Sigh - the NSW politics thread

Never said they weren’t, just argued that the claim that they’re responsible for 1/4 of animal extinctions since recorded history started was total bullshit and it is.

My cats have a run, I own my home.

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reptiles, birds and mammals are not the only animals and 1600 isn’t even close to the start of recorded history.

These numbers do not make sense to me, are they saying that only 81 species of mammals have gone extinct globally in the past 425 years and 42% of them were in Australia?

I struggle to believe the number of mammal extinctions is that small globally.

EDIT: And yet Wikipedia seems to back up your data, I’m shocked, but better informed now.

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Blink thrice if a cat has a gun to your head right now.

I think what everyone is forgetting is both dogs and cats have been introduced and domesticated in this country.
There’s no more native cats since we killed off the Thylacine.
The dingo is our native dog yet that’s the one most people see as a pest.

There’s a big argument happening up here at the moment about wild dogs/dingoes and their impact in the environment.
Farmers hate them because they kill cattle.
Environmentalists like them because they kill deer and wild pigs.

Not for one moment have I seen anyone finding a positive in cats in regards to environmental impact.

My cat is very good at eradicating the local cockroach and spider population.

I encourage her to continue to keep our house spider and roach free.

Just this evening a 8-legged cunt made the mistake of entering our bathroom.

That 8-legged cunt is now regretting its decision. I thought she might eat the bastard, but she decided playing keep uppies with it was her entertainment for the night until she got bored and decided to join me on the couch.

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Millions of years of independent evolution, then tens of thousands of years of stable indigenous land management, have been overturned in 250 years. We’ve done a proper number on the place.

There were mammalian extinctions when humans first entered the continent (and same for the Americas) and there’s debate what mix of overhunting by people and the later introduction of dingoes should account for that. You can see that, in those thousands of years, the native species that survived have co-evolved to survive alongside the dingo, and maybe the same thing will happen with feral cats, but not before we lose a hell of a lot of marsupials.

If you think about it, proper human expansion has only really been around during the industrialization as cities and communities spread and we suddenly started wiping out entire habitats that could contained vey localized animals. The biggest effects generally occur in island locations where you have animals like the Dodo and Tasmanian Tiger that have a very constrained habitat and don’t generally have natural predators or competition for resources. Introducing new species into these small environments will generally have the greatest affect.

It’s only really been the past 150 years in which humans have rapidly expanded and required more room, resources etc and properly started competing the wildlife. Extinction previously hasn’t exactly been a quick process, although lately it’s definitely increasing speed.

The exception being megafauna, which disappear around the same time as human habitation in the archaeological record.

You do know that Huntsman spiders will kill cockroaches and other spiders, yeah?

Your cat is an introduced pest, the spider is not.

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Apparently dogs were domesticated by near Eastern hunter gatherers at the same time the goat was domesticated as well & cats were domesticated about the same time as mankind started planting crops because they were attracted to the rats that were eating them ( the crops ).