Farmers and wildlife groups have found barn owls breeding, hatching and fledging in large numbers in WA’s Midwest and Wheatbelt regions.
Wildlife experts have linked the apparent owl boom to a recent mouse plague and the reduced use of an owl-killing rodenticide.
Barn owls are expected to face increasing competition for food and habitat as mouse numbers continue to decline.
Jesus, so now we have an owl plague?
the reduced use of an owl-killing rodenticide.
Mice evolving to be immune was always going to happen, but if people don’t stop using it asap, there’s a very real chance traditional predators start to consider them poisonous…
Then we’re really fucked.
But it’s wild we have thousands of years of experience with this problem and an obvious solution is just having cats around.
It’s not like that was a fringe benefit of cats, rodent control was the entire point, and so important they were worshiped as gods.
Even before people figured out what was happening, they knew cities with a shit ton of cats didn’t get hit by plague and disease as hard. Now we know that’s because rodents spread disease, and unless they have a very specific parasite, they’ll do everything possible to avoid cats.
At some point people started thinking nature would set up something as vital as the CDS just for companionship…
We do have cats. Millions of them. But this is not Eurasia, and they preferentially kill the native fauna that never evolved to deal with such predators. Feral cats have been the primary driver for numerous species being wiped out completely.
Yeah…
But I don’t think you understand how bad it is that rodents are immune to rodent poisoning…
It turns the poison into just food, and lots of places just dump a bag full of poison and if it’s gone they assume it worked and dump another.
When/if they ever stop, a giant population spreads in every direction carrying any and every disease in the last place.
That new place, turns to to the times tested and Amazon approved poison.
Cycle repeats.
Rodents carry serious disease. And you’re ignoring the very important fact, that an indoor cat is what deters rodents from being in a building…
If the cat is outside, the rodents want to be inside even more.
So you put the cat in the house, and the rodents stay outside of the house. And in your trash can, is some used cat litter, which the rodents can smell from very far away.
I really thought that needed to be explained. Like if I said “seat belt saves lives” and you told me your aunt got killed in a car accident when everyone was wearing a seat belt. Then mentioned that she was in the crosswalk and not in a vehicle.
What you’re saying isn’t wrong, you just didn’t understand what people were saying and went off on a tangent.
