Ah ha! I KNEW IT!

[trinityvixen]

Watching Life After People, a special on the History Channel, has been more interesting for being a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, methinks. Tellingly, despite the premise being that people are gone, gone, gone, everything focuses on emphasizing the before with the after. And very human concerns are bemoaned and nature's indiscriminate, well, nature is lamented.

Case in point: they wail about what will happen to the poor, poor puppies who will have to live without people to watch over them. Working theory is that the dogs we've bred to be small, short-legged, useless piles of pretty crap are going to be wiped out by the genetically variant mutts. Dogs will have it hard for being scavengers, but around 150 years later, they'll probably revert to the pack-hunting canines humans originally domesticated.

But the house cats? ::BIG EVIL GRIN:: They'll own the new world. Having never really lapsed when it comes to being hunters (and having so many feral cats already operating out in the big, bad world), they'll be perfectly positioned to hunt the rodents that will take over the human spaces. They even had this cute simulation of cats hunting in forests growing in old office buildings. Because the cities will become wildernesses, the cats will stay there. They may adapt to high-rise living with mutations in the flying squirrel direction, but they won't have to. They'll hunt, they'll breed, they'll win.

I always knew they didn't need us for shit.

Oh, and, good news, everyone! The oceans will make a good comeback once we're out of the picture. All hail the apocalypse!

Comments

[viridian.livejournal.com]

btw, you forgot the book that Shelly loaned you over here. I may read it if you can't pick it up before the weekend.

[shell524.livejournal.com]

Feel free to. :) It's a pretty quick read, and fairly amusing.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

The thought of housecats flying from building to building in an abandoned New York City is really funny.

[shell524.livejournal.com]

bigscary said the exact evolution about 2 minutes before they did. It was kind of hilarious.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

Had you read this article? It's fascinating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/magazine/02cats-v--birds-t.html

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I hate to piss off all the cat-lovers, but I'm afraid I side with the birds on this one. Plus, death-by-shooting like a fitting end to a hunter's life. Live by the claw, die by the high-powered rifle fire and all that.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm a cat-lover, and I side with the birds here, too. Feral cats aren't endangered.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

Oh I totally agree. Don't get me wrong, I love me some kitties, but feral cats should be our responsibility to control since it's our damn fault they're out there anyway. TNR programs are fantastic but woefully underfunded.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

If not for the fact that human actions are responsible for the millions of feral cats, I'd almost forgive the cats for just being better predators than the birds are prey.

I support catch-and-release and home pet neutering, which I think is a better, more humane way to curb the cat population. It's completely unnecessary, and a tad barbaric, to drop them in the field like so much unwanted garbage. Tranc them and kill them, maybe, but just shoot them? I don't support that.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Oh, I certainly don't blame the cats, who are just doing what's natural to them; and obviously there are more humane ways of dealing with the problem than blowing cats away. It's just in the case of that one guy, seeing a feral cat attacking birds, that the action seems justified.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

They are making a new Jack Ryan movie. Apparently it is made up because Paramount doesn't own any more Clancy Ryan books. And they don't have the rights to John Clark, so he won't be in it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Whew. A stinkeroo Jack Ryan is fine so long as Clark is nowhere near it.

Interesting, though, that Paramount can make a movie with Ryan without owning book rights. If I liked that character especially, I'd probably be worried. Then again, so many Clancy books are more ridiculous than what some screenwriter could come up with, so maybe they'll do just fine on their own.

[shell524.livejournal.com]

Lacking cable as we do, we came over to bigscary and negativeq's place to watch the show. It was less awesome than I was hoping for, and far more amusing with a crowd than it would have been alone. And yeah, I knew the cats would thrive. My cat has brought in too many birds (dead AND alive) for me to ever think he'd have trouble surviving without me. :p

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The questions raised by the special regarding pets and pests were the most interesting. It's funny to think that the key to cutting down on the rodent/roach problem is just to kill off the humans. I'd no idea that rats and mice were so dependent on us. Whereas pigeons, apparently, are going to make it just fine. Crazy.

But yeah, no, I have no fear that cats wouldn't make it. Mine might not, for being so spoiled and lazy, though I think Wally would make it farther than Oscar for being a pretty damned good hunter. I've always known that the first cat to work a can-opener is as good as the harbinger of the apocalypse for humans anyway.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

YOURS? Is this apocalypse scheduled for next week or something?

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

Is this apocalypse scheduled for next week or something?

42 days from tomorrow, at 1:23pm. Didn't you see the memo? or the TV ads?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Once again, the answer is 42.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I hate humans, so let's hope so!

on a unrelated topic....

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

...and because I want to see you in pain =-þ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5yPkxCLads

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Huh. Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (http://www.amazon.com/Riddley-Walker-Russell-Hoban/dp/0253212340/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201238360&sr=8-1) (which is set in post-apocalyptic Kent) features dogs that have gone feral and reverted to pack, and pose a significant threat to the Iron Age human population, who always have to worry about being eaten...

was an interesting idea, but flawed; and come to think, why *weren't* there any cats in there?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Generally, I think there are usually fewer cats in fiction because they're not as infamous as the dogs in being to "sniff out" trouble--like people wanting to eat them. Plus, dogs are useful for hunting, less so cats.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Oh no -- the humans were getting et by the dogs, was the idea :)

...kind of horrifying, the thought of not being able to walk anywhere alone because of fear of packs of dogs. I encountered a pack of semi-feral dogs once, and making sure they didn't bother me suddenly became quite high on my priority list, thank you.