When you think of crazy cats, (real feline ones, I mean), maybe you’ll think of (“Sufferin’ succotash!) Sylvester, whose cunning and deviousness to make a meal of Tweetie was constantly thwarted by the sinless birdie’s knack for getting Granny to bash him over the head with her umbrella. Or, if you were once a business executive at Purina, you might remember being irritated by the ability of a 14-pound orange tabby named Morris, the poster cat for “9 Lives,” to veto a food flavor you created. And who didn’t have a rainy afternoon transformed into a magic carpet ride by “The Cat in the Hat?”
Yet when the subject turns to feral cats, nobody boasts any cutie-pie memories or lovey-dovey attachments. In most people’s eyes, feral cats might as well be killer leopards, stalking the wild bush of the neighborhood late at night, striking fear and loathing into the innocent hearts of pets and pet-owners alike.
What Is It?
Feral cats are cats that have not been socialized to humans. Ferals are not strays, but cats abandoned to fend for themselves, essentially becoming wild animals. They reproduce litters of kittens, but only mingle with other wild cats, and fear people. A small minority of these kittens might be tamed with lots of human handling and interaction. Since feral adults avoid all human contact and cannot be touched, they consequently never find homes as pets.
Pest or animal control services and organizations offer varied approaches to solving problems related to colonies of feral cats. Feral cats can pose health hazards as well as threats to local wildlife. Communities are often split between trapping and euthanizing the animals, or finding the ferals a wild sanctuary. Few no-kill shelters or sanctuaries actually take in feral cats, and those that do are extremely limited in the number.
Who Needs It?
Anyone whose neighborhood is populated by feral cats will require the services of pest and animal control professionals.
Benefits
Many pest and animal control services are proponents of “Trap, Neuter, Return,” or TNR, as it’s more commonly referred to. TNR service providers say they offer the least costly and most effective method of addressing the overpopulation of free-roaming, feral cats in our communities. They trap the feral cats humanely, sterilize them, and then return them to their outdoor home. In these neighborhoods, compassionate animal caregivers continue to provide them with food and water. The process eliminates, or at least reduces, objectionable behaviors like spraying, yowling, and catfights. Most importantly, the feral population is stabilized.
Some elite pest and animal control services will offer the possibility of relocation. These service-providers emphasize quality of life considerations. Since feral cats are much like wild animals, they contend the great outdoors is home to them. The most famous example of this approach is on San Nicolas Island, off the coast of Ramona, California. Here, planes full of lucky feral cats land on the runway, where they’ve been given a reprieve from a death sentence, after being trapped by pest or animal control services. A new cat facility is on San Nicolas Island, an island that is part of California, designed to provide the cats with the kind of natural habitat to which they’re accustomed. The animals are medically evaluated, spayed or neutered, and vaccinated.
Detractors of relocating feral cats to isolated islands point out how the program jeopardizes the nesting success for seabirds that increasingly rely on islands as refuges. Ferals threaten other native species, including the island’s night lizard. Still other studies show that if you remove feral cats from their original location, others merely move in to take their place. It’s popularly dubbed “the vacuum effect.”
Risks
About 70 million cats are estimated as feral or free-roaming in the United States. More and more ecologists and wildlife advocates want domestic cats out of native environments, because they perceive them to be destructive to other native wildlife, including birds, rodents, small mammals, and lizards. Similarly, with the growing popularity of TNR programs, these ecologists oppose any program that releases feral cats back into the environment. They want them out of parks and neighborhoods simply because of their impact on an area’s ecosystem.
Dr. Stanley A. Temple, of the Department of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains, “Feral and free-roaming cats are exotic predators [in the ecological sense] that are not naturally a part of any North American ecosystem. They are not ecologically equivalent to any North American mammalian predator, and their impacts on prey species are distinctly different from those of wild predators…Their predation on native wildlife can have serious consequences for species already stressed by other sources of human-caused environmental degradation.”
Colonial proverb: “You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.”
English proverb: “In a cat’s eye, all things belong to cats.”
