(NEWSCOM)
Global warming could lead to more kittens
By Eoin O'Carroll | 07.23.08
“Each year it seems to get worse and worse,” said Christina Gin, an animal shelter volunteer in Hayward, Calif., to the Hayward Daily Review earlier this month.
She was talking about the shelter’s surplus of kittens, a problem that animal shelters across the country face every summer. But lately, it seems that there have been more and more of the furry carnivores.
Ms. Gin blames global warming for the feline glut, and she’s not alone. The Humane Society has observed that kitten season, which usually starts in March and April, has been starting earlier and lasting longer.
The Kansas City infoZine quotes Nancy Peterson, manager of the Humane Society’s feral cat program, who explains how warmer weather sends female cats into heat: “The brain receives instructions to produce a hormone that basically initiates the heat cycle in a cat,” said Ms Peterson, “and those instructions are affected by the length of day and usually the rising temperatures of spring.”
The story quotes some dissenting voices, however, such as a veterinary professor at Iowa State University who argues that the cat’s sexual cycle is based on the length of day, not the temperature.
But the warmer weather could still lead to a population increase, by increasing kitten survival rates, hastening the onset of cat puberty, or by helping more rats and mice survive, providing a more abundant food source.
Last year, Pets Across America – an umbrella organization for animal shelters – said that shelters are seeing spikes in the number of incoming cats and kittens. According to a press release from the organization, several shelters experienced an increase of more than 30 percent from 2005 to 2006.
An increase is not just perceived in the United States. The BBC recently reported a dramatic increase in kittens in a shelter in Bristol, England.
No definitive link has been established, but climate change has been shown to change the breeding patterns of at least some mammals. In 2003, for example, researchers at the University of Alberta discovered that Canadian red squirrels are giving birth an average of 18 days earlier than their great-grandparents, a shift that they attributed to rising temperatures.
[via Grist]
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2. Mary | 07.23.08
Furry little fuzzballs….My neighbor did not own, but fed 32 cats, how the **** many furry little fuzzballs do you think that would add up to global warming or not?? Responsible people can fix the problem, don’t want a cat, but have a stray in the neighborhood, have that cat spayed or neutered and t set it free. That’s what I did for 32 cats. It was expensive, but ‘fixed’ the problem.
3. Ben | 07.24.08
Tom,
Just because Kittens don’t pose a carnivoral threat to us humans doesn’t mean the implications aren’t dramtatic. Increased survivial rates for potentially dozens of species with similar mating habits and diets as Cats would push the carrying capacity of many ecosystems to their limit. Just because something seems innocent enough doesn’t mean it won’t have unintended consequences….
5. Suz | 07.24.08
The problem is not with the kittens it’s with their owners who are “too lazy” to get them fixed.
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1. Tom | 07.23.08
Quick! Lock the doors! Board up the windows! We are going to be over run by… wait… kittens?? For some strange reason I don’t really feel threatened by furry little fuzzballs.
Are you really going to take an increase of the number of kittens at A shelter in England as some kind of proof of literally anything other than there are more kittens there than there were before?
This would be one of the reasons why I call it gullible warming.