Take that, cat lovers.

Hey, hey, hey! Suki was born and bred right here in God Bless America USA #1! She's as American as I am.

Also Missourian as well, so win-win double bingo champion :)
 
But on the other hand there are Mexican chiwawa's who jump the border to steal American love.

So on average dogs are just average.
 
That's complete crap. Almost no other species of animal is as deeply connected to human development as the dog.

I'm not saying you have to personally like them, but attempting to pretend they're just like racoons or deer or something is ridiculous.
 
AlpsStranger said:
That's complete crap. Almost no other species of animal is as deeply connected to human development as the dog.
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Couple of things:

Since you phrased it: almost no other species, you don't consider what I claimed as: complete crap, since there certainly is overlap if you allow room for other species.

Second, you measure love as the way the animal's ancestors where connected to human development? Then we have different parameters, since I judge how a single animal reacts to a single individual.

I'm not saying you have to personally like them, but attempting to pretend they're just like racoons or deer or something is ridiculous.
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Again, couple of things:

First, I love dogs. In fact I love most pets.

Second, I am not pretending they're like raccoons or deer or even some thing, claiming I did is as you say: ridiculous.

What I did say is: when it comes to love the dog stands with a whole lot of other happy species in the area you mentioned.
What I didn't say: when it comes to love the dog stands with the aardvark, the blue whale and weevils in the area you mentioned.

I was talking about species which are regularly used as pets and have the ability to show just as much affection to their owner as dogs do.
 
Ziggy Stardust said:
How does this distinguish cats from other animals? Dogs also kill things. The little yapper my girfriends parents have will hunt, dig out and kill rabbits. And what do you recon is that red-meaty substance in their food?

And the cats may have the image to be ruthless hunters, but a horizon program a couple of weeks ago showed that the domestication of cats means that most cats get their food variety from raiding other cat's food trays. Following 50 cats for a week resulted in 15 dead animals found. that is 1 kill every 3 weeks.
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You can't cat-proof a yard. You can dog-proof one. Dogs are confined to a space in which there isn't any native wildlife. Cats don't tend to have boundaries, and also have a greater tendency to go after birds that might fly into a yard.

I should add, I did have a scarring experience as a child; my sister and I found an injured bird and nursed it back to health, before releasing it, at which point next door's cat promptly poached it right in front of us. I'm unsure as to whether this colours my opinion. :p Though I don't dislike cats, especially kittens. I don't think anyone can dislike kittens. It's just that they do have a fairly notorious effect on the local environment, whereas dogs don't.
 
Dunno. Never let my cats outside. Never have. Can't really, seeing as they both had the tendency to accidentally scratch my wife who takes enough warfarin to kill a horse, because I had the pointy bits of their hands chopped off at the knuckles.
 
Note to all the cat-lovers in the thread: We're having a flood in my province that's affected a huge area. One of the news stories is about Momo the Cat who was recorded jumping off her human's truck and swimming to shore when the truck was swept away by the floodwaters. Both she and her human are fine. :goodjob:

I remember when I first saw this story; it wasn't until later that we knew for sure the cat was okay.
 
A dog would have pulled the owner to safety by grabbing his shirt in his teeth and swimming to shore. As usual, the cat just looked out for #1.

Edit:
See disclosure in post below.
 
Shooting would have stopped when the cat first hit the water, used its demonic antigravity energy to levitate itself back out of the water and attach itself to the trainers face with its claws.

Disclosure:
Valka & PE
I AM JOKING AND IN NO WAY ACTUALLY MEAN THESE THINGS. IF EITHER OF YOU FREAK OUT ON ME THEN IT'S ON LIKE DONKEY KONG.
:lol:
 
:rolleyes:

Did you bother reading the article? The human and his cat are extremely attached to each other. The human considers the cat to be his child. The cat loves water, and often hops in the tub/shower with her human. So she wasn't scared to jump into the water, per se. But she did know she was swimming for her life.

This incident of the truck being swept away happened very suddenly, it's extremely frightening, and both of them are incredibly lucky to be alive.

(no, I have no sense of humor about this; several people have died due to the flooding, and thousands will be homeless)
 
Camikaze said:
I should add, I did have a scarring experience as a child; my sister and I found an injured bird and nursed it back to health, before releasing it, at which point next door's cat promptly poached it right in front of us. I'm unsure as to whether this colours my opinion. :p
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From another perspective, that cat was reminding you that you can't always pump the brakes on the circle of life.

Not going to lie, the image of your story makes me giggle.
 
Ziggy Stardust said:
That's the second time you made that claim. This time I'll just counter with: no they don't.
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Yes, they do Ziggy. First hit on google for 'cats kill wildlife':

Cats Kill Billions of Animals Annually, Study Finds
Cats are responsible for the deaths of 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.9 to 20.7 billion mammals every year, according to research conducted by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
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And this is just in the US.
"It's hard to know," Dr. Peter Marra, research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and co-author of the study, told ABC News. "We think there are 15 to 20 billion adult land birds in the U.S. If we are suggesting 2.3 billion are killed annually, that means 1 in 10 birds are taken by cats every year."
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“The results were certainly surprising, if not startling,” said Kerrie Anne Loyd of the University of Georgia, who was the lead author of the study. “In Athens-Clarke County, we found that about 30 percent of the sampled cats were successful in capturing and killing prey, and that those cats averaged about one kill for every 17 hours outdoors or 2.1 kills per week. It was also surprising to learn that cats only brought 23 percent of their kills back to a residence. We found that house cats will kill a wide variety of animals, including: lizards, voles, chipmunks, birds, frogs, and small snakes.”

And it's not like they respect the label 'endangered species'.
Playing "cat and mouse" might be fun for Scruffy, but her game is not fair to wildlife, including species that may be threatened or endangered such as the Kirtland's Warbler. Unlike predators such as red-tailed hawks, raccoons, and gray foxes, domestic cats are not a natural part of America's ecosystems. In fact, pet cats did not even exist in this country until the early European settlers brought them here. People wanted cats to eat mice and rats around their farms, but nobody guessed how much trouble cats could cause beyond the barnyard.

Domestic cats, officially considered an invasive species, kill a lot of wildlife. "Exact numbers are unknown, but scientists estimate that nationwide, cats kill hundreds of millions of birds, and more than a billion small mammals, such as rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks, each year. One cat alone can kill up to 1000 small animals per year. This might not be such a big deal except that there are now about 70 million outdoor cats in the United States. With so many cats on the hunt, some small animal species are even in danger of extinction. In southern Florida, for instance, cats have taken a toll on remaining populations of endangered Lower Keys marsh rabbits and Key Largo woodrats.
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Here's the impact of cats in Britain:
Cats kill 275 million other animals a year


More fun facts:
The two main diseases that cat owners should be wary of are toxoplasmosis and rabies. Cats often become carriers of toxoplasmosis by killing and eating infected prey. Though most cats become immune to the disease, it poses significant health risks to pregnant women and those with a weakened immune system. Currently, more than 60 million Americans carry the disease, according to the Centre for Disease Control.

Due, in part, to their close contact with wild animals and humans, rabies in cats is on the rise and rabid cats were reported at three times the rate of rabid dogs, according to the CDC.
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Love this tidbit:
Amy Watts of Athens, Ga., thought she knew her cat, Booker T, but when scientists put a little camera on the kitty, it captured carnage.

"He's the cutest little serial killer you will ever meet." Watts told ABC News' Dan Harris.
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Here's a snippet about their impact on New Zealand. I've read other articles that had far more but I don't feel the need to dig further on it. Apparently, however, they are really screwing up NZ.
"Cats need to go," says Gareth Morgan, a 59-year-old businessman who is trying his hand at being a rich philanthropist. But his current mission places him at the center of a global controversy. Morgan isn't calling for the killing of cats, even though he says that this might be "an option." With his "Cats to Go" campaign, Morgan is merely asking his fellow New Zealanders, out of consideration for threatened fauna, not to replace their cats when they die.

Morgan is convinced that New Zealand's wildlife would be better off without the fluffy killers. The cities would be filled with birdsong, penguins could waddle across the beach without fear -- and kiwi birds, not cats, would walk through the gardens. Evolution did not provide New Zealand with any land-based predators and, as a result, its indigenous species are simply no match for cats. Nevertheless, New Zealanders are among the world's most cat-friendly people. Almost half of the country's 1.7 million households cater to at least one domestic feline.
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The house cat has long been listed among the 100 most dangerous invasive species. It originated in the Middle East, where, as an indoor hunter, it managed to endear itself to humans thousands of years ago. Once it enjoyed human protection, the cat expanded into every corner of the earth.

Especially on islands, cats, along with rats, have done irreparable damage to the ecosystem. The Guadalupe Caracara didn't survive its encounter with the cat, nor did the Hawaiian Rail. Cats have contributed to the extinction of at least 22 species of birds on islands alone.
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Yeah, they kill pests but also anything else they can catch. I don't see them as a particularly effective pest control system either in many cases given the collateral damage vis a vis damage to the environment and the dangerous diseases they spread.
 
How many worms do those birds kill? Birds clearly have a detrimental effect on their environment.

How many animals are killed each year to support dogs?

Vis a vis damage :)
We Can't Quatify the Cat Factor'But proving the cats' guilt is a tricky problem. The populations of many species, such as the house sparrow, are declining. Perhaps cats are partly to blame. But the common chiffchaff is doing splendidly, even though it's at the top of the predators' hit list. Blackbird populations are declining in some regions, but for a different reason: the Usutu virus, which comes from Africa, is raging within its ranks, killing hundreds of thousands."We can't quantify the cat factor," says Lindeiner. Of course the cat plays a role in the daily killings, but just how fateful that role is when it comes to the future prospects of a given species remains a mystery.
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