> The population, which was around 900 after World War II, dropped to 13 in 2017. At the same time, the number of cats was in the hundreds. Aging residents felt there were too many of them and not enough people to look after them. The Aoshima Cat Protection Society, therefore, recommended that every cat on the island be spayed or neutered in order to gradually reduce the population. The sterilizations took place in 2018.
Is there anybody local that wants the cats to stay? Sounds to me like the program is working as intended. Sure tourists love it, but if there's nobody local to look after the animals welfare, it should end the way it's been planned it seems to me.
>Is there anybody local that wants the cats to stay?
There are five locals. One is the "cat mama" mentioned, who presumably likes the cats but realizes their fate without her is grim. The other four probably don't care that much.
> Sounds to me like the program is working as intended. Sure tourists love it, but if there's nobody local to look around, it should end the way it's been planned it seems to me.
Are we talking about the country of Japan or cat island here? The declining cats of cat island is a wonderful metaphor for the declining population of Japan island.
Makes no sense to me really. Sure the population will decline and maybe in 100 or 200 years Japan's population will recover. Why go through that mess when you can just have 100 million non-Japanese people slide in, just give free citizenship to anyone that has a kid on Japanese soil and don't enforce immigration law, simple as.
I suppose they can Disney-fy it, hire people to live/work there as caretakers, but is that what the area wants/needs?
I remember reading an article about Prague, where the author felt like it's been turned to Disneyland: because of the tourism boom, the city got littered with tourist gift shops and eateries.
we could see cats split into prey and predator, or them develop great fishing abilities or bird lure and climbing capabilities, life finds a way to make many out of few opportunities .
"The population, which was around 900 [people] after World War II, dropped to 13 in 2017. At the same time, the number of cats was in the hundreds. Aging residents felt there were too many of them and not enough people to look after them. The Aoshima Cat Protection Society, therefore, recommended that every cat on the island be spayed or neutered in order to gradually reduce the population. The sterilizations took place in 2018."
I don't think I've read anything in a long time that's made me this melancholic.
Japan has a lot of stories like that. The urbanization is crazy, with literal half-empty towns, and people's homes left behind in the countryside. In case you are open to English narration, the creator behind the Abroad in Japan channel specifically likes to visit places like this, and explain some of the social and cultural context behind them:
All things are transient; All things will end. At least this isn't ending with the island being abandoned by humans and the cats trained to depend on them being abandoned to starve.
Probably there's a certain cat population level that the local ecosystem would support, but not a artifically high population level enable by humans feeding the cats.
But our culture and modern views relating to nature and cats would never allow the idea of having a population of feral cats fending for themselves in a unhabited island.
> a population of feral cats fending for themselves in a unhabited island.
There were numerous examples of this around Australia, there still are some - it's damn hard, nigh impossible, work to remove them via traditional trapping means w/out motivated local inhabitants.
Let's also not forget that cats are not the only species that piggyback in our civilization to spread.
Far more successful than even the cats in doing so, is the domestic mouse.
If anything, once there are no more humans and cats on this island we can rest pretty assured that our friendly rodents will become the dominant species.
Cats pretty much decimated the native bird population of most Hawaiian islands which has had a pretty big impact down the food chain. House cats are definitely cute but they’re also a manmade ecological abomination as an invasive/introduced species.
Nah, that's natural selection at work. It is not like we are a kind of metaphysical entity floating above the aether like some kind of demiurge. We are part of the nature, there's no morals on evolution, no preferred steady state. If we protect an species we are playing god, if we don't, the same.
The trouble here is that this is a minor, technical nitpick, which I can't really support. "Natural" as a layman's term doesn't just mean "thing from nature" but also means "thing undisturbed by human activity". People here clearly mean this latter thing when talking about "natural". Which is pretty confusing, I agree. Languages should have a word for this, as it is clearly needed.
Also, observe that many humans don't like natural selection either. There are efforts, for example, to conserve species that are going extinct, no matter how natural or man-made the cause.
Natural already means "things undisturbed by human activity", among a good lot of other things. As long as there's a clear need for such a word, it would do us good to have a separate word for that, like notmanmade or whatever, because that would make discussions clearer.
Nope you are wrong. Cats are brought by humans everywhere where they are not native. Humans already destroyed ecosystem by many ways. This was just trying to reducing that harm.
Species purposely introduced by humans would be considered artificial not 'natural' selection. If the cats swam over to the island of their own volition as a survival strategy though, that would blow my mind.
So, would ticks brought to a new prairie by bisons. So, would seed brough by the feces of migrant birds.
Yes, we can CHOOSE any moral framework, including one where we introduce this arbitrary notion of artificiality to treat the impact of homo sapiens as a distinct category. But let's not treat this as science. I wouldn't go so far to call it as a religion, but it is still on the realm of ethics and philosophy.
We can even have pragmatical reasons for choosing so, like the need for a particular eco-system to stay in a given state for our own confort, health and economic reasons. But it is still an arbitrary choice.
Species migrate by themselves in the nature, sometimes they play havoc on the existing biome they migrate themselves into. This was, it is, and it will be a significant driver of evolution long after we are gone from earth.
And on this particular case, it is not even like we are restoring the island to some idealized, pristine steady state. Cats are not the only species that piggyback on our civilization to spread, we also have the domestic mouse. If anything, completely eliminating the cat from those islands will serve only to ensure that the domestic mouse will be the dominant species there.
> So, would ticks brought to a new prairie by bisons
Ah, no. Nature is specifically what has unadulterated by humans. If humans are involved, it's not natural. I didn't make up the words, but that's exactly what it is. At least if you're talking about nature as being distinct from something else. If you're talking about nature writ large, then there is no distinction, but we're not talking cosmology here.
> we can CHOOSE any moral framework
I was only making clear the distinction between natural and unnatural.
But, to take on this argument, cats and mice are exotic pest species in many places. You might object to them being called pest, but their existence is usually at the extinction risk of native species. It's fair to say there'll be enough cats and mice around the world. You could say that we should just let whatever thrives to thrive, but I'd argue the world would be a more boring place without native species, and indeed ecosystems can collapse from the introduction of exotic species, potentially even causing existential risk to the introduced species (including us humans).
Sure, "we broke it so we should try to help maintain it" is entirely an ethical question and not a scientific one.
Are you satisfied now? Can we go back to talking about the problem instead of arguing about the definition of "natural"?
...but wait, you're the one that introduced the word "natural" to this conversation, using it as a reason to do nothing. That's ridiculous. If everything is natural, then your argument would say we should never do anything ever.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to use such a wide-reaching definition of natural, then you can't also use "natural" as a motivation to not intervene.
> our culture and modern views relating to nature and cats would never allow the idea of having a population of feral cats fending for themselves in a unhabited island
> The population, which was around 900 after World War II, dropped to 13 in 2017. At the same time, the number of cats was in the hundreds. Aging residents felt there were too many of them and not enough people to look after them. The Aoshima Cat Protection Society, therefore, recommended that every cat on the island be spayed or neutered in order to gradually reduce the population. The sterilizations took place in 2018.
We have a similar place in Taiwan that only became a "Cat Town" as recently as 2008, when one lady just kept adopting cats. Doing so basically "saved" a dying mining town by turning it into a must-see tourist destination on the way to Jiufen, another "must-see" tourist destination.
For certain definitions of saved, of course. Jiufen (another former mining town) seems to be getting a bit overwhelmed, but Houtong infrastructure has been rapidly expanding to handle it and the locals seem to be ok with it.
Cats are often a menace to remaining wildlife (see Oatmeal); and their urine/feces smells so horrible to the point that regular cleaning becomes necessary.
Retirees tend not to want to move away from their family to an unfamiliar, run down, remote island with a somewhat large tourist population. If they did want to do so, there's got to be a ton of cheap houses.
i wonder if this is better than just letting them go feral.since its an island you could argue you could make an ecosytem by putting some sort of plant eater that the cats can go after.
I’m glad the neutering program worked. I usually don’t go to touristy places, but I will make an effort to come here now that I know it’s a transient opportunity.
I wonder how many people will see this and try to smuggle in fertile cats. Probably a non-zero amount, though I suspect nobody will volunteer to move there to take care of them.
I suppose it's possible to smuggle fertile cats in, but it's really far-fetched. According to another comment here, this remote island has a single ferry. A howling cat in a carrier is going to be easily noticed while boarding the ferry or traveling on it.
I said try not succeed, though it wouldn't be that hard to sedate a cat for thirty minutes or find a boat.
I think some people will think this is a travesty they can fix. Even this thread has some amount of people who don't seem to realize this is intentional and the alternatives aren't great.
The cat island only existed because fishermen were there to feed them with their catches.
The fishermen are gone and the last humans on the island are aging out.
I think this is a perfectly humane solution. Especially considering it in the context of their cultural embedding, in which animal welfare in general are not the greatest. And also considering that the alternative is that feral cats starve to death.
Given that the goal was for no more cats to be born (so that the cat population eventually drops to 0) and this was apparently accomplished, it seems like a fair term.
"Driving into extinction" is an awfully loaded and hyperbolic phrase for "neutering a single colony of feral domestic cats." It makes it sound like an atrocity. Maybe that's not what you intended.
Preventing unwanted and uncared-for kittens is a good thing. It's a major goal of animal welfare groups all over the world.
>The Aoshima Cat Protection Society, therefore, recommended that every cat on the island be spayed or neutered in order to gradually reduce the population. The sterilizations took place in 2018.
This is peak surprise_pikachu.jpg.
If they didn't want to drive the cats to extinction ("gradually reduce") then why did they do it to every cat?
The decreasing human population is the problem. Rather than let the cats suffer and starve after the last human leaves, they sterilized them so there would at least be less needless suffering.
Who is surprised? The sterilization program is doing exactly what it was supposed to, and that's a good thing. I think you're misinterpreting the article.
The headline reads: "... Won’t Survive Much Longer".
Later, the article goes: "Sadly, though, this feline paradise won’t be around as a tourist destination for much longer."
So no, I'm misinterpreting nothing. The article implies the cats going extinct is a bad thing.
No doubt something perhaps got lost in translation and then further got sensationalized for clicks, but as presented I am left wondering who left their common sense by their front door before going out to work.
The sole caretaker on the island is getting old and won't be able to look after the cats forever, so the Aoshima Cat Protection Society decided to spay/neuter the cats and let nature take its course. This is going exactly as planned.
The author thinks it's sad that a popular tourist attraction will vanish soon. I can sympathize with that while still knowing it's for the best.
The sad part is that the Cat Mama has to wind things down. This does not imply any kind of failure on the part of the Society.
As someone who put his mother to rest last December, someone dying is a "good thing"?
I think I can gather what you're trying to say, but what the sincere fuck my dude.
EDIT Note to other readers: Clearly there was no ill intent, the comment was retracted and amends have been made. I'll leave my reply in place for some context, but let us speak no further upon this.
Is there anybody local that wants the cats to stay? Sounds to me like the program is working as intended. Sure tourists love it, but if there's nobody local to look after the animals welfare, it should end the way it's been planned it seems to me.