This doesn't make sense to me. They like birds so much that they want all the cat owners to imprison their cats? But both cats and birds are wild animals. They eat and be eaten. Isn't it just how it works? For animals, it's just the full package.

Come off it, domestic cats are literally a separate species bred from captivity. It is not “imprisoning” them to keep them in their natural environment (the home). They are not native to any ecosystem.

Sure, if cats would sustain themself from birds that would be a different matter. We know how that looks: http://causalpatterns.org/resources/ecosystems/pdfs/s6_res_l...

But cats are being fed by the humans they keep and hunt for sports. There are soooo many more cats than would be sustainable by the bird population.

The reason for all the friction is that terrible people did terrible things to shelter animals. Is it perfect? No, but it is a situation with few better paths forward.

It's not even particularly good, let alone perfect. Shelters, in my experience, are the poster children for "the perfect is the enemy of the good". They would do a lot more good for the animals in their care by relaxing their standards.

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