Feline friends always love it when humans put out nice new warm beds for them! Certainly a warm heated spot in the cold could serve no higher purpose :):
> the American Veterinary Medical Association recommends keeping cats indoors to avoid dangers associated with diseases, parasites, cars, attacks from other animals, poisons and extreme weather
Now it’s not only children but cats too? I grew up in a location where cats could go anywhere they pleased (in or outside), and it’s really strange to me that some countries recommend or require them to always be inside.
Outdoor cats are a menace to birds and other wildlife on a scale that's hard to describe. It would be hard for an individual homeowner to do anything else that is even nearly as destructive to their local wildlife than keeping an outdoor cat.
Not in locations where wild cats exist anyway. If wild cats exist in your area, the bird life has already adapted to them over the past millions of years.
Obviously, if cats in your region have been introduced by humans, that's an entirely different situation.
Human feeding of cats can increase their population far above the predator-prey limits that existed for millions of years. As they say in ecology: "What you feed succeeds."
All felines aren't exactly interchangeable either. Domestic housecats are naturally extant only in the Middle East, but everywhere else they have been introduced by humans.
> Domestic housecats are naturally extant only in the Middle East
That's not really true - in most of europe, the native wild cats and domestic housecats are closely related and interbreed. see e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wildcat (Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Central and Eastern Europe to the Caucasus).
Many of the types of domestic cat found across europe were already bred in antiquity as well.
So it's not that clear-cut, and local wildlife has adapted quite well to it.
Maybe, maybe not. But they're definitely happier lives for the 10-50 wild birds and 50-200 wild mammals a cat would kill each year. Domestic housecats will hunt even when well-fed.
"The greatest good for the greatest number of [sentient organisms]."
The shop sells a SpaceX sticker pack, and one of the stickers looks like a bunch of cats in a satellite dish.
I'm not a SpaceX follower, so can someone who is explain what it means: https://shop.spacex.com/collections/featured-products/produc...