allergy to cats. Many of these displaced kitties are wonderful pets, and you have no reason not to adopt one, as long as you make sure that the cat is healthy and isn’t being placed for a behavior problem you’re not prepared to address. To be fair, many of those problems are very fixable, but you need to know what you’re dealing with before you adopt.
Chapter 4
The Wild Ones: Special Cats, Special Considerations
IN THIS CHAPTER
If you’ve ever put a saucer of milk out for a hard-luck kitty, or if you’re spending your lunch hour sharing sandwiches with the free-roaming cats near your office, this is the chapter for you. And we know you’re not alone: There are millions of cats in the United States who live a wild life — they’re typically called feral cats, or just ferals — and lots of people out there are helping them to survive.
Perhaps because the cat of all our animal companions chose their own path to domestication, it’s only natural that many cats should live still in the shadowed zone between tame and wild. In the alleyways of our largest cities, the parks of our ubiquitous suburbs, and the rural spaces in between, millions of cats spend their lives living just out of our reach.
The wild life is not an easy one, to be sure. Domestic cats living a wild life breed constantly, with each young mother producing two or even three litters a year. Of those kittens, relatively few may live to maturity. Those cats who do live to see their first or second birthdays struggle to live much beyond them. Starvation, disease, predators, and traffic take a heavy toll.
There are plenty of controversies around the idea of free-range cats, but we feel there are ways to mitigate many of the issues without mass slaughter. As such, we’re going to use a newer term for these cats that truly reflects their lives on the margins of human existence. Advocates for humane treatment of these cats call them community cats, and we’re choosing to do so, as well.
Cats become free-ranging when people don’t care for them, or don’t care about what happens to them. For example, people move and leave their cats behind. Or people let their cats breed and don’t pay attention to the fate of the kittens. Or people figure that their cat can do just fine on his own, and they drop the hapless kitty along a country road or in a city park because they don’t want the responsibility of caring for him anymore.
On top of everything else, these cats must contend with people who believe them to be pests and who therefore decide that the best way to deal with them is to exterminate them. Until recently, these beliefs were nearly universal. Communities dealt with the problems caused by community cats — real or imagined — by trapping and killing them.
More than a few cat lovers knew there just had to be a better way to deal with these homeless cats. These cat lovers were determined to find a better way and they did. In a little more than a decade, the future has brightened considerably, with programs designed both to lessen the numbers of cats on the street and to help the cats who remain live more comfortably.
Help for the Wild Ones
It’s only fair that community cats have human help to make their way in life easier, because humans were largely responsible for the problem in the first place. Because cats are so adaptable to their environment, and because they can manage pretty well on both sides of the line dividing “wild” from “tame,” many people let their pet cats cross that line — or throw them across it by abandoning them. And when some cats go wild, they … well, go wild. They pick up the natural wariness of all wild creatures. And they breed, and breed, and breed.
Finding the solution that isn’t
We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that any plan for dealing with community cats that includes rounding them up and killing them is based on an idea that needs updating. These catch-and-kill plans don’t work (at least not for long) because they ignore the fact that as long as people keep allowing their cats to breed, and keep dumping their unwanted cats, cat colonies will keep re-establishing themselves, year after year after year. A couple of cats, then a couple dozen, then more — and it’s time for the great round-up again.
Because we’re faced with a never-ending supply of cats, the old idea of mass killings cries out for an alternative, one that lessens the impact of these cats on neighborhoods and on their prey while dealing with them in the most humane way possible. How can we, as cat lovers, settle for anything less?
Offering a new way of thinking: Trap, Neuter, Release
If you accept the idea that community cats will always be around, then wouldn’t it be better to make dealing with them easier on the environment, the animal control budget, and the cats themselves? Enter the idea of managed care for feral cats — Trap, Neuter, and Release.
Trap, neuter, and release (often just called TNR) has become the favored way of humanely dealing with wild cats. Millions of people feed community cats — from the person who sets out some tuna for the cat who hangs around the back door, to those dedicated souls you can find at any pet-supply store, stocking up on large bags of whatever food’s on sale. What if these caretakers went one step further and slowed down the rate of reproduction? Captured, socialized, and found homes for kittens? Could a cat colony be managed in place? Some tried it, and the answer soon became obvious: Yes, there was a better way.
The people who hauled 20-pound bags of cat food to the cats they wouldn’t let starve, who named the adults, and who tried to find homes for the kittens decided to try an extraordinary idea: Alter the cats and let them go again. (We talk about how to manage free-ranging cats with this humane strategy later in this chapter.)
Spaying or neutering a wild cat never seemed to be worth the effort, at least as far as officials in many communities were concerned. If you trapped a wild cat, the reasoning went, killing him seemed to make more sense than altering him. With so many more docile cats and kittens around, a wild-born cat is a poor prospect as a pet. So why not just do him in?
Perhaps they were just trying to end the heartbreak of seeing litter after litter of kittens born into a very hard life. But before too long, some
