Nēnē Gosling Death Points To Disease Carried By Feral Cats

['elepaio]

Please folks, can we apply some ora modicum of common sense here ? With those numbers, we would ( maybe ) see more cats than people walking in a circle at the park . Or just on the fringes since cats might just be illegal aliens and invaders. Over running and enslaving us to feed them while they do nothing while we coddle them.

[HiloJulie]

Please folks, can we apply some ora modicum of common sense here ? With those numbers, we would ( maybe ) see more cats than people walking in a circle at the park . Or just on the fringes since cats might just be illegal aliens and invaders. Over running and enslaving us to feed them while they do nothing while we coddle them.

I know facts often illude you as well as that when you are cornered by facts, your first response is to deny them, then you revert to claim that the person presenting the facts is attacking you - or should I say assaulting you, then you generally end in some weak kneed spineless pray to Rob for help.

So, let's look at some facts, shall we?

First source:  "An estimated 2 million cats live on the various different islands of Hawaii. That’s half a million more than the human population of the state."
https://www.600milliondogs.org/post/what...he%20state.

Second source:   "The estimated 2 million feral cats that freely roam the islands are considered by experts to be an invasive predatory species"
https://louisegund.com/this-is-what-you-...at-crisis/

Third Source:   "There are roughly 300,000 free-roaming cats on Oahu and many thousands more on the neighbor islands."
https://www.civilbeat.org/2016/10/69-per...om-hawaii/

Fourth Source:   "And cats kill even when well fed as pets, or spayed/neutered and rereleased" "On Maui Island alone, feral free-ranging cats are now estimated to number approximately 300,000-400,000 animals! That is 413 to 550 cats per square mile! That means that for every 1 resident on Maui Island there are more than 2 feral free-ranging cats."
https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/defa...ldlife.pdf  (CAUTION - DOES CONTAIN GRAPHIC IMAGES)

Fifth Source:  "Hawaii is facing a “cat crisis,” state officials say. It’s estimated more than 2 million cats roam the eight Hawaiian Islands, including up to 1 million on Big Island and 15,500 on Kaua’i, where the petrels were killed, according to Aloha Pest Solutions.:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world...54315.html

As I originally said, there is no "official" count by any agency, but the five (of hundreds more) sources above ALL COME TO VERY SIMILAR AGREEMENT.

It has been generally accepted that an estimated 2,000,000 feral cats roam free in the entire state, with 500,000 each on Hawaii, Maui and Oahu.

So, I would say we have a cat human problem.

"Please folks, can we apply some ora modicum of common sense here ?"

How about stopping the goddamn feeding of feral cats???

['elepaio]

LOL folks .. Textbook Projection Hidden Much HJ ??? Screen shots don't lie.

---

Now go edit gurl

---

Now go edit gurl

[HiloJulie]

LOL folks .. Textbook Projection Hidden Much HJ ??? Screen shots don't lie.

---

Now go edit gurl

---

Now go edit gurl

Quoted for preservation.  

Now, what was that you were saying about "editing" and "screen shots?"

"1 minute ago (This post was last modified: Less than 1 minute ago by 'elepaio.)"

Now, how's about you discuss the 2,000,000 feral cats roaming free in Hawaii. 

Or does that exceed your capacity?

At a minimum, please explain what it is you mean by "Textbook Projection Hidden Much HJ ???"

Or does that exceed your capacity as well?

['elepaio]

Edit was literally same post hun.. Can't help that . Technicality it's the system. But try harder..3/8 min after is rethinking / regret Same same as your OA with Wahine ..um, do you always make same mistakes twice ? .. Like Brian said... Believe the first.

Keep going with the insults and name calling + returicals though .. Whatever blows your dress up hun

[HiloJulie]

Edit was literally same post hun.. Can't help that  . Technicality it's the system. But try harder..3/8 min after is rethinking / regret  Same same as your OA with Wahine ..um, do you always make same mistakes twice ?  .. Like Brian said... Believe the first.

Keep going with the insults and name calling  + returicals though .. Whatever blows your dress up hun

Quoted for preservation.

Did you notice that yes, when virtually two identical screen names began posting, one of them operating under the "hidden mode," as do you, as well as having not posted in over a year until his post, I confused the two. Twice.

Did you notice then, as well, that when I realized my mistake, I apologized.

Now, how's about you discuss the 2,000,000 feral cats roaming free in Hawaii.

Or does that exceed your capacity?

['elepaio]

Totally forget to post this before.. Boomtown ( CAT$ ) a little retro ..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XeXgYyApvto

[My 2 cents]

TNR exists because people are feeding cats, and they want something to point to that falsely demonstrates they aren't part of the problem.  TNR doesn't exist because people want a solution to the cat problem, it exists so they can justify continuing to feed them, and it drains limited resources that could otherwise be implemented towards effective animal welfare programs.

I agree with this.  While a slow reduction might be possible under ideal conditions, those conditions never exist and you would not choose TNR if eliminating the cats were your primary goal.

If I could be convinced that the “don’t feed” policy was the solution I would get behind it, but so far there are too many things that don’t add up.  It has been stated several times in this thread and with supporting links that the best we can expect is a natural ceiling to the number of cats that the environment can support.  Nobody knows what that ceiling is until it reaches equilibrium, but it’s way more than zero.  This means that

1.  There will still be cats and the diseases that they carry.
2.  The cats will be less healthy and therefore a higher percentage will carry those diseases.
3.  The part of the environment that controls the ceiling height is mostly the food source, which consists mostly of rodents and birds.  How do we get the cats to eat only the rodents and not the birds?
4.  The ceiling height will become gradually lower as the food source diminishes and/or the diseases take over.  Is that what we want?

I don’t know how this all maths out but I’m skeptical because it looks like it has the potential, or at least the possibility of doing more harm than good.

I could suggest that every meal that is fed to a cat represents an animal in the wild that doesn’t get eaten.  OK, I made that up.  But there is a reasonable point in there.

As long as I’m making things up, how about we look at the graph again that shows 1 pair of cats being responsible for 11,000,000 kitty births.  Does this  also mean that for every pair of neuterings 11,000,000 potential kitty births are avoided?  You can’t have it just one way.

And Terracore, your statement above surprises me.  These people are contributing time and money to a cause they believe in.  They get no funding from the government, so I’m not sure what “limited resources” you are talking about.  For the record, as part of their program they also relocate as many animals as possible.  If the government was to contribute some money to this, I'd like to see it used for research into a preventative drug for Toxoplasmosis.

I think the wild card in this is the number of native and endangered species here that we are trying to protect.  This “don’t feed” policy might have fewer negative impacts in other states.

[MarkP]

If I could be convinced that the “don’t feed” policy was the solution I would get behind it, but so far there are too many things that don’t add up.  It has been stated several times in this thread and with supporting links that the best we can expect is a natural ceiling to the number of cats that the environment can support.  Nobody knows what that ceiling is until it reaches equilibrium, but it’s way more than zero.  This means that

1.  There will still be cats and the diseases that they carry.
2.  The cats will be less healthy and therefore a higher percentage will carry those diseases.
3.  The part of the environment that controls the ceiling height is mostly the food source, which consists mostly of rodents and birds.  How do we get the cats to eat only the rodents and not the birds?
4.  The ceiling height will become gradually lower as the food source diminishes and/or the diseases take over.  Is that what we want?

I don’t know how this all maths out but I’m skeptical because it looks like it has the potential, or at least the possibility of doing more harm than good.

I could suggest that every meal that is fed to a cat represents an animal in the wild that doesn’t get eaten.  OK, I made that up.  But there is a reasonable point in there.

As long as I’m making things up, how about we look at the graph again that shows 1 pair of cats being responsible for 11,000,000 kitty births.  Does this  also mean that for every pair of neuterings 11,000,000 potential kitty births are avoided?  You can’t have it just one way.

And Terracore, your statement above surprises me.  These people are contributing time and money to a cause they believe in.  They get no funding from the government, so I’m not sure what “limited resources” you are talking about.  For the record, as part of their program they also relocate as many animals as possible.  If the government was to contribute some money to this, I'd like to see it used for research into a preventative drug for Toxoplasmosis.

I think the wild card in this is the number of native and endangered species here that we are trying to protect.  This “don’t feed” policy might have fewer negative impacts in other states.

That ceiling got reached in the 1800s as confirmed by Samuel Clemens and the population has been bumping up against the upper limit ever since. That limit changes as food availability changes. At present armies of true believers wage a guerilla war against native species using cats, rats, and mongooses as surrogates or proxies, some people making it their life's work to spend their retirement funds purchasing bags of cat chow to dump in the park. How this is possible I don't know but in previous generations poor people tended to be thin. Today poor people tend to be obese and have diabetes through the magic of the MacDonalds Dollar Value menu. I assume that something similar is going on with cat food. Where it comes from I don't even know but if humans are willing to eat hot dogs I shudder to think what goes into cheap cat food. There now exists an entire market for a product, cheap cat food, that gets bought only to be dumped on the ground in a manner such that the demand always increases. If I were a cat food manufacturer I would definitely encourage rampant and indiscriminate feeding of feral cats. It's job security.

There have always been cats and there always will be but we don't have to make the problem worse. Intense concentrations of cats in colonies is not normal or healthy. Of course there will be disease under such conditions. If you dumped 100 bobcats in a single parking lot they would tear each other apart as they headed for the hills because millennia of evolution has made them that way, because 100 such predators in such a small area naturally creates a disease hotspot as well as a population crash of prey. When I see a bunch of feral cats at a feeding site I think of human refugee camps. Sure their existence is on some level "natural" but so is death and disease.

These days the food source is mostly cat chow.

Yes, we want the population ceiling height lower.

The idea that neutering a pair of cats means 11,000,000 fewer cats every 9 years is bogus. We never got to 11,000,000 even without neutering. The population level is primarily determined by food availability. The present day practice of FFFtnr (Feed, Feed, Feed) means more cats now than ever.

As long as I can remember the wolves of Isle Royal in Lake Superior have been held up as an example of how predators and prey exist in a rough balance. Prior to the arrival of the wolves over an ice bridge in the 40s the predominant prey base, moose, suffered excessively large boom and bust cycles due to overpopulation and starvation. When the wolves arrived these booms and crashes were reduced. The moose were not eliminated because when their population got low the wolf population was also forced to decline so there was some rough balance. It's not a perfect balance because the populations are so small that inbreeding is a problem but the point is that the wolves were never able to kill off the moose.

Here is another interesting example of wolves and prey on a small island, this time in Alaska:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/...opulation/

This time the wolves have basically driven the deer to extinction because they had another food source, sea otters, that while perhaps not unlimited nevertheless was stable despite wolf predation.

[Wao nahele wahine]

[quote='HiloJulie' pid='347830'

Quoted for preservation.

Did you notice that yes, when virtually two identical screen names began posting, one of them operating under the "hidden mode," as do you, as well as having not posted in over a year until his post, I confused the two. Twice.

Did you notice then, as well, that when I realized my mistake, I apologized.

____________________
Your initial response to me after I pointed out your gender error is basically a fib.  The timestamps show that.  There was no correction BEFORE I posted my comment. Your apparent inability to admitting to making a mistake is rather sad.  If I had made your mistake, I would have chuckled, apologized, and corrected it.  Done deal. 

As to your issues with me being in invisible mode, or the fact that Kane hadn't posted in a year, please explain what that has to do with anything that has happened here.  You denigrate posters whom you ASSUME have not read an entire thread before posting.  And yet, you obviously didn't read Kane's name nor notice my red signature line. 
_____________________
Now, back to the topic.

IMHO, this issue needs to be approached from several angles.  The cats near nene breeding and nesting areas should be trapped and removed.  Those trapped cats with toxoplasmosis need to be separated from the healthy cats.  Clindamycin is commonly used to treat cats with toxoplasmosis.  Every trapped cat should be sterilized.  Whatever methods are used to reduce the feral cat population will take a lot of time and money, and the subsequent effects of those methods on the environment should be desirable.  Whichever side of this debate you are on, we need to figure out a solution in a civil manner.


The paragraphs below are from this link:

https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/blog/2024/05/01/nr24-48/



“They continue to feed the cats, and it doesn’t seem like the loss of the gosling has really made a difference in how often they feed,” commented Raymond McGuire, a wildlife biologist with the DLNR Division of Forestry and Wildlife (DOFAW).

He’s taken it upon himself to remove paper plates full of cat food and dump them in the trash several days a week, several times a day. That’s one action wildlife managers are taking. They’re also working closely with a nonprofit organization to address the continuing rift between cat feeders and wildlife protectors.

“It’s frustrating because I know the community loves the nēnē, here. I got so many phone calls from people who were elated a nēnē hatched in the park. For a month, they (the nēnē family) looked happy, and people were happy because they get to see wildlife in their backyards,” McGuire said.

McGuire says there’s a disconnect between feral cat feeders, who obviously love animals, and their actions that harm and kill wild animals like nēnē. “We don’t want to go after them with fines and citations. But their actions are having a clear effect on our native wildlife and our threatened endangered wildlife. Not just nēnē, but monk seals. And not just toxoplasmosis, but cats attack and eat native birds. We want people to understand there’s a place for these cats. Keep them home. Never abandon a cat,” he said.

Wildlife managers and the people behind a new nonprofit working on the issue ask, “What do you want in the future. Do you want more cat colonies, or do you actually want to see native wildlife in your backyard?”

Jordan Lerma of Nēnē Research and Conservation says his group is trying to shift the conversation and bring both animal-loving sides together to find solutions. The nonprofit previously worked to facilitate discussions with cat groups after interactions at Queen’s Marketplace at Waikoloa reached a boiling point. Heated encounters with officers from the DLNR Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement (DOCARE), and dozens of people who’d been feeding cats regularly, ended with a reduction of cat and nene interactions in the area.