Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the New South Wales Cat Protection Society, climate induced warmer weather is causing cats to have more unwanted kittens.
Longer breeding seasons, more kittens: are cats reacting to climate change?
When Kristina Vesk started working at the Cat Protection Society of NSW in 2006, she rarely saw kittens in winter. Now warmer weather means cats are breeding all year round, increasing the numbers of unwanted kittens and the threat to native wildlife from strays and feral cats.
Ms Vesk, the society’s chief executive, said there used to be weeks from June to September when the shelter saw very few, if any, kittens. But with the climate changing and temperatures rising, it seems cats are increasingly on heat.
“For the past three years, I don’t think we’ve experienced a full week at any time of year where we don’t have at least a couple of kittens in our care,” Ms Vesk said. “Kitten ‘season’ has grown longer and longer as we keep having … enough warm and sunny days in winter that make cats think it’s a good time to start breeding.”
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Vanessa Barrs, a Professor of Feline Medicine at the University of Sydney, said most cats do not breed in winter to conserve energy and help kittens survive. But breeding can be influenced by photoperiod, the number of available daylight hours, and “cats artificially exposed to 12 hours of light indoors … can be induced to breed all year round”, she said.
Is building wind turbines and solar installations really the most effective way to reduce the number of unwanted kittens? Or might it be more effective to run a TV campaign, encouraging pet owners to be responsible about having their animals desexed?
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…ROTFLMAO…
You too? hahaha!!
Me too. 🙂
This is a crock of ……… cats doo doo.
So more owners are not de-sexing their cats; ergo more pregnacies and more unwanted kittens.
Problem solved!
But — owners aren’t spaying and neutering their cats because it’s too hot! They can barely drag themselves out the door to go to work, much less take their cats to the vet. Be reasonable.
Apparently they never saw ‘Cat On A Hot Tin Roof’.
“Longer breeding seasons, more kittens: are cats reacting to climate change?”
More goofy papers, more climate weirdness. Are climate scientists running out of research questions?
So she joined in 2006 and it’s now 2016. Call it a decade. I don’t know what the temperatures have been doing in Oz, what with BOM adjustments and all, so let’s make an IPCC-like projection and say that they’ve *maybe* experienced up to 0.2C change over that time. Are cat breeding patterns really sensitive to a 0.2C change? I mean, *really*?
What’s been happening to the human population in her area? More people => more cats => more kittens. Is that a possibility? Have people been losing jobs, so that the cost of neutering animals has to be balanced against necessities like alcohol and tobacco? (/sarc) Has the cultural mix changed in the area? Have people shifted from abandoning puppies to abandoning kittens? There are LOTS of alternative hypotheses that deserve exploration. The leap to just-so stories about climate change is a way to STOP thought and paralyse action; I do hope this person is not in a position of authority. Oh wait, “chief executive”.
Vanessa Barrs seems to be thinking, though. Of course, if cats are living inside enough to be influenced by artificial light, they are living inside enough to be influenced by artificial heat too, in which case the climate becomes largely irrelevant. And in Oz you are very much encouraged to keep your cats inside a lot to protect native wildlife. So protect wildlife => keep cats inside => longer breeding season => more cats => increased threat to wildlife. Systemantics, how true it is…
So … global warming is good for animals. That’s great – isn’t it? It takes a very special kind of brain to turn every single benefit into a negative.
Yeah, human populations are exploding, too. Must be “climate change”.
Is building wind turbines and solar installations really the most effective way to reduce the number of unwanted kittens?
Answer: running TV campaigns, trips to the vet in the family buggy for neutering, etc. all use fossil fuels and contribute to global warming, so I’d have to go with the wind turbine and solar panel option on this one.
Not if the family buggy is a Tesla… 🙂
And where does the electricity come from to charge up the Tesla?
Yeah, you got me 🙂
And, if you have a Tesla here in Canada’s winters at -40C, you turn on the front and rear window de-icers; turn on the heater; turn on your heated seat; turn on your rear-view mirror de-icer; and head for the office.
A few blocks later you have no power. sarc ;^D
Al, you forgot to include the battery warmer.
And the full headlights, because it is still dark when you leave for work in the morning and dark when you drive home after work.
If your Tesla is running out of juice perhaps you should install a wind turbine on it.
“Light Cure says: February 9, 2016 at 1:23 pm”
I recall having a discussiion a couple of years ago with someone who was an avid suporter of wind turbines that powered all forms of transport, even aircraft!
But that actually makes perfect sense. See, the faster the plane goes, the faster the turbine spins which powers the plane.
Seriously, I need research money now to study this. If i don’t get it a dog will become depressed and a kitten will die out in the cold – I mean warm.
Wind turbines may not inhibit feline breeding directly, but they will feed the cats – if the cats develop a taste for migratory birds and bats.
Literally thousands of fruit bats roosting in trees near our house, yet for some reason the bats are about the only local wildlife the cat doesn’t seem to want to eat.
Don’t be silly….Catwoman had a “thing” for Batman….so of course cats don’t eat bats. 😛
I just couldn’t hold it down the last time I tried to neuter a cat with a wind turbine.
michael hart
This is because you must hold the cat “up” to use a wind turbine blade to neuter the cat. (Please sharpen the blade, hold the cat firmly up in its natural neutralized position, and clean everything thoroughly afterwords. ) /s
Actually, it is the Green Machine that is the cause of cat proliferation. The greater numbers of Wind and Solar installations have caused greater numbers of feral cats to eat the greater numbers of downed birds.
There you go Cause and Effect! PNS….pg
More UNWANTED kittens …how can that be ? !! The economy is doing so WELL !……
Yep, she is correct.
It’s all those ‘bored’ dogs not chasing cats any longer, so cats get up to no good more often.
Those dogs have real jobs now, they no longer have time to chase cats.
More likely it is obese dogs are now unable to chase the cats so they have too much time to get up to no good.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
From the department of that nasty colourless, odourless, trace gas, plant food – CO2 – that causes everything and anything…
warmer winters are better for animals…
…film at 11
Kittens are good for polishing the car……..Very soft fur…….leaves a great finish. How can they be unwanted when they are so useful?
AND they lick themselves clean for the next car wash!
Well then, how about an ice age ???
That should do it. If all the homeless cats freeze to death, there will no longer be any homeless cats !!!
Problem solved .
Horse dump! The title should read “Reduce CO2, or More Homeless Climate Scientists”.
Oh come on – FFS!! No comment can assuage the sheer sense of despair that this ‘news’ has caused me. Somebody shoot me please!
That’s one way to feed all those homeless kittens.
Another way to feed a kitten is to toss it over the fence to my neighbors dog. 😉
Gunpowder is 15% carbon. Das ist verboten
Ms Vesk, the society’s chief executive, talks about unwanted kittens. How can the head of the Cat Protection Society call a cat unwanted? Erect the gallows!
Peak cat ???
People who are experiencing fuel poverty find that they are not able to feed new kittens so the cats end up in the shelter.
Ok I’m sold.
Lead me to my cave where I can shiver in the warm knowledge that my abandonment of 10,000 years Human development has caused:
fewer stray cats and fewer depressed dogs.
Polar bears will always walk; they’ll never be forced to swim.
Pikas will prevail.
Delta smelt never felt better.
Etc.
Me, I’ll have a clean conscience but a shorter life span in which to enjoy it.
On second thought…
How could you forget to mention the poor koalas.
Tom,
Are you against wealth creators?
Why not well-to-do koalas- not necessarily filthy rich ones, despite the jobs they create in interior design, yacht building, fur coats, very expensive cars, etc.
Auto
Shorter life span is also in the advocacy agenda.
Oh, but the polar bears will be IN the cave with you! Yummy.
Expand the layoffs. That will take care of it.
Next: CO2 is causing it to rain cats and dogs!
Good one!
Correction-CO2 is causing it to rain DEPRESSED cats and dogs. Try to be more current! (grin)
Wait a second….maybe that’s why all the DOGS are so depressed….the cats are getting all the action during this “heat” wave….heat….get it?! Where’s my Nobel Prize?
Unless CO2 also extends daylight hours, the last paragraph quoted destroys the argument.
If Ms Veck’s logic holds, we should have many more litters here in South Carolina than they do in New England.
Logic? They don’y need no steenkin’ logic!
And nearly no cats in Canada! Then we export the southern kitties to Canada and they can hunt down all the extra moles and mice up there who come for the warmer weather. Balance nature and all that. Do NOT send us your alligators and poisonous snakes, please.
“Is building wind turbines and solar installations really the most effective way to reduce the number of unwanted kittens? ”
Wind turbines would be a very effective way to reduce the number of unwanted kittens IF kittens flew.
Well, at least if we install more windmills, the cats will feast on all those dead bats and birds around the base of them. Most of them aren’t dead when they hit the ground, so the cats will help end their suffering. But wouldn’t all that extra tucker lead to more cat breeding?
I once distracted a cat for days by attaching a piece of yarn to the blades of a ceiling fan. I wonder if it would work scaled up?
HERE IS AN EXPERT Feline Groovy: Songs for Swingin’ Cats
Mark Steyn, vocals
with orchestra arranged and conducted by Kevin Amos
Neil Boortz used to organize an annual cat catching contest. If you want to know what cat catching involves, think turkey’s and “WKRP in Cincinnati”.
PS, it was a gag, no actual cats were used or harmed.
Many species refrain from breeding if conditions are wrong for offspring survival.
“cats artificially exposed to 12 hours of light indoors …” are well fed, sheltered cats. The chances are that their kittens will survive. It is much more likely that they will breed and therefore there will be more winter kittens. I’m skeptical that photoperiod is the major factor.
When I was a kid, most cats were barn cats. Not as many folks had pet cats. In fact, the pet cat population has nearly doubled since 1981. link
Anyone attributing kittens to climate change is suffering from a lack of intellectual rigour.
I live on a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada we winters much colder than anything wales has ever seen. We have farm cats, that is to say they live their entire lives outside and only get food once a day and hunt to supplement their diets. Thee is no change in the amount of breeding between +20 and -20. I can’t help but wonder if they even looked at a cat in this study.
I think that a bunch of rats at night got to the computer in the lab after escaping their cages and wrote this about cats hoping humans would fall for this.
The Green Bible states that the PR spinners shall inherit the earth.
More like annex the Earth.
True.
How can they inherit something the rest of us are destroying? 🙂
CO2 always causes more of what we have too much of and less of what we have too little of.
Weeds always do better. Food crops and good plants do worse.
Virus’s, bacteria, ticks, mosquito’s, pest insects and overpopulated animals always do better….while humans, most animals and good insects(like butterflys and bees) always do worse.
What’s weird is that all of this life on earth, suddenly started obeying a new universal law that did not exist until a few decades ago.
Our brilliant scientists, immediately found the widespread, compelling evidence of this new law…….so it has to exist.
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Apparently causes an overabundance of apostrophes as well. 😉
H’eh, L’O’L!
What???
I did bee keeping for decades. Bees LOVE warm weather! They hate cold. The only times I lost hives was if it went to -40 F for example. Ditto, butterflies. I grew up in Tucson, AZ, and we had plenty of butterflies during the rainy season. They loved the hot desert.
Come to think of it, the coyotes, bobcats, vultures, roadrunners, owls, snakes, gila monsters, etc. etc. all loved the hot desert. So do jack rabbits and desert mice and lizards and horny toads, etc. Not to mention saguaros.
The gestation period for cats is 65 days average, as late as 71 days for Siamese cats. So are they trying to say cats normally don’t breed in the fall as they know survival at birth will be lower in the cold of winter? Or are they implying winter breeding is up due to warmer winters, even though survival in the spring is not detrimental? WTF? Do the cats know impending seasons or not?
Shoot, I recognized this danger back in 2012. Save the Gender-Neutral Kittens from Global Warming! [grin]