I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this.
However, when you also have articles stating that migratory fish and insect populations have declined by 75% over the last 50 years [1,2] (which clearly isn't caused by outdoor cats) it would seem to me there are larger forces at work.
I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this.
Outside of birds, cats kill rodents. I live in rural Quebec, near farms, a massive nature preserve, and a national park larger than small US states.
When I first moved here, I had no cat, and several other neighbours were new to the area. Old houses, not fresh builds, just changeover of owners... they too with no cats.
The first year I was here, I became aware of the problem, and started to lay traps. And I caught 100+ mice, sometimes several per day for months, all inside my house.
Once Spring arrived, I tried to find entrances, and did! I blocked them, but anyone that knows rodents, and owns wood houses, that won't help if you have an out of control, local colony, and once the winter comes, do they ever want in!
I spent 3+ years with traps, sometimes reducing the population a bit, but each winter more than 50 mice.
Then a neightbour got a siamese cat.
I now catch a mouse or two a year.
If you look at mouse breeding and brood numbers, and you live in a area with loads of food in the summer (near farms, nature), you need something like cats. It's not an option, it just isn't.
There's a reason farmers have loads of semi-wild cats in their barns. And both the mice they catch, and the cats that catch them, are invasive.
And with the hantavirus often touted as 50% lethal, you do NOT want the moral responsibility of trap and release, nor do you want mice in your house. At all.
If they only killed mice that would be a fun fact, but they also kill 20 billion small mammals a year, lol. The point was though that cats are killing all the birds, that they help a few people with a mouse problem is tangential at best to the topic at hand. I can accept that mice are a problem and cats are killing all the birds and small mammals at the same time. It’s kind of like saying DDT is fine actually because it helps a few farmers improve their crop yields. That it does, but it nukes the eagles from orbit too, and we have to look at this systemically.
Once we accepted DDT as a problem we found alternative solutions. But there’s also localized solutions. A few spayed/neutered farm cats aren’t the end of the world.
that they help a few people with a mouse problem is tangenti
You like to eat, yes? Because I assure you, without cats, or something to replace them that does what cats do, you and I will starve to death.
Farmers don't have cats because they're cute. 3They have them to stop rodents from eating silo, seeds, fields bare.
What do you plan to do? Spray death chemicals all over the place, as a replacement?
And no, trapping won't work. It never kills enough, and there are never enough traps.
Honestly, I sincerely doubt cats are the issue. Cats do very poorly away from human settlements, and therefore there's loads of area without cat habitat. In Canada, most of the land is cat free, there is so much land without cats, it would be impossible for them to wipe out a noticeable percentage of birds.
There's no way they're the problem, as a result of this, when we're talking about 1/3 of the birds.
A far better explanation is insect population collapse. Missing food.
> Because I assure you, without cats, or something to replace them that does what cats do, you and I will starve to death.
You could have made the same argument about DDT. You have to acknowledge the problem before you can find a different solution.
With enough determination it’s quite feasible. You know as a Canadian that Alberta is the only place in the Americas without rats. They have a very successful management program. [1]
Cats are an invasive species, so are rats. Alternatives exist, please stop being so defensive. Given this topical counterexample it hardly seems like a case of “cats vs food and hentavirus” since Alberta has no rats, plenty of food and no hentavirus without relying on cats.
> There's no way they're the problem, as a result of this, when we're talking about 1/3 of the birds.
… they kill 10% of birds per year. Times 3 years is just about 1/3. Given it occurred over 50 years I’d say we’ve got us a good candidate. Especially since there is documented evidence of them leading to the extinction of entire species. You can see how the math here is within the ballpark yeah?
Alberta is not rat free. It claims to be, but poke about a bit, and you'll see how fake that claim is.
And rats are not mice. And Alberta has plenty of cats around farms.
And the replacements for DDT are destroying insect populations. The problem is NOT cats. I notice you didn't explain why birds, in all the areas without cats, which is all areas in Canada without human settlements very close by, which is most of Canadian land, are dying too.
You're attributing cats to the problem, then explaining how it's proof it's cats.
> Alberta is not rat free. It claims to be, but poke about a bit, and you'll see how fake that claim is.
Once again no sources cited on your part other than, I guess, your gut, and "poking around."
> The problem is NOT cats.
You haven't made a case for that. The studies I dug up say quite the opposite, that cats are a massive source of wild bird mortality, that they've driven several species to extinction. I have cited sources and you seem to just be shooting from the hip?
> ... in all the areas without cats, which is all areas in Canada without human settlements very close by, which is most of Canadian land, are dying too.
What makes you think cats aren't in areas without human settlements very close by? This map shows they're all over the place. [1] And if that doesn't convince you check out the invasive feral cat population map in Australia where they actually wanted to cull the population. [2] They live on every square inch of Australia, and let me tell you, people do not.
"In some cases, house cats have singularly contributed to the virtual disappearance of Vancouver Island bird species. The streaked horned lark, once a resident of southern Vancouver Island, is now likely locally extinct in Canada, and cats were cited as one of the main causes of nest failure." [1]
"The coastal vesper sparrow has seen its population drop by 85 per cent over the past decade, and a federal government analysis cited a “high concentration of domestic and feral cats” as factors in their decline." [1]
Stop just repeating "nuh uh" and dig up some studies or lets end this conversation here, because the fact is, you are wrong on this one.
> You're attributing cats to the problem, then explaining how it's proof it's cats.
Wild house cats cannot live without prey, and they are not adapted to -40C, let alone -20C for weeks at a time. They cannot live in many parts of North America without humans settlements.
There are native cats in Canada, skilled at even detecting prey under feet of snow, but house cats are not that.
There is no significant cat presence in Canada, outside of human habitats.
I notice you cited Vancouver Island, the most temperate place in Canada. And there are deserts in Australia, cats don't live there without humans, yet there are birds adapted to the desert.
The outdoor neighborhood cats are the ones that are an issue. It sounds like promoting owl habitat would be a great targeted solution to mice problem without affecting small birds as much.
A period (full point) is a dot within the sentence, while a full stop is a dot at the end of a sentence. In the 19th-century [1], this terminology was used on both sides of the pond.
I read a book about lucid dreaming a while back, and it said something like: the easiest way to tell you are in a dream is to look at something mechanical or complicated.
The idea seemed to be: if you could get your dreaming mind to look at your hand and then turn it over to the other side, you didn't have the mental 'bandwidth' to imagine the opposite side correctly, and you'd realize you were dreaming.
Equally, if you were around a bicycle in a dream, and tried to look at the gearing mechanisms etc., it just wasn't possible for your brain to generate that level of detail; it would just change the bicycle into an elephant or what-have-you.
I never got to lucid dreaming, but did notice a similar thing happening. So, I always found it interesting how the mind might switch from internal 'concepts' to external 'reality' in a way that isn't readily available to 'conscious' thought.
Not really going anywhere with this, but if 'AI' can generate better bicycles than our dreaming minds, then…
The method I found to work most consistent in getting to a lucid dream is to wear a wristwatch with a vibrating alarm (noisy alarm clock makes you too awake) and then set it to wake me after I've slept something like 4-5 hours. Then I'll be really tired and fall asleep again almost immediately, but when I'm falling asleep fast it's easier to notice and focus on hypnagogic patterns. Hypnagogic pattern are patterns of light you can see behind your eyelids as you fall asleep and then they become more and more focused until they turn into a dream. It's hard to keep the focus, but doing after waking up just slightly from a vibrating alarm clock and then not moving the body at all, makes it much easier as the patterns then come really fast and quickly turns into a dream and if you manage to keep the focus you basically just go from being awake and straight into a lucid dream. The problem is it fucks up sleep a bit, so should have a few hours extra to sleep in the morning.
This is 100% the most effective way to do it for anybody interested in trying. It doesn't even take all that much practice. I got it on my second attempt.
I'd disagree slightly about how awake you want to get though. Obviously don't turn on any lights or stand up. But force yourself to be awake for enough time to get your bearings or you are going to lose consciousness too early.
Oh man I had that for the first time a few months back when I couldn't sleep for like 50 hours or so and it freaked me out as someone who doesn't visualize
I used to lucid dream regularly (need to get back to it - it's a lot of fun). I used a reality check where I would try to (lightly) blow air through my nose when my hand was closing it off. If I could I was dreaming. I did this randomly during my waking hours every so often when I had some indication that something was different and I needed to test reality.
Whenever I would come semi-aware when I was dreaming I would do this reality check and realize I was lucid and could do what I want. The interesting part to me is that blowing air through my nose and hand twigged me to the fact that I was dreaming, but the technicolor mega-gorilla screaming at the sky and throwing laser bolts did not.
It's amazing how casual the weirdest things are in dreams. For example my wife had a dream where an old women was sitting on stairs, she folded herself, became a hand, which climbed the stairs and disappeared. And it was OK but just weird enough to remember.
I had chronic sleep paralysis for many years. One thing I eventually figured out is that I still had control over my breathing, and I could hyper-ventilate myself awake. Sleep pararalysis then stopped either because I aquired that skill or because I stopped eating gluten.
Huh I actually don't recall ever having control of my breathing actually. Can wiggle wiggle a few fingers/toes and muted scream and some eye control is all I got i think.
Most of the time when I'm dreaming it never even occurs to me that I might be in a dream until I wake up.
I have even had some cases where it did occur to me, and I started lucid dreaming (which was very cool), but then I reverted to my default this-must-be-real dreaming state. That was very weird.
I've only ever lucid dreamed under conditions of extreme stress, nightmares where am being chased by murders etc.
For example I had this dream where I was the guy who got killed in the last bit of The Ring (they think things are OK but Sadako comes for him anyway) and then I was able to lucid dream, control it and beat her up.
I usually become highly aware I’m dreaming when I’m able to kind of float around (not fly, more like low gravity mixed with a near-floor hovering) but the “wow” of it turns into “this is just reality, no big deal” so fast I never get a chance to try to consciously shape the dream.
I can relate heavily. The recurring ability to hover by kicking my legs around is profoundly liberating and a deeply familiar sensation at this point. Dreams feel like living a parallel life :)
The ability to levitate in dreams is very useful, because dreams typically are unable to make your legs actually move. Thus, the feeling of walking is not easily fantasized realistically, and immobility of the main character is not something that many the unpaid screenwriter will refuse to take lying down.
I would look at my hands in lucid dreams and they would appear in extreme detail, as if I could comprehend both its general form as well as every single grove in my fingerprints. I’m pretty sure I tried to turn them over and was able to see all around them.
One thing I find fascinating about dreaming is that it seems that the dream wants to prevent you from staying lucid. When I become aware that I am dreaming I “wake up” and start going about my day, only to realise I am still dreaming, at which point I “wake up” again, and this cycle continues. This is a perceptual barrier that can be broken through, at which point you instantly gain hyper awareness awareness and control over you dream.
> the dream wants to prevent you from staying lucid
What we consider waking life, reality, etc. is the same. The mechanism of the hypnosis is the constant identification with phenomena, which creates the sense of being a person, which is nothing more than a conceptual abstraction.
Recently I switched from taking a lions mane supplement in capsule form to mixing some powder into my morning tea, since I can get the powder for far less $$ and it's usda organic on top of it.
For some reason this has resulted in persistent lucid dreaming before waking up, daily, for over a month now. The capsules rarely caused this, but something about the tea seems to be affecting the bio-availability, or maybe the powder is just different.
Whatever the root cause, it's been quite fun. But a bit distracting as it makes completely waking up difficult, now that there's this incredible interactive mind-movie I'd rather continue playing vs. start my day...
It does seem like a state of mind worth exploring with some potentially huge utility if mastered. I can't produce such immersive and vivid visuals to navigate mental models in my regular conscious thinking. I'd much rather do the equivalent of lucid dreaming to navigate things like interplaying algorithms and data structures for example.
Have you noticed any differences in your ability to form internal imagery while awake? There’s a post on Reddit where the subject appears to have had that ability affected by Lions Mane.
I read a guide that suggested looking at your hands - that night I dreamt and recalled that and it worked. I guess most people do not see their own hands accurately while dreaming and it acts as a cue.
My thinking is not coherent enough while asleep to run all those experiments. A few times I've asked "am I dreaming?" in dreams, but following any step-by-step process after that thought is just not in the cards. My thought patters are just as disjointed as the scenery and events "inside".
Look at the time or look at letters. They are all fractal gibberish if you look at them closely during dreaming.
But that might just be part of the dream.
I’ve more than once floated into letters that would reveal more and more shapes just like zooming animations of fractals. But it hasn’t caused me to realize it was a dream, let alone take control of it.
Lots of crazy and spacey things happens in dreams, that you just accept.
Light switches and steering wheels never work properly in my dreams. I have to concentrate really hard to get things to follow the rules. Then I wake up.
Nope, nope, nope. Light switches never work properly in my own dreams either, but I find that testing the lights or just even noticing they aren't working is a guaranteed one-way trip to night terror land, even in adulthood. Not even realizing I'm dreaming is enough to stop it at that point.
The technique a few people mentioned of looking at words or writing and then looking away and looking back is pretty effective for me. You would have to have some reason to suspect you were dreaming first.
I can do it, I first figured it out when I was 6 or 7, but why? Might be better to just get some sleep.
Just a few nights I had such happen during a dream in which I was playing cards with three or for opponents. I was counting the cards played, and I realized that I had played a card that I had not been dealt. Refusing to believe that I was cheating, I deduced that I were dreaming and awoke at once. But I cannot explain the stack of chips that I found on my night table.
Another way to tell is to try to read things or look at a clock/numbers in your dream. Often time the information will not make sense, and will change if you look away and back.
I've done this myself once or twice in a dream and I actually was able to tell I was dreaming but the shock of my realization woke me up.
> Often time the information will not make sense, and will change if you look away and back.
Yeah, I've done that a few times and it's been reliable for me.
One time I remember, I was absolutely sure I was awake, so I did the "reading text" test, I read something, looked at something else, then read the thing again, they went "Wait, those aren't the same words. Ah, crap."
I've had dreams where I found myself traveling and was presented with maps (in one my car had a HUD where I saw the map on the windshield as I was driving) that seemed to be quite accurate when I recalled them after waking. Even freeway signs with names of towns, roads and freeway numbers that matched reality.
Unlike most I can see things in great detail, including text in my dreams. Consistency in time is absolute mess, for sure, but then again, I don't find this odd to begin with. In fact I kind of expect this. As in I realize I'm dreaming, and yet I don't.
The method that works most reliably that no one talks about is to pinch your nose closed and try to inhale through it. If you’re dreaming, you can still inhale through a pinched nose. Always a useful check to perform before hurling yourself off a cliff to see what it feels like.
I've tried that but am always foiled; the bike falls over or I'm distracted at the last minute by something else within the dream. Its like the mind is creating excuses not to wake up.
Both "je voudrais" and "j'aimerais" translate to "i would like", albeit with some nuances in the connotations.
The later has more of a wishful quality, more open to rejection. In spoken form, they're mostly interchangeables.
I too was at school in the UK during the 80s and 90s and don't have any fond memories. Maybe because it wasn't a school with Latin in the curriculum. I had two science teachers: a young one and one nearing retirement.
The young science teacher spent the whole lesson writing from his notes onto the blackboard, while the whole class just copied it verbatim. His only interaction was asking whether everyone had finished, before wiping one-half of the board clean to continue.
The other science teacher had us read from our textbooks all lesson, and his only interaction was to get annoyed when we made so much racket he couldn't read the newspaper. He always seemed the smarter of the two teachers to me.
I went to one of the best schools in England allegedly. We had a new English teacher who spent a whole year doing the silent notes on the blackboard thing. He would come in early so he could get a head start. We also had a PE/French teacher who couldn't speak French. Shit teachers are everywhere.
I was in a school in the UK during the 00s and I have OK memories. It had Latin in the curriculum, so I think we can conclude Latin does not correlate with fondness of memories.
The teachers used annoying 'SMART' boards and if they ever got board marker ink on them they would freak out.
Isn't the reason because the lingua franca of HN is English? If people were posting articles in other languages, there'd be a more representative set of criticism.
I even had a MiniDisc car stereo. So much better than CDs, you could just let them rattle around in the glove box and they didn't get scratched.