How on earth?

Apart from the declawed bit :/

Right, I couldn’t remember the word “catio.”

I made a catio in my backyard (3rd one attached the house) because our little bastards will kill everything in a kilometre radius. Not that we've ever tested that, but we've seen how they act when creatures smaller then them are out and about within their purview.

Agreed.

Also it being more natural is irrelevant. They aren’t wild animals. They’re pets. They’re much better fed than anything they’d compete with, so they aren’t having to worry about being sparing with their caloric expenditure. That’s also not natural.

Get a catio, don’t let your cat roam wild.

it’s more natural

it may very well be, but what most people don't realize is that the natural life of wild animals is not a disney fairy tale. their life expectancy is a lot shorter than that of the household pets and their death is often nothing to envy.

That used to happen to us. The street cat would mark our door constantly, but he has done worse! He once got into the house and marked our curtains, and a year ago, he barged into the house and attacked one of our docile house cats. That was an expensive vet visit. We've fed him regularly for years now, but still can't trust the little shit to this day.

The fact that several species in Australia are now extinct kinda shows cats do harm bird populations. Cats are usually an invasive species and hundreds of them in an area can decimate local wildlife. Overcrowding only kill birds when there are too many, while cats will always kill birds. There are definitely places where it matters more, like on small islands, but in general any invasive species can massively shift ecosystems.

You shared a Wikipedia link with sources[1] (and also numerous sections and assertions in the Wikipedia article itself) showing that cats generally impact wildlife populations but came to the conclusion that they don't. Am I missing something here? Is it because you're specifically focusing on birds?

[1] https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2656.13745

5 CONCLUSIONS

Free-roaming domestic cats affect wildlife through predation, disease, hybridization, and indirect fear and competition effects. Our review highlights biases and gaps in the global literature on these impacts, including a focus on oceanic islands, Australia, Europe and North America, and on rural areas, predation, impacts of unowned cats, and impacts at population and species levels. Key research advances needed to better understand cat impacts include more studies in underrepresented regions (Africa, Asia, South America), on impacts other than predation, and on management methods designed to reduce impacts. This review also supports past studies in illustrating that cats negatively affect wildlife populations and communities in most cases in which these potential impacts were evaluated

I'm going to remember this argument for the velociraptors released into human populations 😂

Velociraptors kill huge numbers of humans. Most human species have high reproduction rates, and crowding results in higher death rates from increased disease and parasite spread, competition for food, and all the good shelter from predators being taken. Higher death rates from one cause (say, velociraptors) results in less death rates from crowding-related causes. I haven't seen any evidence that, in general, velociraptor hunting ends up actually impacting human populations.

Specific species of humans in certain locations have been harmed by velociraptors: the Wikipedia page list several examples in Jurassic Park (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park). So it's good to have local awareness if there's a particular vulnerable population. But in general, keeping velociraptors inside is only for their own safety and won't impact human population one way or another.

and there is this whole thing about birds having a wings.

i am the owner of an indoor cat and i am all for keeping cats indoors because of how many dead cats i see on the roads in my relatively densely populated urban area. if i won the lottery or something and i would be moving into a house with a garden, i would be scared to let the cat out because of the danger to her, not the birds.

How do I prevent cats from coming in underneath the fence though?

Time to be down voted to oblivion for my parents' exception to the rule: their outside cat just celebrated his 25th birthday. He's no longer an energetic, murderous little shit, but a grumpy no longer able to murder murderous little shit.

Very precious, 10/10 to pet

It may not be abstractly good for cats to be allowed outdoors (my family growing up had a cat eaten by the neighbors dogs, a cat get hit by a car, multiple cats get serious injuries from fights with neighborhood cats, etc.) But having been in a household with a series of cats that only went out when they asked to be let out: they ask to be let out every day. It is completely inconsistent with my experience that a cat would "never want to go outside again".

My cat was a street cat that I got around 9 months old. Very spoiled indoor cat. She still tries to run outside and escape sometimes, she's too curious.

cats georg is an outlier and should not have been counted.

He didn't own them, they were just in his neighbourhood.

Letting? Letting what? Blood?

Hey, you can find land barons on there to charge you extortionate rent for use of a boxroom