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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."
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.
I just came to make sure this comment was here.
-USR1
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."
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
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.
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.
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
Anyone willing to work at Google is either evil or incredibly dumb.
It could just be the toxoplasmosis.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
The first time your plot of land was settled it was pristine nature. Just because we collectively decide at one point in time to point to some plot of land and designate it a preserve doesn't mean we can't change our minds later ... and that's no more wrong than your home occupying part of nature.
Wolves are no longer native to my country, some people want them again to be ... but for the moment they are most definitely invasive, and oh my god do people whine if they are shot.
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.
Love it!
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
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.
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.
Bay Area tech employees won't be happy until the rest of the world is as sterile as they are.
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'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.
A nearby shipyard was overrun with feral cats. They started a massive catch and kill program which more or less took care of the cat problem. A nearby shipyard was soon overrun with rats....