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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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