points
11 months ago
| 7 comments
| HN
And of course being able to eliminate pest populations responsible for disease transmission, food spoilage, equipment/infrastructure damage, and other various harms has earned cats that seat in the pantheons of cultures around the globe.
rags2riches
11 months ago
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"Food spoilage" is putting it mildly. Mice have short generations. A single mouse can have up to ten litters in one year. If unchecked, a mouse population will quickly turn all your stored food into mice.
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nandomrumber
11 months ago
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Queensland is occasionally exceptionally good at this.

Here’s some video from four years ago https://youtu.be/rAdNJ1jczVI?si=HhB-P5lcAz3zhuMI

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grumpy-de-sre
11 months ago
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In the meantime public sentiment toward cats in Australia is becoming really toxic (due to the consequences of a long-term ineffective feral control program). I swear one day when the chemical baits turn out to be worse than the cats themselves the pendulum will swing hard in favor of cats once again. They really are an indispensable tool and a big part of humanities agricultural success.

FWIW I'm in favor of dropping a few billion AUD into cat control programs and deploying technologies like felixer everywhere. Up until now it's just been an underfunded borderline volunteer affair.

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arp242
11 months ago
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Maybe store some poisoned quadrotriticale?
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nandomrumber
11 months ago
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That’s the trouble with Tribbles.
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thinkingemote
11 months ago
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Are cats actually effective at pest control or is that cat propaganda? How would cats operate in these societies?

I know they can catch pests but are they effective at controlling them? Maybe they will limit the growth of pests, so better than nothing. Most cats catch for fun rather than food I think

Maybe we had much more cats around for this purpose, if so I'd imagine there is some archeological proof.

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dspillett
11 months ago
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> Most cats catch for fun rather than food I think

The hunting trigger is only loosely connected to hunger — they don't get hungry then go out to hunt, they'll often see a hunting opportunity and go for it, eating the result partially/totally/not as needed. In a situation with abundant prey this will look like they are mostly hunting for “sport”.

I assume this comes from hunt availability/success being intermittent: it is better to slightly over-hunt (and slightly overeat) to keep reserves up for a lax period that might be coming.

They say that a fed cat is a better mouser, and this might be why. A truly hungry cat will prowl less to conserve energy so have less opportunistic encounters with prey.

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potato3732842
11 months ago
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>Are cats actually effective at pest control or is that cat propaganda?

Yes. Have you never heard of a barn cat? Until recently pretty much ever commercial or industrial facility large enough to have its own maintenance department typically had one or more.

>How would cats operate in these societies?

Just like a barn cat. Leave out starvation rations for it and it'll hunt for the rest.

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pif
11 months ago
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> Most cats catch for fun rather than food

Domestic cats do. Stray cat's hunt for a living.

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HPsquared
11 months ago
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Catching for fun rather than food actually increases their mouse-hunting potential. With fun as a motivator, they can catch a lot more mice than they have the appetite to eat.
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Sharlin
11 months ago
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I mean, you don't need archeological evidence given that there's a vast amount of historical evidence of cats being kept for pest control as well as companionship. Even the Western world was largely agrarian just a hundred years ago! And farm cats are still a common thing. Free-roaming cats are also a massive threat to bird populations in many places – cats are just very effective predators and birds reproduce much slower than mice and voles.
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scientator
11 months ago
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I believe the royal society for the protection of birds studied whether cats are a threat to bird populations and concluded that they really aren't. Obviously cats do kill birds, but overwhelmingly the major threat to birds is habitat loss caused by humans. Also, cats kill rodents, which indirectly helps birds because rodents are a big threat to bird populations, because rats take eggs from their nests. In fact, cats preferentially kill rodents. Something like 90% of their diet will typically be rodents. Birds, for them, are only opportunity kills. In other words, cats are an easy scapegoat because they quite visibly do kill birds, but humans (as is usually the case) are the true underlying problem.
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OneDeuxTriSeiGo
11 months ago
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It really depends on the region. Island populations are disproportionately at higher risk to eradication by cat due to the difficulty or impossibility in replenishing the population from outside/neighboring populations.
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lenerdenator
11 months ago
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And if we're being honest, the whole soft tummies thing and purring probably helped too.

... this thread needs pictures.

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sandworm101
11 months ago
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Wolverines have soft tummies too. That we see cats as cute is not so much that they have evolved to be cute. They look little different than wild cats. We see the palus cat as cute but pet its tummy and you will lose some organs. Those humans who protected and nutured cats were better survivors. Having cats around gave them an advantage over people who were indiferent to cats. We finding them cute is a trait that has evolved in us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas%27s_cat

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woleium
11 months ago
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Palus (or is it Palius?) cat has round pupils, like ours. Makes them easier to anthropomorphise.
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Sharlin
11 months ago
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Pallas cat.
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gilleain
11 months ago
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Apparently is is [Pallas's cat] :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas%27s_cat

with an apostrophe. shrug

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yungporko
11 months ago
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wolverines are also fuzzy and adorable. knowing full well how much it might fuck my shit up, i don't think i could stop myself reaching to pet it if i ever crossed paths with one.
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lll-o-lll
11 months ago
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It’s toxoplasmosis parasites in the brain that causes the unfathomable love for cats. Those of us still uninfected[0] find it very odd.

[0] dog people

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Sharlin
11 months ago
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Cat people never seem to have a need to boost their egos and take jabs at dog people in discussions about dogs. Only (a certain type of) dog people seem to do so. Insecurity? Superiority complex?

Maybe toxoplasmosis makes you a better person? It is my experience that cat owners are overwhelmingly nice, empathetic human beings. There does not seem to be such correlation among dog owners.

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lll-o-lll
11 months ago
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> It is my experience that cat owners are overwhelmingly nice, empathetic human beings.

Unless you tease about toxoplasmosis.

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mkl
11 months ago
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Many people are neither cat people nor dog people. I have no desire to be around either.
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Yeul
11 months ago
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Hell is other people.
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mkl
11 months ago
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Doh, worded that badly. I mean I don't want to be around cats or dogs.
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gerdesj
11 months ago
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Unfortunately evolution does evolution:

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/toxoplasmosis/

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jamiek88
11 months ago
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> Toxoplasmosis is a common infection that you can catch from the poo of infected cats, or infected meat. It's usually harmless but can cause serious problems in some people

The UK governments approach to using normal, simple language across all its web assets is fantastic.

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edent
11 months ago
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They've published an excellent blog about their language choices at https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/pee-and...
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raverbashing
11 months ago
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Yeah

I feel that medical language in the UK is dumbed down for your average (and let me reiterate again, average) person

Which is good for the majority but slightly unnerving if you don't like being talked down or wants to know what is really happening and have anything above very basic medical knowledge

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watwut
11 months ago
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How is the above quote dumbed down? To me it seems it is just ... communicated well.
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raverbashing
11 months ago
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I was speaking more generically, I agree that those pages do a great job of communicating.

But in general healthcare communication in the UK (and Ireland) do feel like they're dumbing down stuff for you

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ninalanyon
11 months ago
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Could you provide an example?
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woleium
11 months ago
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“crystal mark english” is what to tell your LLM to write in.
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mkl
11 months ago
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I'd never heard of it. The "crystal mark" itself is a money-making thing for what seems to be a for-profit company: https://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html
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aitchnyu
11 months ago
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Would LLMs be guilty of trademark infringement?

Llama said its in CM. Gemini said "aiming for Crystal Mark". OpenAI called its output "plain, clear" without mentioning CM. Claude didnt comment its output. Deepseek returned "Here is your passage rewritten in clear, polished English with a refined and elegant tone—what you might call "Crystal Mark English"".

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sshine
11 months ago
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> eliminate ... equipment/infrastructure damage

And cause it.

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euroderf
11 months ago
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I suspect there is a strong historical correlation btwn cats and beer.

You figure out fermentation, you change from hunter+gatherer to settled agricultural, you store grain, you need cats.

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WalterBright
11 months ago
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> equipment/infrastructure damage

The Cat has caused extensive damage in my house. I'm still working on repairing it.

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throwup238
11 months ago
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Have you considered introducing the Rat to distract the Cat from the infrastructure?
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WalterBright
11 months ago
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The Cat only caught one Mouse in 10 years.
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