Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/09/limit-the-spread-of-coronaviru.html
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Another reason to keep your cat indoors is that the local predators may be a little more aggressive–now that the streets are quieter. For instance, coyotes have been spotted in Toronto’s ravines and the occasional park before the current unpleasantness; now my neighbors have spotted them on nearby streets.
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I’m limiting the spread of Coronavirus right now!
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Yep. It’s long pissed me off that so many cat owners are so cavalier about helping with the decimation of various bird populations. Keep that efficient little killing machine inside ALL the time.
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My murderous kitty doesn’t go out anymore because I prefer not to find chipmunk heads, feathers and entrails on my patio.
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Not to mention crapping over people’s gardens and spreading toxo.
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Maybe Samuel L. Jackson needs to record another book; “Keep Your Cat the F**k In!”
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I’ve read a couple of articles that detail that pets can also catch COVID, dogs can get it but the virus grows inefficiently in them. Cats also catch it and it grows much more efficiently in them. However its currently not understood if infected pets can transmit the virus to owners, but to be on the safe side be careful with your pets.
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Always disturbing to find those chipmunk feathers on the patio.
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Chirpy little buggers.
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Oh, I don’t know about that. We have a Cat Genie and haven’t had to touch cat shit or smelly litter for years. I can’t speak highly enough about this wonderful machine.
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I really doubt transmission by outdoor cat is a statistically relevant method of coronavirus transmission. The current best evidence seems to suggest that direct transmission of respiratory droplets (i.e., sick person coughs near you, lands on your face or hands) is by far the most common form of transmission, and while intermediate touch points like doorknobs and railings are possible vectors of transmission, they are not driving the epidemic. Transmission via cat seems much less likely than doorknobs both because of the mechanics of transmission (the virus can get more easily trapped in cat fur rather than on a hard surface where it is easy to pick up and especially since the outdoor cats I know don’t really wander up to random people and beg to be scratched.
So keeping your cat inside is something you can do out of an abundance of caution but is probably one of the less significant things you can do. Killing wildlife on the other hand does seem like a pretty good reason to keep domestic cats indoors coronavirus or not.
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It hasn’t yet been demonstrated, AFAIK, but I’m going on the assumption that if a cat can carry the virus, then a human can catch it from a cat. I don’t know about anyone else, but at our house we have an embarrassing amount of close contact with our cats’ faces. And cats do sneeze sometimes, too. So I am treating this as a real risk; if it turns out not to be one, great.
We’re keeping them inside because of that, and also because I don’t need them getting into any fights and having a veterinary emergency at the worst possible time.
As for the bird-killing issue… here’s a good isolation/underemployment project for me. I’ve long suspected that pet cats are given far, far too much blame for declining bird populations.
Meanwhile we gloss over insecticides (killing many birds’ food supply), pollution (air, water, noise, light), climate change, habitat destruction, hunting, and other human factors. (Wait, hunting… songbirds? Yes, yes indeed.)
But it’s only a suspicion, a hunch that people who dislike cats have latched onto one or two inconclusive or outright shoddy studies. So off I go to read some studies. If anyone has links to any that seem particularly solid, please post.
ETA: after some initial reading, it turns out most studies on the subject focus on feral cats, not pets. A well-known one that looks at both notes in its abstract that “Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality.” I’m all for controlling or eradicating feral cats (as well as dogs and pigs, all great destroyers).
While not a rigorous study, I find this short article interesting, especially given the source.
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Ah, I hadn’t seen the bit about cats actually getting infected, it sounded like this article was suggesting cats acting as passive carriers: just with the virus sticking around on their fur from human contact. That I still find to be pretty low probability. If cats can actually be infected (and it seems that at least some cats can) and pass the virus back to humans, then that would be a more realistic scenario, and probably good enough reason to keep cats inside, although I still think that most outdoor cats are pretty accustomed to social distancing anyway at least from humans. Possibly a bigger case would be my cat infects your cat that goes home and infects you.
Good point about feral cats probably being a much more prevalent killer of animals and of course humans remain supreme in any case. Only humans would clear and pave miles of natural habitat to build a city and then blame cats for killing the birds left in the tiny park areas they left behind.
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Most of the impact of predators on wildlife populations is down to the change in behaviour and stress levels in the prey species. Simply counting kills is insufficient when the dominant effect in populations is down to reduced fertility. The (flawed) argument is used in reverse to justify how killing a few top predators won’t have much impact on the prey species they keep under control, but it does.
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Passing coyotes would be cool, but this…!
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According to the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, there is no evidence that cats are responsible for the decline in British songbird populations. Most of the birds they kill are weak, sick or otherwise unlikely to survive to the next breeding season.
Of course, it should be noted that cats are native to Great Britain (the domestic cat may not be, but the native wildcat is close enough that the two are sometimes considered to be the same species and can interbreed to produce fertile offspring). Meanwhile, in most of North America the smallest native cat is the bobcat.
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But…some cats seem to be made of rubber! And they meeeeeeoooow!! And if you’re the household member they pick, you get a best friend for about 15 years! And they push stuff, precious stuff, off high places, and they’re so hilarious about it, you forgive them! And some of them never stop making squawking noises and actually will argue with you when you try to push them off the newspaper! And they trip you while you’re climbing or descending stairs, and you don’t mind!
Sometimes, if they’re really attached to you, they follow you around, inside or out, keeping a steady stream of what seems like cat conversation going and they don’t stop EVER! The same really attached ones understand if you say, “Bed time!” and run up the stairs to jump between your split legs that you keep that way because that’s their favorite spot, all night.
So, c’mon, cats are pretty cool.
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