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 community cat caretakers started realizing that their efforts to control the population were working out better than they had imagined possible. They discovered that a policy of “trap, neuter, and release” goes a long way toward taming the problems of cats gone wild.
But aren’t these cats pests?
People hate and fear feral cats for any number of reasons, and those who care for community cat colonies have to argue their way past a whole mountain of objections in their efforts to have cat colonies managed rather than destroyed.
But it turns out that the needs of the cats, and the concerns of both those who love them and those who hate them, can be solved through the management of cat colonies.
If you work on behalf of community cats, you need some help to counter those who think your efforts don’t make much sense. The following list covers the most common objections and explains how a trapping, neutering, and releasing program helps:
So long as cats remain, so will the problem. Well, maybe, but you aren’t going to get rid of free-roaming cats. Studies have shown that as long as a source of food exists, cats will move in. Institutions such as college campuses, military bases, and hospitals are tailor-made environments for community cats. Where there is food, there will be cats. There will always be cats, so the best thing to do is manage them.
Free-roaming cats fight and are noisy. Unaltered feral cats fight and are noisy. Cats are breeding machines: Females are in heat virtually all the time they’re not pregnant, and males spend their time fighting and yowling for mates and territory. Spaying and neutering removes a lot of this behavior. Unaltered free-roaming cats also may cause behavior problems in indoor pet cats because they are more likely to spray and mark territory around our homes, which can provoke the cats living indoors in that home to spray and fight as well. Again, altering the community cats reduces this issue.
Community cats can trip people, or even attack people, causing liability for the property owner. As much as possible, cat colonies are fed away from areas where people are numerous. Wild-born cats are by nature afraid of people. If they don’t have to go near them to find food, they usually won’t.
Community cats have more kittens than can possibly survive, and dead animals are a health hazard. In a managed cat colony, neutering keeps animals from reproducing. Instead of dozens of sick or dying kittens, a managed colony produces a few babies who can be caught, altered, tamed, and placed.
Cats cause traffic accidents as drivers swerve to avoid hitting a loose cat. Altered cats don’t need to roam in search of mates, and well-fed cats don’t need to roam in search of food. The chance of a cat turning up under the wheel of a car is lessened when the animal is content to stay in a territory where he feels safe and knows he’ll be fed. And honestly, if you’re really that worried about driver distractions, using the “do not disturb while driving” feature on cell phones is probably a move that would make an even bigger difference.
Community cats are carriers of disease. In a managed colony, cats are vaccinated for rabies (which can be transmitted to humans) and tested for feline leukemia and other diseases that can be transmitted cat to cat. Cats infected with feline leukemia are typically not released; they’re either put in a single-cat home with an understanding owner or humanely killed.
FOR THE BIRDS
Don’t community cats eat birds? Cats aren’t native to a wild environment, and birds are. Shouldn’t we be worried about protecting endangered birds?
Of course we should. But free-ranging cats aren’t the biggest threat to wild birds. People are. Consider: Cats have always been around, and so have birds. But now bird numbers are declining. Are cats to blame? Nope. The bigger threat to birds is loss of habitat and climate change, not cats.
Besides, when cats hunt, they’re better at catching rodents. You could argue that cats do us a favor by keeping the rodent population down — and those critters really do spread some nasty diseases.
Cats aren’t a fraction of the threat to birds that humankind represents. And a community cat colony that’s well maintained is even less of a threat than one that’s not. A managed colony doesn’t grow, and isn’t as hungry. Fewer cats, and fuller cats, are both good news for birds.
But even the most ardent advocates for community cats believe that they shouldn’t live in areas with sensitive populations of prey animals, such as rare birds. For these situations, cat colonies can be removed and relocated — and indeed, they should be.
Toxoplasmosis is a legitimate worry for pregnant women, but you can reduce the risks significantly by taking a few basic precautions. Please see