Good for you with the kitties flatlined, but you do know I’ll never be able to listen to that song again without putting your words to it!
Heh - that’s the joke in our family, too, because some members of my family have never seen my mythical kitties who skedaddle the second they hear someone at the door. Funnily enough, my mom housesits for a week or two each year, and they recognize the sound of her coming in and don’t bolt.
Good job, flatlined! See, there’s a good use for having lots of money. 
Congrats!
Now, where on earth did I get the idea that there were no Ginger Toms? ::toddles off to Google::
oooh Lasciel, thanks for the info that ginger dumplings are skittish in general. I have 3 siblings, all FIV+ found abandoned soon after birth. They were hand-raised by a very nice couple and have known nothing but kindness and all-the-kibble-you-can-eat their entire lives, yet the 2 ginger boys jump a mile at the slightest sound. The tortoiseshell chick is the one with the huge nads, boy.
flatlined, thank you as always for the good work you do. I’m helping with animal rescue over here after the earthquake/typhoon/nuclear meltdown. We could sure use someone with your awesome skills over here…ever been to Japan, little girl?? :D:cool:
Au contraire, most ginger cats are male. There are occasional female gingers. Conversely, most tortoiseshell (calico) cats are female, with occasional males. This is all due to complicated but relatively well-understood genetics.
flatlined, you totally fucking rock!
Huh. That’s almost exactly the opposite ( vis-a-vis orange males ) than what I have read. According to Pontier, at least in the French populations they studied, orange males were bigger, more aggressive and thus more successfully propagated themselves in the countryside where lower population densities allowed them to out compete other, on average smaller and less aggressive males.
True, but the proportion is not anywhere near the same. Very roughly 25% of orange cats are female, but only a tiny, tiny number of male cats are calicos. And at that male calicos are usually sterile as they are invariably carrying an extra chromosome.
But I guess I should add that anecdotally my cats conform slightly more to the orange cat=more skittish hypothesis ;).
My black cat is completely unflappable, quietly falling asleep in the scale while at the Vet’s office, whereas my orange male is far more nervous outside the home ( inside he’s a big, goofy five-year old kitten who thinks he’s a dog ). My rambunctious orange cat starts 90+% of the wrestling matches with my black cat, but on the rare occasions he actually pisses off my substantially smaller black male, the black one kicks his ass.
Steve goes prowling down the street with his tail hanging low…
You guys are making me blush! Thank you for your kind words.
I honestly couldn’t do this without help. I’m part of a small rescue group so if I need help I ask and receive. Our totally awesome vet practically gives us his services free. Steve got tested, shots, fixed, eartipped and some abcesses drained for $75. We run on donations, which means its kind people like you who drop your pocket change into our jar that keeps us going. Nobody makes money with the adoption fees, they are mostly to be sure that the animals will go to homes that are more likely to treat them well.
Freudian Slit, while I like Stormcrow’s answer better, at this time of the year, intact females are pregnant or in heat. All I would have had to do is ask the rescue director for an intact, not pregnant female. If she wasn’t cycling when I got her, she would go into heat very shortly afterwards.
Lasciel, thank you for the information. I didn’t know that. I’m out in the sticks and don’t often see ginger kitties.
Kinki, that is so good of you. Animals are often forgotten during disasters. Many emergancy shelters will not allow people to bring their pets, which means making the choice of living in a car with a dog/cat or letting kids sleep on a cot and have a restroom. Locally, we are set up for wildfire evacuations, I’ve fostered dogs often, but if it was a major disaster, we would be overwhelmed. If my prayers mean anything, I’ve been sending them to Japan everyday.
Steve is currently in a cage in my barn. I usually keep males overnight and then let them go, but due to the abcesses, I’m going to keep him there for a week so I can put antibiotics in his food. I don’t think he’s going to tame down. When I put him there, he was staggering around because of the drugs, but was still able to give out a very impressive hissing growl at me. Trapped scared cats are scary cats!!!
Of course, this means my Sportster, which has custom plates saying “TNR”, will have to live outside. I can’t push it up the ramp and I’m not going to ride it in and scare the poor guy into panicing and maybe ripping out stitches.
I have a wooden shed with an attached lattice cage for fostering cats. When I get home, or when friends come over, the first thing we do is go visit the fosters and feed them. It makes us laugh at adoptions. We are pretty close to the door at PetCo and my fosters all perk up and look around when they hear Harley’s drive past.
Again, thank you all for your kind words. They honestly are appreciated. Thank you for fostering and having your cats spayed or neutored. The killing of perfectly healthy cats and dogs for the sin of being homeless won’t stop until the breeding stops. Thank you for the pocket change you drop in a rescue groups jar at the petfood. It allows us to save lives.
I am definitely glad that you’re doing this stuff. It’s the most humane way to stop the feral cat problem.
::::knucks:::: to you, flatline!
The only stray tom I’ve ever run across was ginger. Strolled in the house one day, filthy dirty and massive head torn up. He could stand on his hind legs and eat off our kitchen table. I have never seen a domestic cat that big. He weighed nearly 30 pounds after he got healthy. I don’t know what his mama got friendly with, but I’m betting it wasn’t a regular cat. He was a lover, completely a big old sack of mushiness.
Is this because the environment can only support a certain amount of feral cats and if you kill the ones you captured a feral cat that would otherwise have starved to death would take his place? Or is there another mechanism?
Am I the only one who finds it really ironic that now now people are making sure cats don’t reproduce?
I don’t understand what you mean here, can you explain?
I was coming to ask the same question, Nawth did. Is it because we’ve bred them into existence?
Neutered cats will still defend a hunting territory, so I suppose they could out-compete non-neutered ones, especially during mating season when the n-n are putting so much energy into other things.
I’m guessing though that a spayed female will not attract the attention of a n-n male, so wouldn’t keep him from chasing down an unspayed female, right? Overall, it seems the positives of release are more in the “not killing innocent animals” realm than the “will prevent the creation of more n-n cats.”
Now, with roaches it’s different. A roach that has been prevented from reaching full maturity by an IGR ( wiki here: Insect growth regulator - Wikipedia ) will still compete and engage in reproductive behaviors. The hormonal IGRs I had success with allowed the males to reach full size, but they were sterile. However, they still competed for females, which significantly supports the overall 3-phase attack which ultimately destroyed an insecticide-resistant population.
I think this is the strategy that Flatline is describing. I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t work with spayed/neutered mammals*, because the hormones which drive the competing behavior are no longer present.
*well, lesser mammals, humans have been proven to continue their reproductive behavior and cometition for mates despite neutering/spaying. In many cases, such activity increases. 
In some cases, the desire for the attention of said altered mates also increases!
I disagree. I think, for one thing, that the sterile cats competing for food with virile cats is valuable in itself; if cats are going to expand to the extent of the food supply, that implies that filling some of the "cat niche"in the ecology with sterile cats will make it more difficult for the virile cats to survive at all. Killing the trapped cats allows virile cats to move into the niche, while sterilizing and releasing provides a force to compete with the virile cats. Certainly, if only four or five percent of the population is sterile, it will make very little difference in the next generation’s population. But if seventy percent of the population is sterile, virile cats may have trouble finding each other to reproduce as often as possible. And while neutering may not have as much effect because a single male can impregnate so many females, spaying may prevent as many as five or six litters of kittens over the life of the female. Basically, I don’t think that the competing sexual behavior matters as much as the competition for food and territory.
Well, yes, to some extent. But only to the extent that the food supply is limited, and I’m really not sure that’s the case here. Cats are fantastic hunters and excellent scavengers. They would probably wipe out the local bird and rodent populations before they would start to go hungry.
I think the limitation is on how much territory an individual cat can protect, not on how much food is available inside the territory. At least 100 cats could probably make a living off of one Grocery Store dumpster. . . or even off the rodents surrounding it. This does not happen because one dominant Tom eventually claims the territory.
I’m not sure what the saturation point would be for pure starvation to ensue, (even in rural vs urban or suburban) but I’m betting it’s pretty darn high.
ETA: Please be clear I am not arguing for the killing of the cats. I am all for TTNR - and I don’t approve of killing innocent animals.
Because usually it is the other way around.
In a rural area, it may be that there only a certain amount of territories such as barns that can support a cat and neutering the cats that patrol that territory would starve the intact cats and reduce the amounts of feral cats.