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I'm tired of the inequality
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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That is a slight understatement:
We've had some help though, i think i read that something like 1/3 of all human caused extinctions are because we keep bringing cats with us wherever we go, and letting them roam free in ecosystems that didn't have any equivalent predator, leading to stories like this https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/03/25/species-extinct/
Do you have a source for that? Intuitively 1/3 of all species extinctions (keep in mind this in general includes plants and other kingdoms of life, not just animals) sounds far too high imo. Maybe you have read that number in a slightly different context, like bird deaths in urban areas, or perhaps in a more specific context similar to the one in your link? Don't get me wrong, like your link shows, (house) cats can easily have a devastating effect on the local wildlife, in particular birds and small mammals or reptiles (wikipedia has an article on the topic, although I didn't find anything like your numbers in it). But as far as I know the major ways in which humans have caused extinctions are historically overhunting (mostly affecting large birds and mammals), habitat loss in particular since the advent of agriculture, and more recently of course the effects of the climate crisis since the industrial revolution.
I think you're spot on there, this was the only thing i could find that was close to what i remembered reading, and it's speaking about extinctions of bird, mammal and reptile species, where cats are behind roughly one third of the extinctions: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/worst-invasive-predators/
Sorry for late response
Hold on, the link you posted says 10 to 100 times more than the natural background extinction rate. That's very far from "any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of the Earth.
No, it says
both in the general intro and in the "Extinction rate" section, and
in the "Extinction rate" section (both verbatim quotes from its first sentence).
Oh, dropped a digit. Should have just taken that nap I was gunning for. My mistake!