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IMPORTANT: Putting a real scrunchie on your cat is dangerous for the cat (read on to find out why). Don’t do it! This article discusses a special, scrunchie-like product that is safer for cats. Please, for the safety of your feline, don’t just put any old thing around their necks.
Okay guys and gals, it’s time to dust off your scrunchies again! Not sure where you put them? They’re in that box in the back of your closet. Yeah, that one labeled, “scrunchies, banana clips, slap bracelets, and Swatches.” C’mon, it’s for the good of the birds!
Are we all gonna just sit here and pretend that this cat doesn’t look like the “Creepy, Thin Man” from Charlie’s Angels?
A two-year study out of Murdoch University in Western Australia, spearheaded by Ph.D student Catherine Hall, concluded that putting scrunchie-like collars on cats reduced the amount of native wildlife killed by 54 percent.
While the sudden appearance of a scrunchie in a cat’s repertoire could make it want to hit up Lalapalooza while sporting a pleather jacket from Contempo Casuals, thusly eliminating any spare time they had for indiscriminate hunting, the cause seems to be a bit more simple.
“You think this is gonna stop me from catching a bird? As if!”
Scrunchies, especially the more colorful ones, make cats more visible to birds. “Bright colors are very noticeable to songbirds, they should see the cats further away, allowing them to escape earlier,” Hall said. “Because it’s based on color and vision, cats won’t be able to learn how to make it stop working.”
Considering that a 2013 study by Environment Canada found feral and domestic cats to be the top cause of bird deaths across the country, coming in at 133 million avian fatalities, the desire to prevent this is an understandable one.
“I get that we’re trying to alert birds to my presence, but is having them laugh themselves to death at my appearance any better?”
Historically, cats have been able to figure out ways to thwart intended alert systems, such as bells on collars. Being the smart little buggers that they are, they just learned to move in a stealthier manner as to avoid the jingling which, in effect, made them even better hunters.
“Sometimes, I like to play ‘Stay’ over and over again. Lisa Loeb just gets me.”
Birds Be Safe/Twitter
There’s no working around looking super fly, however, and that’s great news for the birds, reptiles and amphibians who will be alerted to the cat’s presence, thanks to their new accessories. Sadly, animals with poor color vision do not find this feline homage to Jessie Spano as helpful.
“I’m gonna catch you faster than you can say, ‘Zig a Zig ahhh.’ Wait, where are you going?”
Birds Be Safe/Twitter
While it’s great that going full Spice Girl on your feline can help wildlife populations, the safety of your cat is also important. A true and legitimate scrunchie that you used to wear in your hair (or maybe still do, we’re not here to play Fashion Police) will be too tight for your furry friend and can cause injury or stress.
The Cat Protection League out of the U.K. urges, “While recognising that cats catching birds is a concern, the use of scrunchies could cause serious harm to the cat if it becomes caught or tangled. For this reason, the only articles placed around a cat’s neck should have a quick release fitting or a snap opening. Cats prefer to hunt at dawn and dusk so Cats Protection believes an effective way to reduce hunting is to keep cats in at night.”
“I’m an indoor cat. You’re just doing this to entertain yourselves at this point.”
Birds Be Safe/Twitter
We agree that keeping cats indoors is the safest bet, not just for wildlife, but for cats themselves. Having said that, if you’d like to cover your bets and jump on this colorful trend as well, UK company Birds Be Safe makes covers for your cat’s existing collar. Fluffy can look snazzy while birds can live on to tell their bird friends about the weird thing they saw that day.
But, seriously you guys, he looks just like him.
Lead image source: Take Part/Twitter
If your cats were only destroying invasive species (cats themselves being a noxious invasive species), then nobody would be complaining. But your vermin cats destroy anything that moves. Letting a cat roam free is absolutely no better and NO LESS CRIMINAL AND MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE than intentionally throwing rat-poison around on everyone\’s property to kill any living thing. Your man-made vermin cats are now driving hundreds if not thousands of species of native animals to EXTINCTION across the whole planet. Have you no conscience nor morality left?
Apparently gutting-alive and skinning-alive animals with everyone\’s vermin cats, tortured to death just for your cats\’ play-toys and YOUR entertainment, no other reason, is perfectly acceptable to you. Yeah, you\’re all fine upstanding "animal-lovers" who respect all other lives around you and all other life on earth, aren\’t you.
Are you not even aware that Toxoplasma gondii oocysts when dried (and still viable) become aerosolized and drift on the wind? You can contract potentially-deadly T. gondii just from a cat-owner\’s yard when it\’s not been raining for a week and you inhale any air that passes over their land.
Free-roaming cats and people improperly disposing of indoor-cats\’ cat-litter are actually killing-off hundreds of rare marine-mammal species, even rare whales and your beloved manatees, (countless numbers of individual rare animals) on coastlines of all the world. A global ecological disaster worse than any oil-spill that has ever existed or could even be imagined. There are now harsh fines in areas of California for anyone found dumping cat-litter illegally — not in some environmentally-contained landfill. At least some of them "get it".
Birds are just a minor subset of all the thousands of native animal species (BILLIONS of individual animals YEARLY in just the USA alone!) that cat-lickers (criminally irresponsible cat-advocates) are annihilating around the world with their man-made invasive species vermin cats.
Not only are these demented invasive-species house-cats-ONLY "animal lovers" now killing off all Big Cats in all wildlife reserves around the world: http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/big-cat-owners-warned-to-keep-them-acres-away-from-feral-strays
And for the ultimate example of absurdity and species-conservation irony, now making all moggie-licking residents of the UK (the inventors of that TNR insanity) the complete laughingstocks of the whole world, they\’ve already made their ONE AND ONLY NATIVE CAT SPECIES EXTINCT in the UK with their invasive species "moggies": http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/16/scottish-wildcat-extinction
"A report, produced by the Scottish Wildcat Association, reviewed 2,000 records of camera trap recordings, eyewitness reports and road kills, and concluded there may be only about 40 wildcats left in Scotland in the wild today. \’However you juggle the figures, it is hard to find anything positive,\’ says Steve Piper, the association\’s chairman. \’The overwhelming evidence is that the wildcat is going to be extinct within months.\’" … "However, it is not the loss of habitat that is causing the current cat crisis in the Cairngorms. It is the spread of the domestic cat." … "\’Essentially the Highland wildcat is being eradicated by an alien invasive species: the domestic cat.\’" (report quoted from three years ago, they are no-doubt extinct by now)
As well as killing off all their inland River Otters in England (and elsewhere) with their cats\’ parasites: http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/otter-toxoplasmosis.html
As well as cats\’ parasites killing off all rare and endangered marine mammals on all coastlines around the world (worse than any oil-spill that has ever existed or could even be imagined):
http://news.msn.com/science-technology/deadly-cat-feces-killing-thousands-of-marine-mammals
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/hawaiian-monk-seals
And these cat-licking "animal lover" psychopaths and sociopaths are also killing off all the Mountain Lions (Cougars, Puma, Endangered Florida Panther, etc.), and all other native cat species in North America: http://rapidcityjournal.com/sports/local/feral-cats-pose-threat-to-birds-lions/article_8ec451c9-4b03-55a3-baa7-71ac577905cb.html
But now these cat-lickers are even killing off rare whales and causing massive birth-defects in the indigenous Inuit people who depend on seal-meat for their very survival. Seals that were infected (and are also dying-off) from these cat-lickers\’ cats\’ parasites.
Cat parasite found in western Arctic Beluga deemed infectious http://news.ubc.ca/2014/02/13/bigthaw/
Let\’s thank these psychotic bible-home-schooled cat-lickers for all the fine work they do for being such fantastic "animal lovers", shall we? THEY JUST LOVE CATS SO MUCH! So caring! So thoughtful! So intelligent! So FULL of love for living things! So much so that they will even sacrifice whole races of humans to death-by-birth-defect to prove how much they love their cats.
I\’d love to thank them all, each with a gift of a solitary-confinement prison-cell — FOR LIFE. Better yet, for their VAST ecological crimes and sins against all of nature and all of humanity, hanged-until-dead would be a far more fitting "gift" for them AND the whole planet. That used to be the punishment for engaging in bio-warfare against the human population and all other animal life in any country. I say bring it back — special, just for them.