I’m at a friend’s place and the cat keeps bringing in dead (or half-dead) animals into the house. It’s my understanding that cats think we are big, helpless kittens that don’t know how to hunt. Hence, they think they are doing us a favour.
It seems like a few mice actually escaped and found refuge in some walls in the house, so these “presents” are actually more than just annoying (and smelly if the dead animal ends up behind the couch).
Actually RSPCA (largest animal welfare charity in the UK) recommends only taking them out on a harness. A working animal on a farm is a little different than just letting your pet roam the streets of your neighborhood. The vast majority of animal and veterinary experts (even in the UK) disagree with you. Just because you see people being irresponsible with their pets doesn’t make it a good idea. There is a ton of research that shows how cats decimate local wildlife. It also shows how it puts your own cat at risk for diseases, larger predators, or even being killed by humans. The information is not wrong just because you have latched onto your own bias.
What’s your source on that? That’s news to me but I can’t find it anywhere on the RSPCA website.
https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/pets/cats
There’s a lot of wild cats that live across europe, which is why the advise you get in the states is different because over there, cats are more of an invasive species which its prey haven’t evolved with.
We have many species, but here’s one example which has been around for 170,000 years: European Wildcat
that’s not a domestic cat being let outside
an entirely different entity than an indoor/outdoor cat
I agree, but the point is that domesticated cats aren’t invasive in the same way as they are across the pond. They are effectively the same species as european wildcats and have the same prey.
and that’s incorrect, domesticated cats have guaranteed food/shelter that keeps them unchecked in a way that natural predators are, thus making them invasive. they wreak havoc on local ecosystems worldwide.
source
source 2: electric boogaloo
source 2 II: still sourcin’
(all European except the third from AP, couldn’t find their source so feel free to discount that one but I hope oxford and tilburg are good enough eu sources)