When you find enough suicidal people to establish “cat hunter” as a profession and they survive long enough to make it a competition.

Every cat lover with a gun would be out hunting them back.

The parent comment was created by dog people attempting to move the Overton window.

Cats were not domesticated, they opted to coexist with a overly invasive species and have been doing pretty okay because of that, perhaps advocates of felinocide would be interested in joining VHEMT to address the root of what bothers them.

>kill billions of native birds every year.

what is wrong with killing billions of ill and old birds? That is how Nature works, and the other predators do it in the non-developed areas where humans didn't push out those predators from. In the developed areas the other predators are gone, so thanks to the cats who do the necessary job of all those missing predators.

>They're an invasive species in most states

Do you see many native predators around humans? If anything the humans is the invasive species doing pretty much all the damage.

The thing with cats is that people think they have a cat problem when in fact they have a rodent problem that the cats keep in check.

Then they go, eradicate the cats, and wonder where the rats and mice come from. It's called the "mesopredator problem" in ecology, and it's a massive issue when you want to restore ocean islands for birds.

I mean - we do sort of. We just TNR them (trap, neuter, release), because we don't have much appetite to euthanize fuzzy cute animals we see as pets.

Sadly, it looks like the program is struggling to find funding: https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/breaking-the-news/...

One of the most effective techniques we use for mosquito population control is to actually breed infertile mosquitoes and release them out in the wild. When mosquitoes breed they will end up laying infertile eggs

I wonder if we could do the same with other species or if the destructiveness pythons exhibit in their much longer lifespans makes this equation work out very differently

If responsible cat owners wouldn’t let them out of the house, then this wouldn’t be a problem

> They're an invasive species in most states and kill billions of native birds every year.

That's fine. Humans exterminated most of the native felines on the North American continent, so we're just re-introducing some of them.

Well first, I think there would need to be cat hunters. I don’t think there are.

Second, we’ve decided as a society that a particular set of animals are ones we love and protect. Dogs, cats, horses, etc. So it’s very unlikely any hunter of this class of animal would be palatable to our society. Maybe in another country where they don’t view this class of animal in the same way.

Third, I am totally in agreement that cats kill so many birds every year. We keep our cat indoors for this reason.

It might just be an urban legend, but I have heard that some American soldiers sent to Afghanistan were told that shooting stray dogs would help their reputation with locals. I think rabies is a prevalent problem in that part of the world, so it seems plausible.