Kill Your Cat This Easter

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by Arne Saknussemm, Apr 18, 2014.

  1. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    Easter lilies toxic for cats, FDA warns!

    Easter lilies are popular in homes at this time of year, but they can be deadly for cats, a veterinarian warns.

    The same is true for Tiger, Asiatic, Day and Japanese Show lilies, said Dr. Melanie McLean, a veterinarian at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

    The entire lily plant -- leaf, pollen and flower -- is poisonous for cats. Eating just a couple of leaves or licking a few pollen grains off their fur can quickly cause kidney failure.

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    A cat that's eaten part of a lily will vomit soon afterwards, but this may gradually lessen after two to four hours. Within 12 to 24 hours, the cat may start to urinate frequently. Urination may then stop if kidney failure occurs. If untreated, a cat will die within four to seven days after eating a lily, McLean said.
    Early treatment is critical and you should get your cat to a veterinarian immediately if you suspect that the cat has eaten a lily. The veterinarian may induce vomiting if the cat just ate the lily, and the cat will be given intravenous fluids to maintain kidney function and prevent dehydration, according to an FDA news release.

    Other types of lilies, such as Calla and Peace lilies, don't cause kidney failure in cats but can irritate their mouth and esophagus, McLean said. Lilies of the Valley can cause heart rhythm problems. In all cases, call your veterinarian.

    If you have cats, it's best not to have lilies in your home, McLean advised. If you do have lilies, make sure they're in a location your cat can't reach.

    Lilies don't pose a serious threat to dogs. They may suffer some gut problems if they eat a lily, but their lives won't be in danger, according to McLean.

    More information

    The Humane Society of the United States has more about plants that are poisonous to pets.

    Copyright © 2014 HealthDay. All rights reserved. This material may be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
     
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  3. quinnsong Valued Senior Member

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    Great heads up Arne, I do have a peace lily and the cats have got a little ill (vomiting) but both cats no longer seem interested in the plant anymore.(could have connected the dots) Good to know though, was planning to plant a few bulb plants including lilies in back yard this spring,so no lilies looks like.
     
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  5. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    And if you ever get tired of having cats...
     
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  7. Capracus Valued Senior Member

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  8. quinnsong Valued Senior Member

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    Let Them eat Arsenic



    Cats do not hold a candle to homo sapiens.
     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Nonetheless, feral cats and free-roaming domestic cats do indeed constitute an environmental catastrophe. They kill at least one billion birds every year, and we don't have that many to spare--given that another billion or so are killed by crashing into the unnecessarily lighted windows of vacant office buildings at night. Keep your cat indoors, or in a completely closed-in outdoor space. People have experimented with bells on their collars, but cats are highly intelligent and they can usually defeat it. Results are not in yet on the practice of putting two bells on opposite sides of the collar.

    Other animals that don't belong in the USA (or not in such large numbers) but are here because of our stupidity and comprise their own ecological crises:
    • 1. Wild boars. Hunters established populations in earlier eras. The wild ones bred with domestic pigs, resulting in an animal that is extremely clever, well-suited to the environment, and unafraid of humans. What we call "the landscape" is what they call "buffet lunch."
    • 2. Canada geese. I'm not clear on why these birds are taking over the Northeast, but they're crowding out less aggressive species and clear-cutting the vegetation for food.
    • 3. Deer. We've killed off their natural predators so their only enemy now is cars--so evolution is selecting for intelligence instead of speed and strength, and the new generations are learning how to stay out of the way of motor vehicles. They're destroying parks and gardens all over the Northeast, and spreading westward and southward. It's been suggested, in all seriousness, that if we want to save the environment, we should be eating the meat of deer, Canada geese and wild boar every day.
    • 4. Coyotes. By virtually killing off the wolves, we've created a paradise for these smaller predators. Like the wild boar they have no fear of humans and happily live in our cities. In L.A. they've learned to hold their tails erect so people just think they're stray dogs. Unlike wolves they're happy to scavenge from our trash cans but they'll also eat our pets. In the Northeast, coyotes have crowded out the foxes that dine on rats, the rodents that carry the ticks that are now spreading Lyme Disease throughout the entire region.
    • 5. House sparrows. This bird is often called the English sparrow for the precise reason that it was deliberately brought over by homesick Britons. From eighty pairs turned loose in New York's Central Park at the end of the 19th century, they've spread all over this hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska. They're crowding out less aggressive native species, driving many to the brink of extinction.
    • 6. Boa constrictors. A few incredibly stupid collectors in the South didn't realize how large these reptiles will grow if provided with an unlimited food supply. The same people who will happily go out with a rifle and shoot twelve species of native animals in one day, didn't want to kill their precious, carnivorous snakes, so they just tossed them out in the woods. Some of these snakes are now twenty feet long and are killing off the wildlife in the region--animals who don't have an instinct to be on the lookout for 200-lb snakes.
     
  10. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    Coyotes. The native American peoples say , "After God, the smartest person in the world is Coyote". Do a little research and you will see what they mean. Oh, and you forgot to add 'pale faces' to your list above.

    And speaking of sparrows and such, there was some nozzle, I think he lived in Massachusetts sometime in the 19th century, decided that America should have all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. He took it upon himself to have them all imported here. It was probably him that brought over the English sparrow. Again, you'll excuse me for not doing the googling. It's a small matter to look it up for yourself, if you please.

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  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I spent most of my life in the Southwest so I'm familiar with Coyote, the Trickster, and the legends about him.

    When the Paleoindians arrived approximately 12KYA and began making camps, and eventually villages, the coyotes learned to be camp-followers. Their descendants today would rather hang out on the outskirts of a town (or even roam the streets of a city as I noted earlier), taking up the easy life of a scavenger in a world whose dominant species casually discards megatons of food every day, than go back out into the wilderness and actually hunt prey.

    Wolves underwent a similar evolution in the Old World, but only a small number of them found the prospect of living with humans and eating garbage more attractive than hunting. All dogs appear to be descended from an extremely small number of ancient wolves, quite possibly a single pack in one location. However, they took the partnership more seriously and actually diverged into a new subspecies of wolf. Genetic changes include a smaller brain for the lower-protein diet of a scavenger, expanded gregariousness that makes them comfortable in multi-species packs with many more members than the average wolf pack, a very weak alpha instinct allowing a biped to be leader of that pack, and various instances of neoteny such as barking, wagging their tails, roughhousing and chasing sticks, behaviors that wolf pups lose at maturity but make dogs so adorable to us.

    Yes, I'm familiar with that colossal emotionally-driven blunder. I've never been able to determine whether the house sparrow was part of that fiasco or a separate introduction. However, the one bird for which many people would hang that guy upside-down by his genitals is the starling.

    No one understood the concept of an ecosystem in those days, yet the Brits outdid everyone else in disrupting them. The introduction of rabbits to Australia, for instance, was a disaster for the wombats whose burrows they appropriated. Still: not as disastrous as the development of a stoat-fur industry (a species of weasel that we Yanks call ermines) in New Zealand, an ecosystem famous for its flightless birds.

    Two civilizations had already been founded in the Western Hemisphere: Olmec/Maya/Aztec and Inca. The Aztecs hadn't gotten around to pushing north across the daunting Rio Grande or through the Sonora desert, but if they'd been left alone by now they surely would have done it. In the meantime the Maya had already created their own ecological disaster by cutting down so many trees to build temples, that they changed the bloody weather in Mexico, causing the demise of their culture and creating a culture in distress ready for the Aztecs to take over.

    Meanwhile the North Americans were not standing still. East of the Mississippi they invented agriculture (despite the handicap of no tractable grazers to domesticate for food and draft) and had already developed a network of small cities that traded with each other.

    Both the Olmec and the Inca had discovered metallurgy and were well into the Bronze Age. In fact there's evidence of 5,000-year-old copper mines in Michigan, but that incipient civilization apparently failed before it was able to ravage the environment. Anyway, if the Christian armies had not invaded the New World, it's quite possible that it would now look very similar to... well, to the way it looks now anyway.

    There's no correlation between skin color and respect for nature--or anything else, for that matter. After all, it was the Maori who hunted the moa to extinction.

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  12. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    I've read one theory that suggests the downfall of Mayan civilization was simply malnutrition: recurring crop failure or crop deficit coupled with a rising population. Of course, the Mayan people themselves are still there and arguably doing better than ever in terms of health and nutrition now that they are part of 'the modern world', albeit lacking their former glory.
     
  13. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    About the 5,000 year old copper mine in Michigan: that sounds like one of the several 'false start civilizations' that have existed. We think of civilization as a grand pageant that arose in Mesopotamia and has gone on ever since with more than a few notable pauses, but in fact it had started earlier (and later, as in the case of the Mayans whose civilization failed before the Europeans ever arrived) in such places as, If I recall, southern Russia, and perhaps Poland (to name just two) as long as 30,000 years ago. However, unlike Mesopotamia, or India or China, these relatively advanced societies petered out or outright failed for one reason or another. I suppose no one really knows why exactly.
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Mayan civilization didn't fail. It had lost its luster but before its people actually reverted to the Stone Age, the Aztecs came down (the articles I've read say that they probably started as a Paleolithic tribe in California) and took over. They utilized all of the Olmec/Maya Bronze Age technology, including written language and bronze metallurgy itself, and even the Olmec/Maya gods, and overlaid it all with their own political structure, which was greatly elaborated.

    Don't forget Egypt. Mesopotamia, India, China, Egypt, Olmec/Maya/Aztec and Inca are the six independently arising civilizations.

    Just look at the front page of any newspaper and you'll surely jump to the conclusion, "They were destroyed by religious conflict!"
     
  15. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    But native birds aren't the only thing that cats kill - they also kill other pests which prey on native birds, for example, rats. The real question is, do feral cats (or domestic cats, for that matter) kill more birds than the other species they keep supressed? IE: Could removing the cats actually result in more deaths of native birds?
     
  16. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    You got it backwards. Religion teaches self control instead of regressive behavior. For civilization to form, originally, humans had to depart from their previous 100,000 year old instincts, which were based on wandering in small groups. For civilization they needed to be stationary in larger groups. This was not exactly natural for the average human who still wanted to be free. Religion is not about returning to the inner caveman or inner ape, since this would change behavior back to something less favorable to the unique needs of civilization.

    In modern culture, free sex in open relationships, sort of works, because modern science and culture offer prosthesis to prevent and treat STD's and compensate for women and children in poverty. None of this prosthesis is natural or found in nature. In ancient cultures, without this modern prosthesis, such behavior would lead to a decline via disease and under developed human potential. Religions seek a higher level human instead of animal man.

    A way to test this hypothesis is to stop all prevention and treatment of STD's, that are not natural or found in nature. We will have two groups, one based on religion, and other based on atheist liberalism and their ape man. Which group will experience the fastest decline as measured by attrition? The liberalism/atheist equivalent, over the ages, required a lot of extra resources to prop it up. This leads to more and more strains on the civilization, until it reaches a breaking point, needs to invade for resources, or declines back to the stone age where this behavior works better. It broke up civilization back to small wandering family groups that no longer look like anything we would call civilization. It is only when there is a reversal does civilization appear again.

    War can be secular or religious. Secular needs the resources which prop it up. Religion needs the human mind in a place where culture will not decline if resources are not available to prop it up, such as within a confined area of land.
     
  17. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Birds kill rats too.
    [video=youtube;d4lGLKWBGug]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4lGLKWBGug[/video]
     
  18. The Marquis Only want the best for Nigel Valued Senior Member

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    Quite correct. And I love cats. They're beautiful animals.

    However, I'll do in every one my neighbours keep as a pet if given licence to do so.
    And then I'll do in my neighbours.
     
  19. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    That sounds reasonable.
     
  20. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    When I used to live in Florida, there were tons of ferrel cats. The warm climate makes it easier for stray cats to survive and return to the semi-wild. In the same area, there were also many ferrel ducks and geese. They were semi-tame and would walk among people and seemed to like certain people but shy away from others. The larger geese would try to intimidate you for food, like a shake down. I used to have fun with these larger geese. I would frisbee toss, a slice bread at their head, to keep them away. The dam things were fast and would catch the bread in mid-air. We got along to where if they saw me coming I would be flocked.

    For the most part the ferrel cats would keep their distance from the large birds, until after mating time and then try to pick off the baby ducks and geese. The birds had a good defense. Anywhere from 2-4 mothers ducks and/or geese would work as a team, herding all their chicks.

    There was one ferrel cat, that was the ambassador between the cats and birds. This cat seemed the most comfortable among the birds, and was fully accepted even by the mothers and their chicks. All the other cats would be chased away. It was so weird to see him sitting among birds with the bird all so relaxed.

    There was also an old lady who used to feed the birds and all the ferrel cats. She could walk among both groups and they would swarm her. After she passed away, others tried to take over the task of supplemental feeding, but the dynamics changed and the officials had to be called in.

    It was interesting to watch the old lady with all her pets. She was not intimidated by the large geese who would storm her for food and seemed to have a name for all the cats.
     
  21. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Nice story, ww.
    I like to feed hens with a large slice of bread.
    It's chaos for a minute, as they all try to steal it from each other.
    Heh Heh

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