ARE HOUSE CATS APEX PREDATORS TRIAL

But cats have really got their claws into Australia. Today, the government is trying hard to eliminate cats from the landscape and is even involved in the invention of new cat poisons and gory things, which are upsetting to cat lovers. That means wildlife, particularly marsupials, are really susceptible to toxoplasmosis.Ĭats have participated in the extinction of an astounding number of Australian animals, especially small mammals. They’re damaging because Australia doesn’t have any native feline predators.

There’s something like 18 million stray and feral cats in Australia. Australia, in particular, is one of these places where they run roughshod over the ecosystem. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy has even dubbed cats “the ecological axis of evil.” What’s their beef?Ĭats are extremely adaptable and good at getting along in all kinds of different environments, with and without humans. Cats aren’t just cute and fluffy house pets they are classified as one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species. I think all these ideas are our way of trying to come up with a reason for why we have 600 million house cats on the planet today. Some researchers argue that a parasite that cats spread can change human behavior in unforeseen ways. We see an echo of the idea that cats are working some kind of black magic on us in toxoplasmosis studies. But, as some animal scientists have pointed out, that could have just been evidence of cat allergies.

ARE HOUSE CATS APEX PREDATORS TRIAL

Sometimes, in witch trial cases, a cat would show up and people would start to have trouble breathing. But there are some strange things they do to us that, maybe, could have been confused with witchcraft back in pre-Enlightenment times. Explain what science is telling us about cats’ demonic mischief.Ĭats are elegant, wonderful, amazing animals. Historically, cats have been accused of everything from killing babies to bewitching people, but there may be more science to those fantasies than we once thought. That tension between public passion and private violence reminds me of the Egyptians. But in America today about two million healthy house cats are euthanized per year because we don’t have a solution for what to do with them. We love cats and have a worshipful attitude towards them. You see a similar thing in modern culture. So the culture was simultaneously engaged in adoring house cats and throttling them behind closed doors. Some people have suggested it was a form of humane population control. And it seems they were also killing the cats in an organized way. Priests raised large quantities of house pets. The catteries at the temples of Bastet are our first efforts at raising cats in a manner of animal husbandry. So over time, the domestic cat became more important. She began her divine tenure at a time when farming intensified and environmental degradation increased. Tell us about the Egyptian goddess Bastet and how she relates to modern cat domesticity.īastet was an Egyptian goddess with the head of a cat, who became supremely important in late Egypt. Our domestic relationship with cats goes back thousands of years and seems to be linked inextricably with our worship of them. In fact, many bird species are becoming increasing rare at least partly because cats kill so many of them.Watch what scientists discovered when they placed GPS tracking devices on house cats. But because there are so many cats in the outdoors, each year they kill hundreds of millions of wild birds in almost every country where they live.

Cats eat rodents and birds-which would be fine if they truly were wild animals. So, it’s a dangerous world out there for domestic cats, because while cats are predators, they are not apex predators.īut there is another important reason to keep cats indoors. Parasites such as fleas and ticks also enjoy feeding off of outdoor cats.Īnd while domestic dogs don’t usually eat cats, they do kill them quite often. In some parts of the world, there are constrictors and other serpents large enough to eat a cat. And in parts of North America, a large member of the weasel family called the fisher, or fisher cat, not only eats cats, but is a good climber and can chase them right into the tops of trees.Įagles, owls, and other birds of prey will also take cats, as will crocodilians and other large reptilian predators that live in warm climates. Wild dogs such as foxes and coyotes view cats as an easy meal, since they’re usually not as wary or as quick as most wild prey animals. But cats do get eaten quite frequently when they are allowed to roam in the outdoors. It’s a shocking thought to most of us that any predator might eat someone’s pet cat-or any domestic feline. Photo: Karelj What eats cats? What does a cat eat? A Cat Hangs Out In A Place She Shouldn’t Be.

Are house cats apex predators