Kedi

[osprey_archer]

It is a cold and snowy day here and I decided I wanted to watch something warm & snuggly & uplifting, so we watched Kedi, a Turkish documentary about the semi-stray cats of Istanbul, and if you are thinking "OMG that sounds adorable" - you are right. It is 100% adorable.

How could it not be when it's all about cats? Cats going about Istanbul, doing their cat things! Cats climbing up impossibly thin twisted vines, cats leaping down from great heights, cats walking along the ridgepoles of tents (there's one great shot in which the camera is inside the tend, looking up, and you can see the shadow of the cat passing across the tent above), cats napping on store awnings, cats pawing gently at the window of a delicatessen so the employees will bring a nibble of Emmental.

It's really cute, but it isn't just cute; an hour and a half of cute would eventually pall. You also get the human stories of the people who take care of these cats, and ominous rumblings of change on the horizon: will the human authorities crack down on stray cats? Will the cats be able to survive as the city paves over the places where they've lived?

There's a subtle challenge here for American cat-owners, too. Or rather - not subtle - but it's not blatantly in your face, it grows organically out of the Istanbul view of cats (as noble free-living creatures who choose which humans to spend time with) and the American way of cat-keeping. Is it really fair to a cat to keep it cooped up inside all day, when it's meant to roam free? Of course a cat may be safer inside, away from motorcars and other cats, and yet... a ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Comments

[slashmarks]

I wonder the same thing about cats - dogs as well, particularly regarding the intensive, behavioral-modification based training that's commonly pushed on them. A lot of people who've experienced behaviorist-style teaching say it's horrible to experience; is it any better for dogs?

The other thing I wonder about wrt outdoor cats: on the one hand, studies suggest they live dramatically longer inside. On the other hand, I'm aware of some suggestions that this is mostly because outdoor cats don't usually get veterinary care; people who keep barn cats and start taking them to the vet every year or so suddenly find a lot of their cats living more like fifteen years than three. That's not statistically rigorous, of course, but it makes me wonder what a good study on that would find.

Thanks for talking about the documentary, I want to check that out now.

[osprey_archer]

I don't know enough about dog-training to have an opinion about that, but I do wonder about dogs, especially big dogs, in areas with really restrictive leash laws. Is a dog that big and that energetic really going to be happy if it never (or almost never) gets the opportunity to run free?

It strikes me that most of our animal laws are about what is convenient for people rather than what is good for the animals (even when we try to dress it up as the second).

In any case, it's a super cute documentary, definitely worth seeing! And I'm afraid that I may have made it sound didactic in a way it really isn't. The contrast between Turkish & American attitudes toward cats is striking, but it's not beating anyone over the head with the point.

[slashmarks]

Yeah, I worry about the prevalence of crate training for the same reason. We keep animals primarily for pleasure and for our convenience, and I think that creates more obligations to their well being than we usually acknowledge.

And no, I understood you about the documentary! Your post just gave me an opportunity to go off on some thoughts I've beeen having for a while.

[rmc28]

And in the UK, there's low-level bad feeling between "nature lovers" - a very loosely-defined group - and cat owners, over the effect of cats on our country's songbird population. See e.g. this blog post from Chris Packham from a few years ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/natureuk/2012/06/changes-for-cat-people.shtml

(When I got cats in 2005, several people asked me to make sure I kept them in at night, citing the "reduces predation by 50%" stat, so it really has been known a long time. Unfortunately my cats were really good at opening cat flaps.)

[missroserose]

Yeah, I'm friends with a lot of folks in the birding community, and they're all extremely anti-outdoor-cats for this reason. They're incredibly efficient hunters and only eat maybe a third of what they kill. Ours all stay indoors, partly due to that and also partly because we live in an urban environment where there are far too many dangers about. Given how many people regularly come by to pet/interact with them and how many surfaces they get to run/jump/play on (including the ones they're not supposed to, sigh), I feel like they have pretty rich lives.

[asakiyume]

Echoing what missroserose says--I've got naturalist friends who are strongly against cats running loose because of their effect on wildlife.

The arguments are, for me, muddy. The notion is that house cats weren't native to the New World, and that native birds and other creatures haven't got the evolutionary wherewithal to avoid them (the way they presumably do against things like bobcats or martins or foxes or other things that are native? I mean, that's the argument, but I wonder. I think part of the argument is that cats are an overwhelming presence in the landscape, unlike foxes, etc.)

I have mixed feelings about the "native" versus "invasive" thing, in any case. On the one hand, nobody wants a landscape to become overrun by one species of plant or animal and lose all its biodiversity. On the other hand... things change and species migrate, and what are you going to count as the Ur natural state?

For Turkey, that concern may not be there, since maybe house cats count as native? I honestly don't know.

[osprey_archer]

On the one hand doubtless the naturalists have a point, but honestly whenever I hear people complaining that such-and-such a species is so destructive, I always think "that's not even the pot calling the kettle black, that's the pot calling the slightly-gray-thing black." Cats may depress songbird populations, but humans are the ones who drove the passenger pigeon to extinction. Maybe we shouldn't allow ourselves outside.

I know house cats have been in Turkey a lot longer than they've been in the New World, but I don't know if they've been there long enough to count as native. How long does a species need to be in a place to be native anyway? Do humans count anywhere outside of Africa?

[asakiyume]

Do humans count anywhere outside of Africa? --exactly! Do we? Maybe we shouldn't allow ourselves outside.

[carmarthen]

Ships also don't decimate the local wildlife, so. Eh. I don't have to work to keep my cats inside - they've always been indoor cats (except one may have spent a while as a stray, and whatever experiences she had, she is TERRIFIED of going outside). They're safer, and so are the birds. But yes, sure we're also bad for the local wildlife - but I don't think that's necessarily an argument against keeping cats indoors. By that logic, we shouldn't make any efforts for conservation as long as there's still drilling for oil.

Some cats will do anything to get outside and roam (my cousin's cat, who was just killed by the neighbor's dog, was like that), but others don't show any interest in going outside, and I actually DO think not being eaten by coyotes or dehydrating to death in a tree* is in the best interests of my little old ladies. And in island ecosystems, feral cats (and other introduced species) can in fact be a greater threat to the local ecosystem than human activities; it was goats (brought by humans, of course) that drove one of the subspecies of Galapagos tortoises to extinction. Of course not all introduced species are invasive (most aren't) - but invasive specifically refers to species introduced by humans that have a measurable negative impact on the local ecology. Not introduced by humans and/or no measurable negative impact on local ecology? Not invasive. Sure, ecosystems evolve over time, and some of that involves humans, also part of the ecosystem, moving species around. But that doesn't mean that action can't have serious negative impacts.

(Also, I've been to Turkey briefly, as well as Greece, and the no-vet thing for community cats means a LOT of cats who are blind from kittenhood eye infections picked up during birth and not treated, and many of the dogs and cats have other clearly painful illnesses. The hotel I stayed at in Greece was full of stray cats, one of whom had just had kittens, all of which had seeping, swollen eye infects the entire 6 weeks I was there, and which were probably going to end up blind. The general health of community cats seemed worse in Greece, so maybe in Turkey sometimes people take the cats to the vet, but it was rough to see. And suddenly being followed by a group of stray dogs is...alarming at best; in some places, likely to precede an attack. Cats are domesticated animals, if not to the same degree as dogs. Why should we treat them as wild animals? And if we do, are we also okay with wandering dogs packing together and attacking people?)

/nature AND cat lover who is touchy about this issue (and the birders vs cat people is kind of a false dichotomy - most of the birders I know ARE cat people, they just have indoor cats, and I always wonder if people who think indoor cats can't be happy have ONLY met the incorrigible roamers - usually unspayed males, and even the pro-feral contingent seems to think spay and neuter is a good idea so we're not up to our ears in starving cats. Pretty much every indoor cat I've met has had plenty of stimulation, and every cat I've ever met - including the roamers - spends about 20 hours a day sleeping.)

*The last time the terrified-of-outside cat got out she spent two days yowling in a tree, and she did not figure out how to get down on her own. It was a bad time for all involved.