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Cats...


wiggyrichard

Love them or loathe them?  

226 members have voted

  1. 1. Love them or loathe them?

    • Love, they're so cute & cuddly!
      146
    • They're shite & should be considered vermin!
      85


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  • 3 weeks later...

So Gilbert comes home today after being gone almost 2 days, meowing and limping.  A visit to the veterinary emergency room at $600 reveals a broken hip.  They recommend surgery that will likely cost $3000-$4500.   Doing nothing will lead to impaired mobility and a life of arthritis.  He's only a little over a year old, so that's a long life of suffering, and our daughter will go ballistic if we tell her we're not getting him fixed up.  This cat is a wanderer in a high traffic area that has coyotes roaming at night, so I can see him getting hit by a car or eaten by a coyote withing months of us spending a fortune on him.   After these cats pass on maybe we'll stick to goldfish...

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On 15/07/2018 at 07:35, il_serpente said:

.   After these cats pass on maybe we'll stick to goldfish...

Or just spend a few quid a month on pet insurance! 

Too late for this occasion, but it's well worth it to get out of this position of having to weigh up how much your pet's health is worth.

Edited by Davkaus
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Our youngest is a right terror, or should I say he's just being a cat. Great bird catcher, and I recognise the noises now. Heard the same noise the other day, and thought, he's got another bird. Looked out of the back window, and he had. Managed to save a mouse the other day. Eventually diverted it out of the house by opening the door for it(the sod never even said thank you). As well pleased until it ran under our car, and our eldest cat was there and grabbed it. Went after the cat, and luckily with him being a softy, he kept letting the mouse go. The mouse played dead, and I grabbed it by the tail, and put him somewhere out of the way so it could escape. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
37 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

the Cat was walking up and down along the keys having the time of it's life ...... its why cats are cooler than dogs , all dogs can do is say "sausages"

 

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Was walking down the street with family a few years ago and a dog comes barreling down the hallway and through an open front door barking at us.

Little did resident dog know, resident cat was napping on the front porch, and took offense to being awoken so rudely, so this cat has just gone straight up to the dog and bopped him one on the head. The dog shut up immediately.

Good times.

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On ‎15‎/‎07‎/‎2018 at 02:35, il_serpente said:

So Gilbert comes home today after being gone almost 2 days, meowing and limping.  A visit to the veterinary emergency room at $600 reveals a broken hip.  They recommend surgery that will likely cost $3000-$4500.   Doing nothing will lead to impaired mobility and a life of arthritis.  He's only a little over a year old, so that's a long life of suffering, and our daughter will go ballistic if we tell her we're not getting him fixed up.  This cat is a wanderer in a high traffic area that has coyotes roaming at night, so I can see him getting hit by a car or eaten by a coyote withing months of us spending a fortune on him.   After these cats pass on maybe we'll stick to goldfish...

Can you purchase pet insurance over there?

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9 hours ago, maqroll said:

Can you purchase pet insurance over there?

I think you can.   I'd never heard of it before reading about it on VT.   My wife was familiar with it, though.   Her argument is that over 25 years of owning cats she would have spent way more on insurance than we've just spent getting him repaired.   As long as you can absorb the big hit when it happens, it's probably more cost effective in the long run to not have the insurance.  On the other hand, with insurance you don't have to do the cost-benefit analysis of getting them fixed when bad things happen.

On a side note, I just got back from a block party and a woman from down the street came up to me and asked what had happened to Gilbert.  Several others were very interested to hear the story and they all started sharing Gilbert anecdotes.  Turns out our little guy is a bit of a celebrity on our block and well-loved.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Controversial, and yet I can see why.  Cats are lovely and all that, but when they're outside they're a **** disaster for biodiversity.

New Zealand council plans to ban all pet cats

That headline should probably read "A council in New Zealand ..."

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Don't go to New Zealand if you're a cat person.

cats7.jpg

There are loads of cat lovers in Ireland.

Sure, they probably don't get the same love as dogs, but who does?

Either way, we don't think people would want to get rid of them entirely.

Well, a new initiative in Omaui, in the Southland region of New Zealand wants to do just that.

The initiative, proposed by Environment Southland, wants cat owners to neuter, microchip, and register their cat with local authorities.

Then, once their pet dies, they will not be allowed to get any more.

 
 

Seems a little harsh...

The reason for this is that cats in the area are responsible for the deaths of millions of birds, insects, reptiles and mammals every year.

Biosecurity operations manager Ali Meade told Newshub that: "There's cats getting into the native bush; they're preying on native birds, they're taking insects, they're taking reptiles - all sorts of things. They're doing quite a bit of damage."

Environment Southland are keen to stress they're "not cat haters" but they're trying to promote "responsible pet ownership" and that Omaui is really not a place for cats.

Speaking about the ban, Meade said: "Your cat can live out its natural life at Omaui happily doing what it's doing. But when it dies, you wouldn't be able to replace it."

We wonder if we could do this with those really brave pigeons in Dublin. They're getting far too big for their boots...

 

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14 hours ago, BOF said:

Controversial, and yet I can see why.  Cats are lovely and all that, but when they're outside they're a **** disaster for biodiversity.

 

By this rationale, surely they should be banning all humans.

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Thats the biggest load of BS I have ever read.

Cats are preying on Bugs? and other insects ? Like these bugs and other insects dont have any natural predators that prey on them, its all the cats fault ?

Birds dont have any other natural predators either ? like hawks or possoms, thats all down to the cats as well ?

Using that logic maybe we should ban cats all over the world so the insects can be left alone.What about cars ! they cause a lot of deaths and maim people all over the world.Maybe we should ban cars as well as cats.

This is the sort of logic I would expect from a government/council where the members have tatoos on their faces.

  

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Like these bugs and other insects dont have any natural predators that prey on them, its all the cats fault ?

Birds dont have any other natural predators either ? like hawks or possoms, thats all down to the cats as well ?

Well, yes, but in a natural ecosystem.

Insects and  birds get eaten by their natural predators. If those predators over breed or over eat, the dwindling population of their prey restricts their food sources, and the number of predators begin to dwindle. Their prey can thrive again for a short time, and their numbers swell. So the predators find it easier to find food. and so on.

That doesn't work so much when the predator is an animal that hunts for fun, rather than survival, because they can waddle off home and eat their free food, at no risk of over hunting. Domestic cats do huge damage to natural ecosystems. It doesn't just affect the insects and birds they eat, it affects the predators of those animals who have to compete with cats for their food.

It's not just one council going off half-cocked. In Canada for example they've been encouraging people to keep pet cats as indoor only animals to protect the local ecosystems. The RSPCA encourages cats to be either kept indoors, or to at least have collars with bells fitted to reduce cats' success when hunting.

Edited by Davkaus
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55 minutes ago, PussEKatt said:

Thats the biggest load of BS I have ever read.

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Cats take a hefty toll on Australia’s reptiles – killing an estimated 649 million of them every year, including threatened species – according to our new research published in the journal Wildlife Research.

This follows the earlier discovery that cats take a similarly huge chunk out of Australian bird populations. As we reported last year, more than a million Australian birds are killed by cats every day. Since their introduction to Australia, cats have also driven many native mammal speciesextinct.

 

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Cats are atrocious for natural wildlife. I'm not surprised somewhere like New Zealand, with a very unique ecology and one that is very unused to creatures like cats being in it, is encouraging there to be less of them.

It's a practice that should spread. Cats are vile.

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I can only go by my owne experiance with our cats.If you look at page 35 in this thread you will see that one of our cats caught a mouse and as soon as we had seen it the cat (Mr Grump ) let it go.As for our other cat (Chloepop ) she chases white butterflies sometimes and if she catches one she will eat it.Im sure this is not doing any real harm to the enviroment or to the balance of nature.I still find it hard to believe that cats will eat insects in any great quantity. 

In New Zealand, duck hunting and pig hunting is very popular, surely this is harming the natural  inviroment more than cats !?

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