> They’re certainly noisy, and they defecate on people and property with abandon (and in great volume—a pigeon produces a hefty 25 pounds of excrement per year), but you can say the same about lots of animals.
No you really can't, I have never been shat on by any wild animal besides a pigeon. What animal besides a pigeon shits on a statue so much it visibly coats it in a layer, squirrels certainly don't.
>Is it ethical for me to have a cat, when cats are obligate carnivores that not only have to eat meat but also independently kill billions of birds a year?
Properly-kept housecats stay inside and don't kill any birds. I suspect the vast majority of those bird deaths are caused by feral cats, not pets (though of course, most ferals probably are or descend from pets that were abandoned or escaped). Our society could be doing a better job with dealing with feral animals like this, because they are bad for ecosystems; they're basically invasive predators.
Bird-killing aside, the environmental impact of pets is actually pretty staggering. It's probably worse for dogs too, since they're much larger animals on average.
>The megafauna that existed on planet Earth just 200, 500, and 12,000 years ago were far more numerous than the number of livestock cows today.
Citation needed. Yes, there were millions of buffalo on the American plains 1000+ years ago, but a quick Google search shows there's over 94 million cows in America today. Also, from what I've read, there are more plains now than in the past, because forests were destroyed by humans to make grasslands.
> Also describing strays as living successfully on their own is absurd. Sure some haven’t starved to death or been crippled by random acts of violence by humans.
In some parts of the world, unowned dogs seem to flourish; for example India has more than 30 million street dogs. However this is not a good thing, since dog on human violence happens too, and 20,000 people in India die of rabies every year. Street dogs are well known for attacking people, so even if the dogs can survive on their own it's still irresponsible to allow that.
>If there's a problem with raccoons, why not just turn to mankind's tried-and-true friend in dealing with animals: dogs?
so many wrong things in your statement.
Bloodbathing raccoons, highly intelligent animals, just because one is too lazy to implement simple solutions to coexist! When we lived in the duplex in Palo Alto bunch of years ago there was a large family of raccoons. It was great and fun.
Yes, the dogs would go out of their way to protect their humans and the house from whatever, raccoons included. Yet putting them into such situation unnecessary (even if dogs had good chances to avoid being harmed - and they don't as raccoons are pretty serious animals) is just a violation of that trust relationship between dogs and their humans.
> The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them.
Dogs can't live in nature? I think that needs a citation. Or at least we need some kind of explanation for the apparently impossible phenomenon of stray and feral dogs.
>Are you actually aware of dogs protecting free-range chickens against bald eagles?
At any given time I've got 3-5 bald eagles in the woods around my house. There are 3 houses with chickens in the neighborhood. The eagles won't go anywhere near a yard with a dog - I'm quite confident they aren't dumb enough to tangle with a large dog unless they have no other option for food.
I have no doubt if an eagle was starving to death it might tangle with the dog and might even win, but I don't think that would be their first, second, or fifth choice if there were other food options.
> I honestly don't see how dogs even make any sense in a city for people who don't have cars.
Why would you think that dogs that live in the city get any less exercise than a dog who lives in the suburbs or somewhere rural? Often cities are more walkable than the alternative.
> Here in Sweden someone had pigeons flying to their balcony all the time and they got reported for keeping them as a pet. The city dropped them off in another town but they flew back and were ordered to be put down because native species are not allowed to be kept as pets and they were unwilling to adapt to not living on the balcony.
If the motivation of these laws is to protect the animals, I can't think of a more backwards response.
>>If not, can we release a rat specific poison or is that impossible without harming the entire ecosystem?
Animals bunch around places where there is food. And the hard part is if you have food these animals generally multiply well enough to eat that food.
In India its common to see street dogs, because food littering. Some times they take away the dogs, but they repopulate again in months/years. And in places where they don't litter you will see there are no dogs.
> Pigeons are a little different because they’re mostly city-wide pets as things stand right now, they don’t seem to fill any “needed” ecological niche, but I may be wrong on that.
What is “needed”? How do you even define that? (And are you filling a “needed exological niche”?)
>- I'm sure you have the one dog in the world that doesn't chase birds. Most dogs do. This is specifically about that case.
This really demonstrates your ignorance. Such dogs are not uncommon, particularly when well trained. My dog doesn't chase birds. She's a border collie that lives for frisbee and frisbee only. I taught her the herding maneuvers, but she does it lackadaisically and it's hard to get her to give eye to chickens. She's just not into it, but she'll humor me if I tell her to do it. Frisbee though... she is. And she can be at a dead sprint after a frisbee in flight and if I say "Stop" she'll stop on a dime. If the frisbee drifts off the field and into the street, she'll simply stop on the edge of the grass or sidewalk and wait for my ok to go get it without me saying anything.
And my dog really isn't special. Honestly, she has been a difficult to train dog from day one, but she has still been trained. Her mother though... man she's a true pleasure to work with.
I usually walk her off leash as well. When people ask me to put her on leash, I do, and I hold it with a loose pinky finger since it's kind of a joke because of how unneeded it is.
> a couple of dogs we didn’t know were running around in our yard. A guy came and picked them up in his truck a few hours later. He explained that they broke out of the yard of a woman down the road...She didn’t want to collect them herself, she was tired.
I cannot fathom how someone can live a life this way or how they get there and continue to exist without dying of laziness. How can you care so little and still have animals to take care of much less yourself. It is incomprehensible to me.
> The culling of the Mink Farms in Denmark should be evidence enough that it can travel through animals.
Not that I think you're wrong, but that's circular logic. "Minks were culled because it can travel through animals. Minks being culled is evidence it can travel through animals."
I wonder why there are so many dogs in the street ;-)
There's nowhere where dogs are "natural." They're a species that was bred to the whims and desires of humans, almost always to the detriment of their evolutionary fitness.
> Pet owners really don't like it when wolves kill off their dogs & cats, either.
Right. I have some affection for wolves and coyotes because of their resemblance and relatiom to domestic dogs... but I also don't want them near my home any more than they have to be, and I avoid them at parks, because they will 100% kill and eat dogs like mine. They do it all the time.
This is a super-weird argument. I live in a country where a stray dog population just doesn't exist.
We aren't waist deep in pigeon and rat carcasses. The native carrion birds take care of them pretty quickly.
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