M at the rat crossing. (Beth Clifton photo)
Part 1 of a four-part series. See also: “Vagrant” or “feral” cats; Feral cats & street dogs; and “Community cats” vs. community health.
Some of the hottest discussion at the upcoming AR 2016 national animal rights conference in Los Angeles, coming up July 7-10, is expected to pertain to neuter/return of feral cats, with good reason.
I’ll be co-presenting on Saturday morning, July 9, with “kitten lady” Hannah Shaw. Regardless of anything either of us says, we can bet that some of the audience will have strong contrary opinions.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Los Angeles verdict
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas McKnew on December 4, 2009 ruled on behalf of five organizations representing birders that California municipal governments may not assist or promote neuter/return of feral cats without first completing an environmental impact report.
Los Angeles Department of Animal Care & Control director Brenda Barnette is reportedly now trying to allocate funds to get the necessary impact study done, but meanwhile her agency has been enjoined from encouraging neuter/return for nearly seven years, during which feral cat populations may have increased in several sensitive areas despite the best efforts of neuter/return practitioners working without official help and supervision.
While the McKnew ruling was not binding on animal control agencies in other California jurisdictions, agencies hoping to avoid litigation have tended to observe it.
(Faye McBride photo)
Effective but misunderstood & misrepresented
Neuter/return is simultaneously the most effective technique for reducing and eventually extirpating genuinely feral cats from sensitive habitat; the most misunderstood technique in the entire animal care-and-control field; and the most often misused technique––or perhaps just the technique whose name is most often used to describe doing something entirely different from neuter/return as it was introduced to the U.S., developed, and promoted more than 25 years ago.
Back then, in the early 1990s, neuter/return was often used specifically to protect wildlife. Neuter/return practitioners tended to value the value of fully feral cats, hunting for a living instead of depending on human handouts, in controlling the rodents who prey upon birds’ nests, and recognized the importance of keeping vaccinated feral cats as a barrier to the spread of rabies from rabid raccoons and foxes to the domestic pet population.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Neuter/return done to protect wildlife
Neuter/return was seen as a method of reducing the numbers of cats who might prey upon birds, while temporarily maintaining a furtive, noctural cat population as a stop-gap measure. Within a few years at most, serious neuter/return practitioners understood, native predators such as foxes, fishers, weasels, and coyotes would move in to take over the rodent-hunting role, as the numbers of cats declined and the raccoon and fox rabies outbreaks then afflicting much of the Northeast subsided.
Today neuter/return is used primarily to keep outdoor cats from being impounded and taken to animal shelters, where they might be killed as unadoptable.
Many of the cats in neuter/return programs today are to some extent dependent upon human feeders, and are therefore not authentically feral.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Neither are many of the neuter/return locations likely to be without cats in the near future, since the practice of translocating outdoor cats to new colonies––not part of neuter/return 25 years ago and longer––has become widely accepted, even encouraged by some national advocacy organizations.
Evolution of terms
Along with erosion of the original intent of neuter/return, the terms used to describe the neuter/return feral cat control technique have evolved considerably over the years.
First came the abbreviation TNR, for trap/neuter/return, followed by TNVR, used to clarify that vaccinating the cats against rabies is part of the standard procedure.
There are now many other variations and acronyms used to describe the specific approaches of specific organizations, some of which are no longer practicing actual neuter/return in any recognizable form.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Cat translocation
Translocating bona fide feral cats for example, would mean moving sterilized, vaccinated, but completely unsocialized cats from the habitat the cats know and have survived in, knowing where to find food and cover and what predators to avoid, to habitat they have never before experienced. Those cats, based on field studies, would have only about a 25% chance of surviving at least two weeks.
But translocated fed sterilized, vaccinated outdoor pet cats might have a short-term success rate of 50%, 75%, or more, if the cats continue to be fed, and are not exposed to traffic, disease, and predation. This would be essentially the same practice as animal shelters rehoming cats as outdoor pets––a practice most abandoned decades ago, but now making a comeback among shelters desperate to reduce the numbers of animals they kill, under political pressure from no-kill advocates.
(Faye McBride photo)
This sort of translocation may be called a lot of things, but one thing it is not is neuter/return, which by definition requires that the cats who are trapped, sterilized, and vaccinated must be returned to the same habitat where they were found.
Nuisance wildlife trappers
In truth translocating cats, feral or otherwsie, is usually just changing the identity of those who will eventually kill them and also changing the mode of their killing. Instead of being eventually killed as unadoptable, to make more cage space available in an open-admission shelter or animal control facility, about 75% of the time the translocated cat will be killed by a wild predator, by disease, by a car, or––most dismayingly––by a “nuisance wildlife” trapper, who will often dispatch the trapped cat on the spot with a blunt instrument.
The best available data indicates that “nuisance wildlife” trappers may now be killing as many as a million cats a year, mostly taken from commercial properties, gated communities, and condominiums. This is a dramatic change from around a decade ago, when feral cats were not yet a significant “profit center” for most of the “nuisance wildlife” control industry, and when the goal of neuter/return was still seen as reducing the feral cat population to zero, not enabling shelters to boost their so-called “live release” rates at the expense of human considerations.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“Giving them a chance”
Perhaps most insidious is that despite the low survival rate of translocated feral cats, shelter personnel desperate for their organizations to achieve “no kill” status are now describing inappropriate releases as a procedure undertaken to “give them a chance”––exactly the same rationale that was widely used decades ago to describe abandoning cats and dogs in public places, rather than surrendering them to shelters where, at that time, their chance of adoption was usually 10% or less.
On August 2, 2015, I was asked by an AR 2015 attendee who had heard my talk whether I believe the evolution of the term “feral cat,” popularized by organizations including Alley Cat Allies and Alley Cat Rescue, to “community cat,” pushed since 2009 by the Best Friends Animal Society, Maddie’s Fund, and the Humane Society of the U.S., has an influence on the growing acceptance of feral cat translocation, instead of strictly practiced neuter/return.
Beth & Merritt Clifton
Indeed I do. The next installments of this four-part series will explain why, and what effects this may have on public policy.
Part 1 of a four-part series. See also: “Vagrant” or “feral” cats; Feral cats & street dogs; and “Community cats” vs. community health.
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We are seeing a resurgence of rabies in local raccoons in the Tampa area, to the point where the CDC no longer bothers to test suspected animals because it is just presumed to be rabies if they are chasing people and falling over. No one at the CDC, Animal Control nor the Florida Wildlife Commission can or will tell me how to obtain the oral rabies preventative that had kept them disease in check up until recent years. Do you know how and where to obtain it?
Raboral, the oral rabies vaccine, is currently licensed for use only by federal and state agencies, and is custom-produced for each specific application. Also, Raboral is believed to be most effective when deployed in cold weather. Raboral has been used successfully in Texas, but in winter.
Bottom line, all cats in this nation are descendants of cats brought from abroad, purposefully for the most part, as I understand it; and we as a society should have collective as well as individual responsibility for educating ourselves and others vis-a-vis kindness, compassion, and true caring for any and all cats. My family have always helped cats found at large by spaying/neutering and obtaining medical care, and adopting when possible, or feeding and maintaining if not. If everyone would do all of this, we would make true inroads toward solving the “problem” of cats at large.
Excellent, exhaustive article, thank you. We refer to ‘neighbourhood’ cats here, in our small but consistent attempt to control the population, at least where there are caregivers or feeders we can donate food to. Will share this article.
Devika Khazvini, the founder of the Chennai-based Catitude Trust, fills approximately the same habitat niche among the animal charities of India as Alley Cat Allies and Alley Cat Rescue founders Becky Robinson and Louise Holton do in the U.S.; both her work and her praise are deeply appreciated here at ANIMALS 24-7.
Focusing her cat population control efforts on caregivers and feeders, however, is fraught with peril for the cats if the caregivers and feeders fail to observe several strict conditions, including that free-roaming cats must never be fed during daylight hours, should not be allowed to become habituated to feeding by humans if they have already been finding food enough for themselves (which is almost always the case; an emaciated free-roaming feral cat is far more often suffering from internal parasites than from an inability to catch mice); and that free-roaming cats must never be allowed to form visible congregations.
Explanation: Feeding free-roaming cats frequently tempts furtive nocturnal mousers, whom nobody notices, into becoming diurnal bird hunters, who hunt for recreation while awaiting their food handouts. This does not help the cats, who already had adequate food sources or would not have been there, reproducing; does not help to control the rodent population; does not help the birds (although dispatching sick birds who might infect others and are on the ground after dark, after others have roosted, is a key ecological role of cats), does not help to reduce birder resistance to neuter/return; and does not help to demonstrate the efficacy of neuter/return as a cat population control method, because even if the neutering reduces the numbers of cats, the feeding increases their visibility––meaning that in most people’s perception, there are more cats.
Further, highly visible habitat, where feeding animals may encourage people to dump their pets and translocate “nuisance” cats, should be considered unsuitable for neuter/return, regardless of other conditions, because even occasional dumping and translocating can rapidly undo all the good a local neuter/return program has accomplished.
Most of these points, incidentally, also apply to neuter/return programs focused on dogs, such as the Animal Birth Control programs now underway in India for 20 years or more. While some Animal Birth Control program have had outstanding success, many others have failed or have come to be regarded as public nuisances (even public menaces) because they have failed to discourage feeders from encouraging dogs to gather in public places, where they then harass any passer-by who may happen to be carrying anything edible.
Wow–the historical info about government persecution of cats was especially fascinating. We still see the remnants of this irrational hatred in today’s society–concern for the welfare of cats is still not equal to that of dogs, and references to cats being harmed still passes as humor in a larger segment of society.
People who dislike cats often go out of their way to hurt and kill them, and boast about doing so, whereas people who dislike dogs generally just avoid them.
Many cats don’t like to take treats from people’s hands, so you may need to drop each treat on the floor in front of your cat or deliver his reward on a spoon if you’re using something wet like baby food.
Great article and series!
Humane Services International builds animal transport (and other vehicles) for animal welfare advocates. To date the transport vehicles have all been intended for moving dogs to areas with better re-homing prospects. This month we received a request for a cat transport vehicle as there are apparently communities with a dearth of adoptable cats in the shelters. Do you know the reasons for why this might be so? (Santa Fe was cited as one such community.)
The Santa Fe organization Felines & Friends has run one of the largest and best-coordinated neuter/return programs in the U.S. since 2002, working in partnership with the Santa Fe Animal Shelter & Humane Society since 2011. Together they have sterilized the cats in nearly 200 outdoor colonies, which should have significantly reduced the numbers of feral-born kittens available for adoption. Since about 40% of the U.S. pet cat population were feral-born or otherwise found at large, this might well have created some demand for cats imported from outside the immediate community. There are probably still plenty of feral cats in Santa Fe and environs, but most likely not in the most easily accessed locations, where kittens can be found and their mothers can be sterilized through the efforts of volunteers. Meanwhile, the decline in cat admissions to shelters is a nationwide trend, recently discussed by Emily Weiss of the American SPCA at this link: http://aspcapro.org/blog/2016/05/25/where-are-cats. Some of the decline, nationally, may be because many shelters are no longer making vigorous efforts to take in cats found at large; some may be because some shelters are now translocating cats found at large to fed outdoor colonies, a tactic which is sometimes erroneously described as “TNR” when it really little resembles the authentic TNR technique of returning fully self-sufficient feral cats to their habitat after vaccination and sterilization. Most of the decline, though, is very likely because more than 25 years of neuter/return programs that have in truth been doing bona fide TNR have at last reached the tipping point where 70% or more of the feral cats in their communities are now fixed. At 70% sterilized, a population of anything will no longer grow, be the life form in question blue whales, microbes, viruses, or anything in between. When more than 70% of a population is unable to reproduce, the population of whatever declines proportionately.