Tourism isn’t the primary reason these birds went extinct. Native habitat was cleared for grazing cows and livestock. This is the same grassland now propelling wildfires. Airplane emissions contribute to global warming but this is not main reason these birds are gone. Habitat loss is.
Came here to this thread to add this!! Yes, the release of non-native Mongooses to "control the rats" significantly contributed to the loss of many species in Hawaii.
Here is a link to learn more about the invasive mongoose in HawaiiInvasive Mongoose ! .
Chickens are invasive to the Hawaiian islands, compete for food with the native birds, and are an intermediary for disease between commercial poultry and wild populations.
One could argue that humans are the absolute worst invasive species ever. So what is your solution besides trying to be high muckety muck? Chickens are here to stay. If only they would eat coqui frogs! The Polynesians that first inhabited Hawai’i hundreds of years ago brought a variety of plants and animals with them in order to survive. Included in those original animals were dogs, pigs & chickens. So sure they may be invasive but they were essential for the original Polynesian settlers of Hawai’i to survive. Google “Hawaiian canoe plants & animals” to learn more.
Setting aside the pointless misanthropy, the reason for modern invasive species management is to protect biodiversity during this period of human development and abrupt climate change. Little or nothing can done about the historic introduction of invasive species by pre-industrialized civilizations.
Ecosystems can't adjust to the presence of cats, because they don't "play by the rules" when they can go inside and be completely protected. The environment is taking too many hits at once for animals to adjust to everything. If it were just cats displacing other predators, maybe the impact would be lower, but birds also face mortality from pollution, infrastructure (building strikes and power line electrocution, habitat fragmentation, other invasive species that outcompete without direct predation, light pollution (which significantly disrupts migration, leading to death). Its too many things at once, the adjustment is just that they all die.
The most garbage estimate ever, did you even read the fucking ranges? They extrapolated their data in the most terrible way ever as if Miami, Florida or Yellowstone or Juno, Alaska have the same concentration of cats hunting birds outdoors.
If your range varies in the BILLIONS your data is fucking garbage. I'm not arguing it's not a problem and cats should be kept inside, but this is just fucking stupid.
Yep. I am a cat owner and will never let my cats outside unsupervised for this reason. People on the internet think it’s a neurotic American thing but it’s a wildlife thing.
I used to think this was bullshit/overreaction (about cats harming wildlife) until a neighbor moved in next to us with an outside cat. We'd get bunnies every spring in the neighborhood and hearing baby bunnies screaming as this cat tortured them made me an outdoor cat hater. I honestly thought about shooting that cat after about the 5th bunny it killed (and doesn't eat - just tortures them to death). If you've ever heard bunnies screaming - it is one of the saddest sounds that I've ever heard and it honestly permanently fucked me up. Really not looking forward to spring this year. Hoping the rabbits moved to another neighborhood.
I love my two cats, but cats are killing machines. I let them go outside on my tiny patio maybe once a week for 5 minutes under very watchful supervision. They can listen to the birds and eat the potted grass but won't be munching on the creatures of Bambi under my watch. It's sad that your neighbor doesn't care. RIP bunnies. :(
My sister had tons of wildlife until she adopted my cat. All her bunnies and many birds vanished quickly. So too the giant rats of the Pacific NW. Within 6 months a coyote killed my cat. It was sad but I knew her wildlife would likely recover. Her kids were upset so their grandparents got them another cat…
Ya.. I had a stray cat as a kid that I spent a lot of time with. One day she walked up and started eating a bunny in front of me.. a crisp white fur.. I don’t remember if I was frozen or thought it was important to see what reality was like.. but I watched for a while
I'm so glad I couldn't see it. I only caught a view of her catching a bunny in the backyard parallel to mine and watched as she carried it into the brush. It was mewing/crying and wiggling around when she caught it but after a few minutes the loud screams started and I had to go inside. That's the day that I seriously thought about shooting that cat.
I don't know if it would help. Baby bunnies are kind of dumb. My husband and I comb through the yard before he mows because they just try to "hide" in the grass from it. They don't really seem to run from threats but try to hide/be very still, which I think makes them pretty easy prey for the cat. Really just hoping the adult bunnies have moved to another yard this spring.
And don't forget the coqui frogs, which have completely taken over on some parts of the islands. They're devastating to the local ecology as they eat WAY too many insects, leading to a loss of food for many native species as well as a huge decline in pollinating insects which is also seriously harming the local fauna. The frogs have no natural predators, and due to this, their Hawaiian population is out of control. The frogs were introduced via plants imported from Puerto Rico.
This propaganda again. That stupid "study" was nothing more than a thought experiment and was found to be riddled with assumptions and bad data. Little dinosaurs have been dealing with predators for hundreds of millions of years. Some feral cats aren't the problem, just like coughing isn't the main problem of covid, it's just an extra pain point. domesticated cats aren't even suitable for survival without direct human support, that's why when rescued they're riddled with parasites and infections that wild animals don't suffer to the same degree. A sickly nearly blind cat isn't going to catch healthy birds.
Habitat loss is the #1 driver of extinctions. But admitting that would mean scaling back our own activities on a scale that feels too big to fix, so people blame the smaller problem (a problem by the way, that has been dwindling every year thanks to education and spay/neuter and release programs), and hope that if they suppress the cough, they can convince themselves they're not sick. What are y'all gonna blame when feral cats are as rare and nearly unheard of as feral dogs?
It's not just a single study, though, and it's not limited to feral cats. Even owned, well-fed indoor/outdoor cats prey on small animals.
There is a significant and growing body of scientific evidence to suggest that cats do a substantial amount of damage to wildlife populations, particularly birds. See this article for a summary of some of the research that has been done, or, if you have institutional access (or just want to read abstracts), you can check out some of the published, peer-reviewed science here and here and here and here.
In addition to the research above, predation by house cats has been linked to the extinction of 63 species (40 bird, 21 mammal, and 2 reptile species) worldwide. Cats, like other pets, should be kept indoors, contained in the owner's yard, or on a leash.
My god you've fallen into the propaganda. Get our head out of your ass and think logically about this. Domesticated cats have existed for thousands of years and didn't cause mass extinctions. Birds in all continents deal with small cat predators and other small carnivorous predators that do a better job accessing nests and eggs - domesticated cats are not any different or more clever. So if the "cause" has been around for so long but only "now" being a problem, it's not the fucking problem. The problem is the massive amounts of deforestation human activity demands and the more recent escalation of that deforestation. Cats can't destroy hectares of wild habitat. People do.
Preaching about cat containment to preserve wildlife is just more blaming the sickness on a small irritation. We keep the cats contained for their own health, not for the benefit of wildlife, because the impact to wildlife is infinitely tinier than habitat destruction. But you don't want to admit that, because it's a small problem you feel you have better control over, than the massive problem of human industry. The more you try to blame cat ownership, the more you feed the lie. They want you to focus on the wrong symptom, just like how they convince people that it's immigrants who take jobs, and not companies sending jobs overseas. Small irritation to keep your focus on, so that you ignore the actual problem.
Cats are horrible for every single warm-blooded species on the planet. Their parasites are ridiculously good at getting everywhere and into everything.
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u/12stTales Jan 01 '24
Tourism isn’t the primary reason these birds went extinct. Native habitat was cleared for grazing cows and livestock. This is the same grassland now propelling wildfires. Airplane emissions contribute to global warming but this is not main reason these birds are gone. Habitat loss is.