Cat Killing Poll

[chilli]

Im down with Gerbil ;) Alot of land clearing was done by indigenous people but what sort here are we talking? back burning? or massive fenced off grazing land which within 50-100years degrades the soil composition and alters the ecology... good or bad i guess most of this stuff can be rectified with the appropriate planning and work but thats not the heart of it money is and was.. who gives a fuck about the land when i can be rich, does it matter if we clear large tracks of land for urban/mining/grazing and industrial area? depends where one stands on their viewpoint on society and or rather the state of our country and current climate... good question. And its true we all do things that arent good for the environment no doubt maybe its all too ingrained for most and why change.

But with all this climate change and environmental changes its not something that just happend in the last 5years or whatever its been happening ever since large amounts of people came to this land and started all the glorious agricultural and industrial exploits...

Oh yeah cats! lol they can be usefull what we should do is breed uber big hunting cats to hunt the other feral cats then train dogs to kill the uber hunting cats

Going by everything you wrote before the last sentence, sounds like we should be breeding the cats and dogs to kill humans, and then each other.

[ThunderIdeal]

YT that's a damn good idea

to kill the dogs we'll introduce a population of chinese needle-snakes

then to be rid of them we'll bring in snake-eating gorillas. when summer comes the gorillas simply sweat to death.

I hope thats a joke. I wouldn't kill a cat for any reason. I can see why some would, but I would feel guilty and cruel.

i wouldn't do it man. the point is, keep your four-legged killing spree indoors, or one day you'll find a crazed torsten outside, wielding tomahawk and machete, bits of moggy stuck to his clothes with blood.

Our outdoor cat wears a bell and still manages to catch a few birds now and then, say 1-3 a month that we are aware of, on top of a lot of mice and other insects.

i saw on tv, years ago, that bells don't really help. the bell forces the cat to become incredibly stealthy, teaching it to be a better hunter.

i'm not really sure where this thread is going.

without being cruel or sadistic, should you kill feral animals if opportunity permits?

some of you are bound to say 'no', and there are lots of good reasons not to kill animals. the first thing i'd like anyone to do before they kick my ass for this is tell me they love animals so much that they'll never eat one again.

i've been bagging toads since i was 8. i've probably killed thousands of them with blunt force trauma (arguably cruel), and i still do. given the choice, i wouldn't spare a single animal that was introduced by europeans, and theres a large number of plant species i'd see out of here too.

the shitty thing is that feralicide will never result in more than butchery, because we'll probably never be rid of ANY of our ferals, or weeds for that matter.

what a shitty fucken situation.

anyway, humans caused ferals. we are virtually the sole reason for environmental concern, but THAT DOES NOT MEAN FERALS ARE JUST SCAPEGOATS. they are a major problem and from what i can tell, weeds are an even bigger problem.

thunder policy # 2. purple succulent, purple splash, fishbone fern, murraya, duranta, anything of the fucken like, planted too close to the edge of your property is fair game.

waddya reckon?

(bit of a joke really, as the major weed problems are not garden escapees)

[-YT-]

IB train the dogs to kill cane toads then us lol but on the contray i quite dig people, more so the thing is a lack of understanding or wanting to which is a cause of trouble, i dont the majority of people are ignorant at all just lack essential information and again understanding. Its good to look at history if even just to gain a glimpse of the past and mindsets back then which surely have moulded this country then and ask the question where are we going? can we sustain this westernised culture for another 10 generations? im just interested in if people are keen to make a real effort to change or better the way we conduct the ourselves in relation to how we live and more so land/environment and even each other.

Thunderideal man weeds are pritty fullon hey i thought of a less harsh term for em ;) invasive non natives lol but i guess they have there uses like artichoke and alot of other things can be eaten etc. big thing down here is olive trees goddam them and there tap root, Theres another fullon weed down here aswell see it alot in the pine forest very spiky and casuses slight skin irratation... cant remember its name atm in some places this stuff cranks for kilometres given the monoculture of the pine and its rapid spread pritty much just kills everything else

Edited September 30, 2007 by -YT-

[ThunderIdeal]

lmao, i was kinda surprised that olives are a weed in your locale, until i realised your locale is the mediterranean.

weeds are pretty full-on, hey. i suspect the authorities focus on the ones that are bad for business, but not so much on the ones that take over the countryside. australia is a big country too. brisbane gets heaps of madeira vine, celtis, climbing asparagus, ochner and groundsel. that's just to name what seem to me the worst, in this particular part of australia. gotta respect the sheer toughness of these organisms. most of the really serious weeds aren't even highly susceptible to herbicide.

[Vertmorpheus]

My main point I spose was that I'd rather live in a world with too many cats than a world full of ppl who just enjoy hurting things. Yes, I know not all culling types are into suffering of animals either. Apologies to ya gerbil, it wasnt a personal dig, I just get an inevitable giggle and a bubble or two of gas when I detect even well intentioned ... well sterotyping isnt the word... but it's something like that. Anyway, no hard ones. what did tripod say the other night "i don't have an indigenous friends, and theyd probably get suss if i tried to buddy up at this late stage..." I'm happy you met someone that happens to think I am wrong. She can drop by our place sometime and meet next doors unrestrained cats and then meet our resident geckos, skinks, frogmouths, crows, magpies, carpet snakes, frogs, fruitbats and the like. Also the large possum that keeps its tribe on our roof as our dog keeps the OTHER possums out of the yard. Many of which I sometimes find flattened on the road, zapped onto power lines , poisoned with laced grubs or sprayed fruit, bounced off windows or drilled with slingshots and air rifles. Even with a cat in almost every other yard, we still seem to have a decent amount of wildlife around, for a built up, not so bushy area.. not as mucha s in a nice natural setting of course, but enough that we can take bub outside most days and find something interesting to introduce her to. Shouldn't there be a permanent puff of feathers or trail of guts across most of our front yards? if theres 200 houses in my street, a cat at a third of em, thats what 65 cats. If half of em arent kept in at night, thats 30 cats jammed into a pretty tight little area (with every surrounding street mostly the same numbers). Place should look like Saving Private Ryan done in fur n feathers rather than fatigues, surely.... not like they entirely devour what they kill, especially when they're well fed house cats. Still, I can hear possums on the roof as I type... they're going to eat the apple core I chucked in the gutter.. an introduced and nastily farmed food species, helping out the natives... what a dilemna!

The problem posed by cats in urban (vs urban fringe, leafy suburbs, etc) areas by cats can never as serious as that posed further out in the sticks as we simply don't have as many animals to lose in the first place. hard to have a mass shooting in a toilet cubicle. IF on the other hand you live in a new development where the back boundary meets up with state forest, different story altogether. But I find it hard to see how anything can be seen as "wrong" in saying that urbanisation with our without cats is worse for a previously undeveloped area than merely introducing cats as a single element could really ever hope to be. What hurts more, a cat or a Westfield falling on your head? Complaining after the fact that the cats are picking off the odd pigeon that lives near the westfield scabbing french fries strikes me as a little futile.Probably easier to plant flowering food trees, provide water and protected perches etc, if its saving birds that is the real issue rather than just an aversion to cats.

I suspect it's all a matter of perspective... the dingo didn't evolve here, it was brought down from up north a few thousand ago... but it got here "first" so the way the landscape has changed around IT is ok... but because cats have only been hanging out here for a few hundred, they're the intruders, and any impact is a negative one by default. Ditto foxes, goats, pigs etc. Nature is pretty resourceful, and given time it seems an upside can be made from just about any downside... the paradigm of "natural" shifts a little but overall, the show goes on. Like Bill Hicks said, plastic wont end the earth, it will just be The Earth + Plus Plastic.

I am all for conservation, but I think what gets forgotten is that even left to her own devices, nature changes dramatically at times, and not always for the prettier or more convenient for all concerned. Conserving an area, its charm, its resources, wherever possible whilst serving the interests of those that live in that is great stuff... but trying to "freeze" nature, or get it to run backwards, seems just as silly as saying "lets change it as fast as possible" to me. If the cat is, in Australia's changing nature, the most well adapted and successful species, maybe it deserves a crack at things. I have heard from rangers that the quoll at its peak has a fairly similar impact, range, and requirements as feral cats. If they get too hard on local prey populations they will die back... nature has a bit of a wobble a lot more often than she falls flat on her bum. All of which is about ferals in reasonably natural areas, rather than malicious but still fedand cared for housecats, who end up killing for a hobby, so theoretically can do it a lot more often... IF they weren't fairly limited just due to a standing shortage of critters in their area anyway.

I suspect though that IF you have only an hour a week to spare contributing to ecological causes, spending the time looking for cats to run over probably isn't the ideal output of energy. I think what the little animals of Australia would really like is an end to constant habitat clearing, poorly managed fires, and fuck all rainfall.An end to wankers zooming around at sunset at 40 ks over the limit in forested areas, people that douse their lawn in lawn grub killer every month, local birds be damned... all kinds of things. Meanwhile the MOST bird, reptile and lil hopping critter population ive ever seen in "settled" areas was at a place that always had at least two cats on free range, and one dog... but it had plenty of space, few fences, a bit of standing water, lots of flowering trees, etc. Every neighbouring blocks was the same, usually with horses or cattle to boot, same thing... lousy with wildflife. You'd find the odd patch of feathers for sure but more often was to wake up in the morning wishing half the birds were dead so you could get some friggin sleep. Somewhere here I have piccies of cats sharing foodbowls with magpies... my dad had about 5 gens of magpies raisetheir babies on nothing but Iaiams brand cat food. On the other hand, a whole family of carpet snakes lived in the greenhouse... maybe without the greenhouse there, there'd be fewer snakes...so maybe that's fucking with the natural balance too. here, we get into a numbers game from which there is no escape.

nature is a tough bitch, I'm sure she finds it nice that in our different ways we all care, somehow... but whether everything is the dire threat its made out to be is the issue I guess. That, and whether SHE is as upset about the occasional shift or change as we like to get.

VM