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Old October 30th, 2005, 04:45 PM
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LM1313 LM1313 is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Spokane, WA
Posts: 819
Quote:
Originally Posted by CyberKitten
Seriously, you must live in a 100 yr old house or a very dirty one to have rodents. I know not one neighbour or friend who has seen a rodent in their homes. It is very unusual in an urban area unless someone is very unclean and their premises draws rodents and insects.

And I am with Lucky. I hope your cats are up do date on their deworming meds as well as other vaccinations because eating rodents is a great way to come into contact with all manner of disease.

That has to be the worst excuse yet I have heard for allowing a cat outdoors!! (Unless you live on a farm and want feral cats for your barn but a barn in Calgary? I think not).

My parents have mice outside and their house was built in the 50s or 60s . . . and the yard and house are definitely clean! My mom's rather obsessive about cleaning, actually . . . The mice live in the woodpile by the fence and in the neighbor's garden. Also, my mom puts sesame seeds out for the squirrels . . . well, you can guess who sneaks them!

Phantom does catch mice occassionally, which is great. It always bugged me on the Tom & Jerry cartoons how you were supposed to sympathize with Jerry. Yeah . . . poooor little mousie spreading the hantavirus everywhere.

Regarding birds, I was reading something interesting on a website about crows the other day. Crows eat eggs and nestlings, but if you drive the crows away from an area, the number of small birds eaten does not go down because the birds/eggs that would have been eaten by crows are just eaten by other animals, like raccoons and skunks, instead. In our area, having a dog or cat in the yard probably results in less birdie deaths in that particular location since it keeps the wild predators out.

Quote:
Cats who kill for fun and cats who kill for food would select completely different birds. And the cats would need a predator too if you want survival of the fittest. These house cats are getting energy on the side- that's not Darwin. That's like saying "Give the cheetah steriods and see if the gazelles can out run him then!" You know what I mean? A cat who has tiny birds and mice as their sole energy source will be much slower and catch way less prey than the ones who go home and get to eat 500kcal of food.
That's true . . . the cats are at "full power" all the time. On the other hand, there are bird feeders everywhere around here, so the birds should be at full power too.

I'm amazed Phantom ever catches anything anyway. She learned her hunting methods from the dog as a kitten, so her technique is to sneak a little ways, then break into a run while fifteen feet away . . .

~LM~