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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think I've read anything in a long time that's made me this melancholic.
https://www.youtube.com/@AbroadinJapan/search?query=abandone...
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.
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.
These days we have the Felixer:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-...
https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/felixer,-the-grooming-trap,-...
Even so, it's unlikely feral cats will be eradicated from Australia anytime soon.
Wild cats already exist in the wild.
The problem there is we’re killing them through deforestation and poaching.
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.
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.
It doesn't matter if we're part of nature. The negative affects are enough to justify not allowing it to happen when possible.
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.
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).
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.
…national parks exist.
> 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.
But i'm sure they'd notice the kittens and sterilize them too.
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.
A Visit to Aoshima, a Japanese 'Cat Island' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24237807 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
Japan's Cat Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9150352 - March 2015 (4 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Dogs_(film)
Don't forget to spay and neuter your pets.
Also: they could replentish the cats with stray cats from the mainland. They could be neutered first...
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.
…why?
Why would someone do that? To "save" the cat island that's in danger, despite this being the intended result.
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.
edit: The Felis catus apologists are numerous on this forum!
Artificially high population of cats. Almost no human population to feed them.
They performed non lethal surgery on them so there wouldn’t be a population of cats dying of starvation when the last residents pass.
Preventing unwanted and uncared-for kittens is a good thing. It's a major goal of animal welfare groups all over the world.
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?
Common sense is a fucking superpower, I guess.
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 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.
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.