I can see why people wouldn't want to get their cats fixed, but stories like this make me feel like there needs to be population control.

https://www.lovemeow.com/kittens-stop-sign-rescue-kindness-2633070769.amp.html?__twitter_impression=true

A lot of pets end up getting put down because people don't.. cats aren't like dogs who are always on a leash or in a house, they get up to stuff you don't know about

@AnotherYeti :)

what a coicidence, I was just reading an article about a plan to exterminate cat populations on a number of islands in the Pacific

because they have such a huge adverse impact on the ecologies

Killing birds and such?

most Pacific islands have unique species of birds which are very susceptible to invasive species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_crow

How did the cats get onto the islands?

Are they inhabited?

explorers brought them

a lot of seafaring ships used cats to keep their rat populations in check

they also brought pigs, which are another huge problem on the islands

pigs are hugely destructive to ecologies

They are? I knew cats could be, but didn't think pigs or boars were that destructive

(To the environment I mean)

they eat a lot, shit a whooole bunch, and trample giant areas, they are quite literally destructive

so the cats are killing the native animals/birds, and the pigs are destroying the local plant life

double whammy

wild pigs can eat anywhere from 5 to 10 pounds of food in a day

thats a lot of biomass on an island

Would their excrement not also be useful for fertilizer to help the recovery of that biomass?

sort of, its a common misconception that all poop is good 😛

its really a question of how much

some poop is good, a lot of poop is toxic

too much of a good thing I suppose you could call it

plus if the pigs eliminate too much of the ground cover foliage the island is more susceptible to storms and high winds

so storm damage is increased

I would have thought trees and such would be the main barriers against storms

not for the topsoil

I guess in Lost there's no way there would only be those few boars for hunting.. they'd be everywhere considering how long they'd been there

ground cover foliage protects the topsoil from run off, literally being swept into the ocean

kind of like what caused the dust bowl in the American Midwest

but more water and less dust

if nothing is holding the soil in place it just drains right into the ocean

So basically the island would just be turned into a mini desert

yes

the foundation for life is grasses and low-lying bushes

they proliferate and secure the soil, allowing for more complex ecologies and larger foliage