Winter quarters for street cats in car tires: At first it looks nice and sounds good too.
In a sharepic you can see a house for cats made out of car tires. These car tires are intended to serve as winter quarters for street cats. You can read about the sharepic:
That's a great idea for a winter quarters for street cats, old cut car tires 🙂
Please share it diligently so that other animal rights activists can see it too
[mk_ad]
The sharepic itself shows exactly this construction. Two cut car tires are shown, and a cat can be seen in the top tire.

This sharepic has been on social media for a long time, and since it has the call to share in the accompanying text, a lot of people have probably spread this picture.
Winter quarters under criticism
But the Streunerhilfe Solingen eV sees major problems in this housing and advises against letting cats hibernate in car tires. The Stray Help says on Facebook:
Unfortunately, it's making the rounds again just at the beginning of the cold season...
This picture is circulating on FB, which supposedly shows a great idea as a place to sleep for feral cats.
[mk_ad]
Apart from that, the Federal Institute for Consumer Health Protection and Veterinary Medicine itself advises against using old car tires in children's playgrounds due to the harmful substances they contain...
“A modern car tire is made up of a variety of different components. About half of the tire is made of rubber, which consists of 20 percent extender oils. Not only does this plasticizer contain problematic components, but also the soot added to the rubber and a number of rubber chemicals are toxicologically relevant. The rubber chemical butadiene can cause cancer and the vulcanization accelerator thiuram can cause allergies.”
…you should pay attention to the following when it comes to cats:
Car tires consist of 40-50% rubber. Rubber contains, among other things, terpenes.
Cats lack an important enzyme in their liver that can break down terpenes, for example.
If a cat is regularly exposed to these terpenes, they cannot be broken down in the body or only slowly, so the toxins accumulate in the liver and can lead to long-term poisoning and/or liver damage etc. and ultimately death.
I would also like to be a little more scientific:
Cats lack the glucuronyltransferase enzyme in their liver, which plays an important role in metabolism. This glucuronidation refers to the binding of glucuronic acid to a substrate. This glucuronidation is an important mechanism in the metabolism of drugs, steroids, glucocorticoids, bilirubin and other lipophilic substances. These include, among other things, terpenes from rubber.
Due to the missing enzyme, cats have a weakness in gluduronidation, which prevents or greatly slows down the breakdown of terpenes.
And before the sayings come again: “It’s better to be unhealthy and protected than to freeze to death”:
This is absolutely wrong. A healthy outdoor cat knows shelter and protected corners and will not freeze to death. Of course, feral cats are happy to accept warm and comfortable sleeping places provided and that's why we should set them up. However, they should not be poisoned in the long term because a cat spends a large part of the day in such sleeping facilities.
If you want to help stray cats over the winter, provide them with insulated Styrofoam or wooden boxes filled with straw (not hay, which gets moldy). These offer safe protection, keep you cozy and warm, are easy to clean and do not pose any health risk to the strays.
This might also be of interest:
If you enjoyed this post and value the importance of well-founded information, become part of the exclusive Mimikama Club! Support our work and help us promote awareness and combat misinformation. As a club member you receive:
📬 Special Weekly Newsletter: Get exclusive content straight to your inbox.
🎥 Exclusive video* “Fact Checker Basic Course”: Learn from Andre Wolf how to recognize and combat misinformation.
📅 Early access to in-depth articles and fact checks: always be one step ahead.
📄 Bonus articles, just for you: Discover content you won't find anywhere else.
📝 Participation in webinars and workshops : Join us live or watch the recordings.
✔️ Quality exchange: Discuss safely in our comment function without trolls and bots.
Join us and become part of a community that stands for truth and clarity. Together we can make the world a little better!
* In this special course, Andre Wolf will teach you how to recognize and effectively combat misinformation. After completing the video, you have the opportunity to join our research team and actively participate in the education - an opportunity that is exclusively reserved for our club members!
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )

