I’ve actually ate plantain. I also fed it to my rabbits I used to raise.
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I have eaten it too. I find it pretty boring.
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Yeah. It is not the tastiest of things 
. My rabbits sure did like it though.
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I like plantain.
I’ve read that if you fry it with some butter and maybe some seasonings it tastes really good but I haven’t tried this myself.
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Now that actually sounds pretty good.
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Many Dominicans are more worried about destruction starting at the Haitian border and spreading east. Charcoal poaching is a thing.
Absolutely. I have neighbours steal branches off my bushes all the time for fire wood. I’m sure it worse for those with larger tracks of land next to the border. I don’t think restoration in any sense of that word is possible to accomplish in Haiti in the forseeable future. I was more just trying to say how restoration could theoretically be started if everybody had the will to make it happen.
I mostly agree, but the whole business with claiming people feed or don’t want to kill feral cats en masse because the people have toxoplasmosis is a bit absurd. I get the same way about my weakness, feral horses, just because I worked with horses for 12 years, and there’s no toxoplasmosis pulling the strings there. I just like the damn horses because they were, by and large, the most pleasant of my coworkers - particularly the BLM mustang. She was great. I’m sure many cat lovers are the same.
If you want people to agree to kill their favorite animals, you’ll need to be more pleasant and persuasive than the feral cat or mustang. Good luck.
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bobcat are not marginally larger than normal houscat (except some large breeds, but those are more likely to be indoor cats). average housecat is 2-4 kg female and 3-5 kg male, while bobcats average at 9 kg, which i would not say is marginally lager.
My statement that cat are not a problem in Europe is perhaps too strong, but from my interaction with birders here, the impression I have is that cats are a very low priority threats for bird sin Europe, with other factors playing a much more important role in bird endagerment (first and foremost being habitat loss because of landuse changes; both intensification and abandoment; and importantly loss of less disturbed forests with changing logging practices and increased visit of the mountains by tourists).
(my lived experience is that even the high density of cats in the city is not prohibitie to large bird populations in diverse communities, I did a study for university, IRRC 30+ birds species visited the birdhouse in one week in our very small garden, and only a few of the species were only seen once, with most of our neighbours having outdorr cats back then)).
You are right, and perhaps South America should have been excluded.
North America, however, lacks the small cats, bobcats do not fill the same niche Felis cats do in the old world, while oit seems he cat are not yet resposible for much extiction in north America, they seem to kill proportionally mor ebirds there; and domestic cats probably do pose a threat north american bird are not evolutionarily adapted, and I am pretty certain this is very true for Australia and New Zealand:
https://hahf.org/wp-content/uploads/media-1/Bird-impacts_of_free_ranging_domestic_cats.pdf
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With good enough sterilisation/castration programs, culling would not be necessary, and this is an option more savoury for most of the populace.
Most studies focus on the densities of urban cats; rural cats density have not grown nearly as much, and in many areas have decreased (in rurual areas people do not take care of cats as well as in urban areas, so many die of disease).
Rural cat also prefer to predate rodents, vast majority of which, in rural areas, are also either not native, or exhibit anthropogenically induced inflated populations.
If all cats are culled in rural areas, all those rodents will have to be killed some other way. the agreement is that cats are very good at killing small animals and that they kill in millions upon millions, we cannot let so many rodents live for many, rtaher obvious reasons, wild cats (the native Felis sylvestris) in europe cannot and will not live so close to humans (and prefers birds, usually); and I doubt hawks could live in populations dense enough to clean the millions of surplus rodents;
all those mice would probably have to be poisoned, probabily, which would release even more pesticides into the environment, and are even less target specific than cats.
While in some places, yes, cats should absolutely be exterminated, this is not true for everywhere, although all places would benefit from more controll of the cat populations
TNR has never proven effective, and cats that are abandoned outside again just go on to kill thousands more animals. I think that’s the core of the issue. Thus far, it’s been a feel-good measure at best, and a waste of resources at worst. I wish that weren’t the case.
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I only have anecdontal data from the lady that works in a cat sheleter, and apprently, after TNR rpogramme started, they have a lot less work.
It has to be applied consistently over a long period of time over a wide area, which seem to be a problem.
In western North America small Central American cats were relatively widespread until relatively recently, so I don’t think this applies there either. And I know animals not evolved to fear certain newer taxa is a thing (i.e. new world monkeys and snakes), but I wonder whether that can be the case here, since (I think…) many taxa of birds in North America and Europe are very closely related.
I think this should be a separate cat thread.
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They have a lot less work because the cats are being maintained in colonies instead of being turned into the shelter. That’s the problem with TNR because it gives the illusion of fixing a problem when it doesn’t even slow population growth. You need to fix 80-85% of the population to even slow the growth of the population. Those numbers are rarely if even obtained by TNR alone.
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do neutered male cats even compete with other male cats for mates? Or same with female cats? I don’t really know how it works but if TNR also stops the cats from wanting to mate, one would think it would do very little as the ones that aren’t neutered will still seek to do so. But if the neutered cats seek out mating anyway, but don’t reproduce, it might work. Really the cats need birth control, not castration :D
Fixed female cats don’t go into heat so they wouldn’t have a drive to mate but the problem is that the goal of getting enough cats fixed to even slow population growth is rarely reached without culling by euthanasia or removing cats for adoption. Also the maintaining of feeding colonies encourages dumping of more unwanted unaltered cats because they feel there is a safe place to dump them. This keeps the problem never ending with the few unaltered cats breeding to outpace the rate at which the volunteers can get the cats fixed supplemented by newly dumped cats.
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This is a human problem.
Not a cat problem.
well, the entire problem of invasive species is always a human problem, never a problem of the species itself which is just doing it’s thing in an ecosystem.
And no, humans aren’t invasive. Cultural and social factors and memes can act invasive, but our species isn’t inherently invasive. In fact no species is inherently invasive, because they are all native somewhere. Humans don’t follow normal ecological rules. So no one start with that nonsense please.
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I never said it wasn’t. It is a problem created by humans that needs to be solved by human intervention.