Again, I never said other cats would not exist. The comic is about domestic cats, not native cats.
Bobcats are wildly different from domestic cats. For instance, they don’t decimate local bird populations and they are generally solitary creatures. Domestic cats tend to live in colonies and do in fact decimate bird populations. In regards to juvenile bobcats, their range increases and they move to their own, mostly solitary, range as they get older. Domestic cats don’t grow out of living in a feral colony. Bobcats breed less frequently (usually once, but sometimes twice a year) whereas domestic cats tend to have more than one litter a year (1.4 on average), so their numbers go up a lot faster. Adult bobcats are also 2-3 times as big as adult domestic cats.
And yet… OP is in the thread judging everyone for ANY cat being outside Not talking about “feral” at all and specifically goes out of their way to include ALL domestic cats period.
The comic itself is about pets, not feral cats, so it makes sense that OP would be focusing on that. Feral cats are the biggest problem in the discussion about killing native wildlife (birds in particular). The thing is, you don’t get feral cats without people letting their unfixed house cats roam free. This is also leaving out the fact the that letting a house cat roam free is bad for the cat itself (shorter lifespans and more diseases/parasites), which is, at least as I have been reading it, is where OP is coming from.
Just because some domestic cats can get as big as some bobcats does not make that the norm. Also, size is not the only differentiator, which is why I brought up breeding, food source, and habitat.
Domestic cats and feral cats are the same species, so I apologize for not making that distinction in the one sentence. It is an easy mistake to make, and you did the same thing in your next paragraph:
And went on to describe feral cats. That being said, I literally said feral cats were the problem. From my previous comment:
Talking about bad faith, the part you left out in the description of feral cats is:
That […] did a lot of heavy lifting in your version…
That is a 15% difference, which in breeding numbers is huge. And this is talking about number of litters, so doesn’t even get down to total number of kittens born (although litter size is pretty similar). Also of note, bobcats don’t generally start breeding until their second year. Domestic cats start at 6 months of age, which is why we fix cats as soon as possible.
Who said it was about responsible cat owners? Show me where I said all cat owners do this? Or OP for that matter? He has been responding to folks that literally say they let their pet cats outside.
The comic is about the health of the cats. Feral cats came up as a natural progression of that discussion. I don’t actually like the comic, but it isn’t about the health of wildlife in any way that I can see, but about the health of house cats. It is pretty well documented that outdoor cats do not live as long as indoor only cats.
Again, when did I say they are the same group? This particular thread was because someone unrelated said domestic cats would be outside if humans weren’t involved.