Slashdot Mirror
Are Google's Cat-Loving Employees Killing Burrowing Owls? (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google's employees started a group called GCat Rescue that traps feral cats and puts them up for adoption. (Though "less-friendly adult cats are neutered and released... The cats that are released are implanted with tracking chips, and an ear is notched so they can be identified.") A public records request discovered that city employees kept catching the Google-chipped cats in a nearby wildlife and recreation area that was home to the very last 50 burrowing owls in Silicon Valley — which California has officially designated a species of "special concern". Someone had apparently even installed a cat-feeding station next to a designated owl-nesting area.
The local Audubon Society has been asking Google to review their cat-feeding stations since 2012, but environmental groups told the Times Google was "consistenty unhelpful" on the cat issue. "They told us it was something their employees were doing and they couldn't interfere," said a board member with a group trying to protect the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. "One of the cats was trapped, turned over to the Silicon Valley Animal Control Authority, released to Google, trapped again in the park and released again to Google," the Times reports, adding that "In August, it was found dead in the park."
"Like so many stories these days about Big Tech, this is a tale about how attempts to do good often produce unexpected consequences, and how even smart people (especially, perhaps, smart people) can be reluctant to rethink their convictions."
The Times reports that a "final victory is at hand" for the cats, since last year was the first time in 20 years that no owl fledglings were observed in the park -- though "as recently as 2011, there were 10." But the number of cat sightings was 318.
The local Audubon Society has been asking Google to review their cat-feeding stations since 2012, but environmental groups told the Times Google was "consistenty unhelpful" on the cat issue. "They told us it was something their employees were doing and they couldn't interfere," said a board member with a group trying to protect the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. "One of the cats was trapped, turned over to the Silicon Valley Animal Control Authority, released to Google, trapped again in the park and released again to Google," the Times reports, adding that "In August, it was found dead in the park."
"Like so many stories these days about Big Tech, this is a tale about how attempts to do good often produce unexpected consequences, and how even smart people (especially, perhaps, smart people) can be reluctant to rethink their convictions."
The Times reports that a "final victory is at hand" for the cats, since last year was the first time in 20 years that no owl fledglings were observed in the park -- though "as recently as 2011, there were 10." But the number of cat sightings was 318.
This is the biggest flamebait article I've seen in a long time, and I blame Trump. Not only does it have cute little furry animals, it simultaneously calls Google employees geniuses and really dumb. It makes environmentalists mad, but also people who hate the environment (and kill cats).
It's probably all because of Hillary.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Like so many stories these days about Big Tech, this is a tale about how attempts to do good often produce unexpected consequences, and how even smart people (especially, perhaps, smart people) can be reluctant to rethink their convictions.
VR will have the consequence of fewer people socializing in a physical way.
Way to go Oompa Loompas. For your next trick maybe you can go club baby seals or something.
better yet, shoot the owners who let them out... I know for a fact that where I used to live (northern IL), we had whipporwills 20 years ago, *lots of 'em* then people came in with their free-roaming outdoor cats, (and dumped pet cats), now... no more whipporwills (extinct), most of the wild birds are gone as well, thanks to cats and cat owners :) no more than anyone would feel bad about any other invasive species being killed. in a sane world, people who let their pet cats run around (or do not take care to have them taken care of, should be held criminally responsible (the same as if a construction company intentionally flattened a nature preserve).
I feel *nothing* when i hear about a cat getting run over by a car, or exploded/killed by bored teenagers/predators/etc, (actually, it might be good to invite a few predators into a cat area (coyotes, and certain people love to eat cats
seriously, cats are worse than rats or other pests, but because insane people seem to like them they get a free pass to destroy everything they touch.. >:(
Cats are a protected class, but owls are Nazis. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot!
I love cats. I have 3, Iâ(TM)ve paid thousands of dollars to keep them healthy and happy, I took time off to take one of my older cats to a veterinary oncologist when she had cancer. Iâ(TM)m 100% a cat person.
But I keep my cats inside my apartment. Theyâ(TM)re efficient murderers and itâ(TM)s wholly irresponsible to let your cats roam, both for their health and the health of the wildlife and environment.
The roaming cats should be trapped. If they belong to someone, huge punitive fines should be levied. The feeding stations should be removed. All the trapped cats should be spayed or neutered.
Why does nobody there seem to have any conscience or regard for the rest of the world?
People blaming Google in this case are just plain stupid. The finger should be pointed at all the horrible pet owners that don't neuter their pets and then allow those un-neutered pets to escape to the "wild". It also looks like this is a group of Google's employees, which doesn't mean "Google". Finally, these volunteers are doing exactly the best possible thing- capturing and neutering them all and trying to home those cats they can. The problems will quickly diminish over just one generation.
"You know what, Stuart? I like you. You're not like the other people, here, in the trailer park."
Now Google has the extermination of a species in on its belt. Lets see what the upgrade to next in the physical space.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
" To date, GCat has rescued, fostered and homed over 100 adoptable cats and kittens."
I love cats but keep them indoors where they are very happy and live 20 years!
But I also love nature and cats can be an invasive species. Clearly so in this case!
Impossible.
God beat them to it.
Google's corporate 767 also is based at local Moffett Field. Moffett Field is home to many burrowing owls.
The question is exactly how many burrowing owls have personally been killed by Eric Schmidt? When he could drive the extra 6 miles to San Jose International and fly out of that airport.
Google is an evil company, no doubt!
Caution: Contents under pressure
Literally nothing could go wrong. Stop saying that. Return to your docking station.
Sure, blame the cats. Don't blame the people who don't have their cats spayed or neutered, who let their unfixed cats roam during the day and night rather than be kept inside, who think nothing of tossing cats and kittens outside to fend for themselves.
It's as if the cats are doing what comes naturally, but the supposed smartest animal on the planet has played no role in this situation.
Don't expect people who work at google to have much foresight about making the world a better place. Google employees are basically lackeys for the intelligence community and ad men, literally two of the most evil things you can be. Anyone willing to work at Google is either evil or incredibly dumb.
I once saw a feral cat in our neighborhood walking by the house when an eagle swooped down and picked it right up. So there is always a bigger threat.
On a farm cats are basically feral, they are farm cats, and males will kill off the litters of other females. It happens. That is nature that enviros love to protect, but apparently cannot bear to witness.
All I care about it getting rid of those damn wabbits. Release the hounds.
1) Both the cat and the bird people are entirely unwilling to listen to each other. They are emotionally invested in their cause and the other side is pure evil.
2) Feral cats do undoubtedly hurt bird populations, including endangered birds. However, habitat encroachment by humans is a much greater threat to most endangered bird species.
3) TNR is not a perfect solution, but it works much better than trap and kill. With TNR, you get the people who care about the cats on your side. With trap and kill, you get them actively working against you. If you do not kill all the cats in the area (something which is quite hard to do), they will very quickly breed back up to the maximum the local food sources will allow and even more quickly when people are actively feeding them.
4) Chemical castration would likely be the most effective solution, but has issues concerning non-target species.
5) The entire thing is as much a human issue as it is a wildlife issue. I spent more time handling people than handling cats.
How would you like if someone who says he loves you lock you in their house for your whole life and cut your balls off?
Wait till one of them points out the superiority of white males on some forum, in his spare time.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
You can't have ecological issues to spur global warming, climate change, and other regulations against your competitors if you aren't single-handedly destroying 80% of the world's coral reefs with your yacht anchor or putting feral cat feeding stations next to endangered wildlife. This is just good business.
Scalp 'em.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rur...
https://www.theguardian.com/au...
Dialectician. Archology.
Big mew is watching you
Cat found dead after a 4th encounter by animal control. Not suspicious at all. Who is to blame here again?
The entire complaint seems to be that they aren't killing the cats they can't find homes for.
I guess you missed the part about putting cat feeders in a refuge, in burrowing owl habitat, even near the burrowing owl feeders. That increases the danger to the owls by drawing cats to that area. If feeders are used they should be drawing cat away from burrowing owls, not towards them. When presented with the option of live prey or hard dry and crunchy pet food what do you think the feral cats released will go for?
Keep the cat feeders on campus, don't put them in a wildlife refuge.
From the above it sounds as if Google is rescuing cats that would otherwise have been put down by animal control. If they aren't trapping them themselves, it would result in a net *increase*.
The problem is not with the rescued cat, those that find a home. There are also non-rescued cats that are released to the wild. The danger to the burrowing owls is actually increased by the employees putting cat feeders in areas where they draw the feral unadoptable cats to the burrowing owls rather than drawing them away.
Kill a cat today. There are far too many of those filthy, allergenic vermin around.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
About Google seemingly doing the "nice, warm, huggy feeling" thing, and ultimately causing bigger problems in the longer term.
This is a metaphor for the endless war between progressives and conservatives. Progressives think they know better and want to "do good" and change the world. Conservatives think that systems are complex and your efforts to mess with them will have unintended consequences.
This is a metaphor for the endless war between progressives and conservatives. Progressives think they know better and want to "do good" and change the world.
Conservatives think that systems exist for their personal profit. Costs OTOH (e.g. 'unintended consequences') are to be socialized. The codified rules must be worshiped in public fora but primarily apply to other people.
'Progressives' like to tell other people what to do 'for the greater good'. 'Conservatives' like to tell other people what to do because 'get richer'.' ...the commonality (what ever the motive may be): "like tell other people what to do!"
'Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.' — Robert A. Heinlein
They should have moved the feeding stations half a mile away from the owls, but then whoever has that park view would not longer conveniently be able to refill the feeding station.
Remember, cats kill birds because they exist, not simply because they're hungry. All those cats could be full all the time and they would still kill all the birds and rodents because they are bored.
Love it!
Our housecats eating canned food and meaty table scraps will kill birds and sometime drag them into the house. A small female of ours dragged in a bird equal its size. People that think a cat feeder with dry food will divert them from attacking live prey are delusional.
If you can't keep your cat in your house, don't have a fucking cat.
They kill birds and all kinds of small animals. if you let them roam freely.
Guessing that you're replying to an AC. Can't see and don't care, but I'm sure you're wasting your time. If it smells like a troll and posts like a troll...
Now about actually solving the problem with a minimum of slaughter: Protect the relatively helpless owls by putting a force field around their nesting area. Actually an electronic fence of sorts.
As it applies to the cats, you give them a kind of shock collar that is powered by the electronic fence. As a collared cat intrudes into the fenced area, the pain increases, which in general will turn the cat around and and it will leave. If the cat gets all the way to the inside edge of the fenced region, then the fence will report that a cat has gotten inside and someone will be summoned to deal with it.
Now about the OTHER predators that are threatening the owls, you can use basically the same approach. Live trap them throughout the protected zone and move them outside with shock collars. The actual goal is to create a thick protective zone of predators outside the owls' nesting area. The collared predators are not going to go in, but they are also going to claim the territory and discourage the intrusion of uncollared predators of their respective species. Not sure about this, but I suspect the collared predators will also teach their own young to stay away from the owls' nests, but if not, there are still the live traps. The young predators might notice and learn to avoid the physical parts of the fence without understanding why their collared parents hate the fence.
Of course this doesn't really address the question of how much expense can be justified to save this particular set of genes. (Unless they will breed in captivity, which is generally relatively inexpensive.) It's really hard to estimate the value of something we don't really understand yet. But the owls must have some weird feature just to have survived this long, eh?
(And I didn't even have to note how greedy and EVIL the google has become.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Microsoft employees, I hear via FNews, have started a similar program. They are importing Great Horned Owls and other large aerial predators to reduce the number of feral cats - or just cats in general.
And as a result they should be destroyed if not adoptable, not released back into the wild where they can kill native species
The huffington post had a really good article "Cats as Invasive Species? The Less-Known Facts About Their Wildlife Impact" that describes this and the research behind it
'Though "less-friendly adult cats are neutered and released...' Good GOD. Just kIll them. They are CATS. The only purpose they have on this entire continent is as a pet species. If they cannot even fulfill that role, delete them. You're spending money to tag an invasive species and then releasing it back into the ecosystem?
Surely you geniuses could come up with some chemical method to give them a happy release!?!?!?
Owls lose. Sucks to be them. Should have been more cute and fuzzy.
We must secure the existence of our owls and a future for owl fledglings.
I can be someone getting the pink slip for an internal "Orly? I CAN has cheezeburger?" memo.
Who cares? The cats were in the wild to begin with. If they did nothing, even in the best-case scenario, there would be more cats—maybe all not right there in the park, but there would be more cats, and the owls don't just live in that park, which means that on the whole, neuter-and-release does help the owl population.
Also, chances are good that they put the feeding station in that park because the cats were already attracted to the owls. So moving the feeding station won't reduce the nearby cat population; it will just reduce the number of cats caught.
But even if I'm completely wrong, and they actually put the feeding station in the park in a deliberate attempt to kill as many owls as possible, I still couldn't get all up in arms about the burrowing owl deaths.
Burrowing owls are a nuisance to property development in the Bay Area, causing significant construction delays (waiting for the young to leave the burrows), because they're a species of "special concern" in California. However, the fact is that even though the California population is dropping (and in Canada and parts of Mexico), they are not endangered on a worldwide scale, nor they are even threatened. Their habitat is grasslands in pretty much all of North and South America. Their habitat is changing, and they are being forced out of certain parts of the developed world, but in terms of overall population, they aren't in trouble, and because their habitat is so broad and so diverse, they aren't likely to ever be endangered globally.
I'm okay with local conservation if there's a good reason for it. Keeping the Bald Eagle around, for example, was worth the headaches it caused, because it's our national bird, and keeping it in our country is generally a good idea. But an owl that can live anywhere shouldn't have special rights to live in a particular spot if that spot happens to involve some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. If they're just as happy in $150-per-acre territory as $1.5 million-per-acre territory, then the best way to protect the owls is to stick them in a cage, drive them to Kansas, and say, "Good luck." Get them out of here.
Failing that, the second best approach is to let the cats do what they do, and just stop caring about it. And, of course, the third best approach involves breading and barbecue sauce. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
First, cats like all predators, get bored with dry food. Second, cats aren't like dogs; they won't chase a ball or shred a towel. The need to stick themselves (via fish-hook claws) to a much smaller animal and bite it to death, doesn't sublimate. Well-fed cats kill for the sport. Loved cats tend to stick to mice and rats. Abandoned and feral cats will kill whatever animal is closest. Once they've got that habit, they never lose it.
Osama bin Laden is a fictional character.
Who cares? The cats were in the wild to begin with. If they did nothing, ...
Doing nothing is preferable when your "something" makes things worse.
even in the best-case scenario, there would be more cats—maybe all not right there in the park, but there would be more cats, ...
The problem is more cats in the sanctuary. Release them on the google campus or somewhere *other* than the sanctuary.
Also, chances are good that they put the feeding station in that park because the cats were already attracted to the owls. So moving the feeding station won't reduce the nearby cat population; it will just reduce the number of cats caught.
The feeding stations increases the size of the cat population that the sanctuary can accommodate. Without the extra food in the sanctuary there may be fewer cats. Too much competition for limited food may cause some migration elsewhere, secondary food sources interfere with that pressure.
But even if I'm completely wrong, and they actually put the feeding station in the park in a deliberate attempt to kill as many owls as possible, ...
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
Burrowing owls are a nuisance to property development in the Bay Area
There is no development in the sanctuary.
A feral/abandoned cat kills about 2 small animals per week. Neutering an animal and releasing it allows environmental degradation to continue. Then there is influx of this year's abandoned kittens which increases the number of animals killed.
Where do these cats come from? Saying they're abandoned is half the issue. It's not just an issue of people losing interest in providing for an animal. These cats are also sexually active; their owner never neutered them. That results in kittens which the owner gives to other people who are also so cheap and selfish that they refuse to neuter their new pet. Thus, a never-ending stream of kittens is created.
It's amazing how often human 'caring' equals shooting holes in the fuel tank, then running for the fire extinguisher. Neutering cats doesn't change the fact that, that cat is a human-created problem. It's great that Google is solving one problem (population explosion) but they, like so many activists are refusing to make the 'tough' choices. Why?
"For one reason – because that future doesn't ask anything of you today." Nix, Tomorrowland, 2015
Well, because it's easier to prevent a problem (kittens) than undo someone's deliberate fuck-up (abandoned cats).
Wait till one of them points out the superiority of white males on some forum, in his spare time.
Isn't that what half of them do, all the time? If you don't at least position white men as superior in some metric, how are you going to claim to be oppressed by them?
Bay Area tech employees won't be happy until the rest of the world is as sterile as they are.
1) Also start a dog-catching group like the cat one, but with an additional goal: collecting dog urine. Install an irrigation system around the owl park that sprays this urine at regular intervals. Should keep out most cats.
2) Convert the feeding station near the owls to a bait station.
3) Start a clandestine .22 or .177 sniping club in the owl park. Hold heaviest specimen, biggest bag etc. competitions each week and award some Google trinkets as prices.
Posted AC for obvious reasons.
Frankly people, cats are an exotic and invasive species, numbers should be controlled for the sake of the natural endemic ecosystem.
Cats can be taught. My cat is a hunter, but always brings me her catch for approval. So I started rewarding her if she brought a mice, rat or pigeon (pest species around here), and locking her in the bathroom for an hour if she killed anything else. She stopped catching the mudlarks and wrens and now they thrive around the yard and she just ignores them, while going full terminator on any pigeon or mouse that lucks out and enters the yard.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I say kill all the cats and the cat ladies.
-- j0uSt
But I do think that their cats are filling Google employe's brains with Toxoplasma gondii.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they're doing. The cats keep coming back to the park anyway.
There are a lot of "may"s and "might"s in that paragraph. AFAIK, that secondary food source is not in the park in question, but merely near it. The park is fairly large, and the other side of the park is a marsh area with plenty of fish, birds, etc. There's plenty of food without the feeding station. If anything, that station draws cats out of the park, not in. And it lets them catch cats that are too close to the park, so that they can release them farther away.
You don't seem to be familiar with the area in question. From what I've read, the feeding station is actually on Google's campus, not in the so-called "sanctuary" (really just a former landfill that overlooks the Shoreline Amphitheater). And there's major construction within a couple of hundred feet. This isn't something happening in the middle of nowhere. The park is across the street from Google's campus and immediately adjacent to Google's athletic park.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have a cat. I found a litter of 4 in my yard and brought them in. Bottle fed them. Kept 1, gave other 3 to friends. If I couldn't have taken care of them, I would have done the right thing and put them down. They do not belong in our ecosystem. I have shot feral cats before. They are always more cats, but there will not be more endangered birds.
People that insist on letting cats run free outside should put a bib on them, to give the prey animals a chance. They are for sale online and work. No harm to the cat, and less chance that it will get the jump on a bird.
Cat found dead in park. What did Google think was going to happen to the cat after they did that twice?