I’m about to go on a two week trip to a bunch of places I’ve never been before! I’m super excited! Been watching a lot of the Katmai bear cam of the salmon run while I work on packing and some last minute chores. I’m excited to visit some places that are a bit more accepting of trans people than where I currently live, too.

Congratulations!! I am so happy your loved ones are accepting!

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I’m a six foot turkey.

The new direction is more than fair honestly. I both really appreciate and sympathize with the need to point out that these hostile bad faith responses are upsetting. For a long time, commentary on attack dogging a forum has had to sidestep the issue that having to deal with this shit is emotionally draining. It’s reasonable that there is a place for eveyrone at the table but the chairs have an emergency eject for diners who start throwing food. It’s bad enough that everyone still eating has to finish their meal with a mess everywhere.

OP is providing sources for all their information. Disagreeing with it doesn’t make it false.

You can’t compare animals and humans, though. I know we love our pets like children but that’s just not how this works. A lot of work has been put into the behavioral science of enriching an indoor cat’s environment but for some reason it gets entirely disregarded when it comes to the idea that your cat doesn’t belong outside.

It is not, as has also already been mentioned.

All I look for Is a willingness to speak to others in good faith and for there to be a referee intervention when that isn’t respected. “Safe space” has been so twisted and ridiculed that it’s hard to use it and not feel some of the inflection of entitlement that’s been imparted to it. Safe for me is an end to needless hostility in conversation and being able to talk without someone else launching a curio cabinet of their favorite ad hominems at you. So far I’ve found beehaw to be a bit more in line with this than tildes, but both communities have a lot of room left to establish what they want to be.

…You are agreeing with me. Sapience is what you are describing. Cats are sentient, not sapient.

The proposal being made is to keep your pet cat(s) indoors. That’s it.

My point was not to cull or relocate cats. My point was that cats have a lot of cultural factors boosting their numbers that other invasive species don’t.

Humans are sapient. Your cat is not. Treating your cat by human standards is not fair to the cat.

In the end, it’s a numbers game. Wild populations of cats around the world don’t hold a candle to the amount of domestic cats. That’s what ends up making it so damaging to wildlife. There’s no shortage of people enabling cat populations either. It’s inevitable when the animals in question are so cherished by humanity. Feral pigs would be another case of domesticated animals ruining habitats and killing wildlife. They are routinely destroyed, and for good reason. With cats, you’re far more likely to see someone feeding a feral population than gunning them down the way hogs are. It’s just the reality of our attachment.

What’s cruel is having a pet you never interact with or care for. Inflicting your cat on your neighborhood is just a different kind of cruelty altogether - as is dropping your domesticated animal into a dangerous environment unsupervised. It’s not a zero sum game where the cat is either indoors and tortured or outdoors and fulfilled. You can provide more than adequate enrichment with a modest investment of time and money. Insisting on the misery of your cat to persist is ironically the true projection of human emotion here.

Honest question to anyone who disagrees: many small animals are kept inside their entire lives. Is this torture? Do you look down on those who own small animals?

Thought on it is split. This article has some decent citations on for and against as well as ways to keep an indoor cat more than happy:

https://www.toe-beans.com/blogs/pet-blog/case-for-against-bells

My personal experience with years of pet sitting and just being familiar with many different cat personalities is that it can help, but it can also be adapted around and does nothing for the other major risks of being outdoors. They will still try to hunt wildlife. A baby bird, for example, probably won’t get to observe the significance of a cat bell before meeting one in a close encounter.

Or to come into contact with coyotes and raccoons.

It’s also just ultimately selfish to not put the work in to provide indoor enrichment. Of course it’s not an easy adjustment when the cat is used to being outdoors, but it’s doable. Just requires some effort on the part of the owner.

Yeah, I really cannot stress enough just how upsetting it is to clean up dead kittens. All the dead baby animals are upsetting but it hits different when it’s a kitten.

I love birds. I have a couple myself but I also put considerable time and effort into making my garden a place for them to visit. I’m sure you know where this is going.

I hate that there’s nothing I can do to keep cats out of the yard. I hate that people are too lazy to provide enrichment for their pet indoors and feel entitled to inflict it upon the neighborhood instead. I have had to clean up dead kittens who got hit and crawled under my car to die. I have had to clean up full dead families of birds I rarely get to see anymore who I somehow lucked into enticing them to nest nearby. I have found full nests of dead newborn rabbits with my lawn mower because they had been left scattered dead in tall grass and already teeming with maggots in the summer sun.

I don’t understand why all of this has to be my problem. There is quite simply nothing good about letting cats outdoors. If they’re not fixed, they create kittens who end up dead. If someone tries to control their hunting with a bell on the collar, they just adapt and go on killing. They shit and fight and die miserable deaths, and for what? Why are people so stubborn and just straight up mean when it comes to keeping your pet indoors? You can show someone the statistics and point them to resources for indoor enrichment and they get mad about it. I don’t get it.

The hostility was exhausting and constant, but equally so was knowing I would have to bake in a bunch of qualifiers into my post to try to head off common bad faith arguments at the pass. When you’re doing this for the very real problems you’re having just existing in society as a minority, it’s absolutely soul-sucking. Even if you know it’s by design, you’re still just one person dealing with a lot of weighty garbage in real life who then has to deal with redditor JAQing/name calling/strawmanning the minute you try to talk about it to try to offset even a fraction of the emotional burden.

I am pretty happy to watch reddit die. Less happy when I think about how this can further distill the abuse within a lot of current discourse.