Nēnē Gosling Death Points To Disease Carried By Feral Cats

['elepaio]

@my2 exactly .. Well fed cats don't hunt to kill / eat .. Mongoose right there eatang beside them too. Do they check they poop as well ??

Loving how they post,, hide behind Internet from someone they wish they could be.

[kalakoa]

the infection is “spread only in the feces of feral cats”

All cats, regardless of domestication. Read the warning on the kitty litter. The only difference is that feces from pet cats is more likely to end up in the landfill where it's less likely to contaminate the environment.

[HiloJulie]

Well, domesticated cats are generally spayed or neutered, and generally poop in a litter box. Assuming the owner handles the cat waste properly, the discarded waste goes, yes to a landfill. 

In the meantime, we can follow the State of Hawaii Invasive Species Council and NOT FEED FERAL CATS!

Hey, it can be done! When the Nene’s population dwindled to less than 50 of the birds left in the entire State, during the 1950’s, humans learned that hunting them was not a good thing, so, eventually humans will learn that feeding feral cats is not a good thing either. 

Do we intentionally feed rats? Mosquitoes? 

I wish we cared about the homeless humans as much as we seem to care about feral cats 

https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/invasi...eral-cats/

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@my2  exactly ..  Well fed cats don't hunt to kill / eat .. Mongoose right there eatang beside them too. Do they check they poop as well  ??

Loving how they post,, hide behind  Internet from someone they wish they could be.

Yeh. I sure love to hide behind the internet. I guess I’ll have to change my screen name to that of a bird and start making posts about being muzzled in my back yard and how much I want to change America and Hawaii into some third world shit hole.

ETA: And speaking of hiding behind the internet, I should change my status to “hidden” so no one can see me when I’m online!

[My 2 cents]

the infection is “spread only in the feces of feral cats”

All cats, regardless of domestication. Read the warning on the kitty litter. The only difference is that feces from pet cats is more likely to end up in the landfill where it's less likely to contaminate the environment.

Well, that raises even more questions.  I don’t know about the kitty litter.  We don’t use the stuff.  Our cat poops outside and I’m quite sure that ours isn’t the only one.  So why isn’t this a huge problem for humans and other domestic animals? 

Also, The article says “Toxoplasmosis, an infection spread only in the feces of feral cats, is likely what killed a nēnē gosling”.  So they’re not even sure?  They’re starting a crusade to starve all the cats based on an assumption? 

There are definitely some discrepancies and conflicts in this that need to be questioned and not just accepted because the DLNR with their (less than) stellar track record says so.

[HiloJulie]

Got to love it when people just refuse to acknowledge facts and think they’re superior to those facts!

Cats kill an estimated 2.4 BILLION birds a year in the US. 

And yet, we protest wind mills because they kill birds. 

Go figure!

   

[Wao nahele wahine]

According to the CDC: 

Cats get Toxoplasma infection by eating infected rodents, birds or other small animals, or anything contaminated with feces from another cat that is shedding the microscopic parasite in its feces. After a cat has been infected, it can shed the parasite for up to two weeks.


Here's a link to their site:  https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmo...wners.html

Domestic and feral cats can become infected.

[HiloJulie]

If only the Nene was considered as sacred as a mountain top, maybe there would be a change in attitude?

Anyone got some spare empty onion bags?

[Wao nahele kane]

#1) No definitive cause for the death has been established.
#2) The cited potential disease isn't carried solely by cats.

"Disease carried by cats, pigs kills 2 spinner dolphins in Hawaiian waters"
https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2022/11/17/t...-dolphins/

[HiloJulie]

#1) No definitive cause for the death has been established.
#2) The cited potential disease isn't carried solely by cats.

"Disease carried by cats, pigs kills 2 spinner dolphins in Hawaiian waters"
https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2022/11/17/t...-dolphins/

Officially, definitive cause of death was indeed toxoplasma. 

https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=404990352491190&set=a.127695893553972

[MarkP]

Domestication is a characteristic of a species that has been selectively bred for generations. All housecats (Felis Catus) alive today are domesticated. It does not make sense to talk of individual cats being domesticated or not. They all are. The only exceptions would be truly isolated populations that have existed for many generations.

Individual domesticated animals can be feral or not depending on whether they were socialized to humans during a critical couple week long period in late infancy. The difference in behavior is reported to be dramatic. If someone says "My buddy Felix used to be feral but now he snuggles on my lap at night" in truth he was never feral, just stray and abused. If he was truly feral he would be clawing you to get away.

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Those who support maintaining cat colonies always quote the same cherry-picked numbers for how quickly unsterilized cats reproduce. They do indeed reproduce quickly but the numbers could not be the same for the Gulf states vs the Yukon. Furthermore the implication is that if you sterilize a pair of cats today then you have reduced the number of future cats by XYZ. Nobody ever goes back and does the math from a point in the past to see whether such simply models make sense. Well, they don't. In 1866 Samuel Clemens visited Hawaii and reported: “In Honolulu, I saw cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep.”

So let us consider that there have been cats in Hawaii for at least 150 years and for the majority of that time nobody was spaying or neutering them. If the simple models used to bamboozle the faithful were true then every square foot of Hawaii would by now be buried many feet deep in cats, literally.

The missing ingredient is the degree to which the availability of food and control of disease or lack thereof has controlled the population. Reducing feeding would reset the sustainable population of cats back.

Yes, cats would starve but they were starving before. Also the Trap, Neuter, Return paradigm is absolutely founded on the premise of maintaining TNR cats who have adequate food while they slowly die of other causes but that these TNR cats must be in place to "keep other cats out". So those other cats must starve. The Roman Colosseum style struggle over food is apparently part of the fun for somebody (obviously not the cats) otherwise why leave the cats in place? We have not even discussed the collateral damage on native species yet.

Cats pooping outside is a huge problem. Sea mammals having toxoplasmosis is like finding gramma, bedridden in a nursing home for years, cut in half with a Katana. There is a huge element of WTF that ought to be followed up on. Something is grossly out of place. There are also questions of when schizophrenia really became prevalent among humans and an argument could be made that it was in relatively modern times when population densities of both humans and cats increased and we began keeping cats inside with us.