Why are there so many stray cats in Japan and South Korea?

On 20 15, Li Zhongqiu of Nanjing University was invited by Yang Le, a teacher from Tibet Plateau Biology Institute, to investigate the wildlife in Qiangtang Plateau in northern Tibet.

On the way down the mountain, I saw this scene: three stray dogs were besieging two Tibetan antelopes, their backs were bitten to pieces and their wounds were clearly visible. After treatment, they finally died.

This scene caused Li Zhongqiu to think carefully about stray animals: What impact or threat do stray animals have on the world we live in, including the wild animals on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, including some birds and animals in the urban ecosystem?

In fact, stray animals are not natural products. It is mainly a group of pets abandoned by people and their descendants. They generally live around human settlements, that is, stray cats in schools, communities and parks in our lives. They are not part of nature (there is no such population in the wild).

In life, the most common stray animals are stray cats and stray dogs.

Stray cats are the main research object of Li Zhongqiu.

About 10 thousand years ago, in the crescent zone of the Middle East, wild cats had close contact with humans and began to be domesticated. In the next 10,000 years, especially in the hundreds of years after the industrial revolution, domestic cats became the most successful invaders, and began to spread rapidly around the world with the expansion of people.

During the breeding period, the range of male stray cats is about 5 hectares, and only 3 hectares during the non-breeding period.

European wildcats, the ancestors of stray cats, have a breeding period of more than 1200 hectares, and the range of female cats is about 300 hectares in the non-breeding period.

Cats catching mice is deeply rooted in my mind, but it broke my understanding of cats in the gold medal works of the 2020 Natural World Photography Competition.

This work records the wild animals killed or injured by cats in a wildlife rescue station in san rafael, California, USA. In 20 19, they rescued 32 1 such animals, but only 89 were rescued. Among the remaining 232 dead animals, cats also captured birds, squirrels, rabbits, bats, snakes, lizards, frogs and invertebrates.

It can be seen that cats have a very, very wide catching range.

Therefore, many domestic cats and stray cats exported by domestic cats pose a great threat to wildlife.

20 13 Scott Loss and Peter Marra, two American conservation biologists, published an article about the number of wild animals killed by stray cats and stray cats in the United States every year. As soon as this article was published, it caused great controversy and shocked many ecologists and zoologists.

They never imagined that the total amount of cats hunted every year was as high as10 billion, and it was shocking that this would lead to the extinction of species on the island.

1894, several tower keepers boarded Stephen Island. They took a cat named Tibbles. Tibbles soon became the owner of the island, catching birds and wild animals. In less than a year, the exotic osprey on Stephen Island became extinct.

In other words, a cat, within a year, destroyed an island-specific species.

According to the Smithsonian Institute of Conservation Biology, the extinction of at least 63 species is more or less related to the introduction of cats.

In China, the annual prey of cats on wild animals has reached tens of billions.

Why is the population of stray cats so prosperous?

There are many caring people who feed us and get a stable food source through our domestic garbage. Under the protection of human beings, sick stray cats are sometimes sent to pet hospitals for treatment by caring people, and the breeding speed is fast. In the urban ecosystem, stray cats lack natural enemies. A healthy ecosystem should be pyramidal, and the lower the level, the more it should be.

How can we restrain the breeding of stray cats?

There are three kinds of population management of stray animals in the world: shelter, euthanasia and TNR.

If the stray animal population is not large, it is no problem to put it in a shelter. At the same time, be careful not to consume too much manpower, material resources and financial resources. So some countries adopt euthanasia to protect native species. Killing animals is a cruel thing At present, most countries use TNR to control foreign input, but the effect may be greatly reduced.

For domestic cats, if you have a cat, try not to keep it alone, which can reduce the spread of diseases and prevent it from hunting wild animals. Second, don't abandon it. This is the source problem, which can ensure that the stray cat population will not continue to increase.

The content comes from: Vista sees the world.