The neighbor behind us and over one has been feeding some feral cats for a while – we live on a hill so we can see her feeding them in her back yard. We have seen, we think, up to 4 adults (probably female) and 4 kittens recently. A different neighbor reported the existence of an uptick in feral cats, probably unfixed, to the SPCA, who started canvassing the area to get more information. We have seen most of these cats in our back yard as well, and because the person feeding the cats is very uncooperative (I can guess the reasons) we have agreed to allow the SPCA to capture the cats in our yard. They are coming by soon to put out the cage trap with food, but not to capture right away, rather to collect more information about which cats come and when. Then, after a few days of that, they will set it up as a trap and try to capture several cats at once, and retrieve them immediately, repeating as needed.
The cage is now set up in our yard but not as a trap yet, just to get them accustomed to it, and we put out 4 cans’ worth of food in plastic trays. They left a supply of canned food which I will replenish once a day. The cage unfolded is maybe 3 ft square and under a foot tall (it folds up fairly compactly for travel). It is metal mesh on 5 sides, with a door on one side but no floor – it’s sitting on a wood deck at ground level. They set up a wildlife camera to monitor what is going on with the cats. The whole cage is propped up on a bucket for now.
I don’t know how the cage will be set up to trigger capture, I think there must be some remote mechanism, because they want to do it when the largest number of cats are inside, and when they are available to come by and retrieve the cats. What I especially don’t know is how they are going to get the cats safely out of the cage once they have been captured. That will be interesting to watch.
More to come as events develop. If you have gone through this or seen it done, please stop by and offer your experiences.
eta: this is San Francisco, with zero lot lines, which means almost all the houses butt up against each other, and there is no way through to back yards except through the houses. The cats have to climb fences or wiggle through small spaces to move from one yard to another, which they seem to do without any problems.
It sounds like trap-neuter-return. There’s a whole host of issues involved with that and the write-up in that wiki article covers it well.
When I worked on Diego Garcia, there was a program to eradicate both the rat and cat populations. As they were both invasive species, the program was intended for just that: eradication. Neutering the animals and returning them to the wild would have still been quite hazardous for the native wildlife. And, of course, the program then, as now, was completely ineffective.
Spay and release for the adults, attempt to adopt out the kittens. A couple of them are quite small and probably adoptable, the other two seem like they might be too old.
This is an urban and highly built-up urban environment. Spay and release may or not be always effective in reducing and eliminating feral cat colonies, but certainly it is better than letting them breed promiscuously, so I don’t have any problem with helping to trap them. We have had small feral cat populations in the past, spreading across our back yards in this block, and they worked pretty well to keep the cat population from growing. If cat owners would keep their pets indoors instead of letting them roam outdoors, there would be a lot less of this sort of thing.
I imagine if the cats are crazy insane they will sedate them to intake in the shelter.
It is fascinating to watch those really good at handling strays and ferals. Big gloves. Burrito wrapping, sedation if necessary. It goes lickety split. They have ways to squish a cage up together to give the cats a shot thru cage wire.
They will have the cage propped up solid, like it is now, for a few days til the cats get used to feeding under it. Then they will remove the bucket that it is propped on, and fold down a metal leg from the front of the cage to hold it up. But attached to that leg is a long string leading to a place where a human is watching. They put food out, then leave and watch from the end of the string. When they see that several cats are inside, and none are under the edges of the cage, they use the string to pull the leg out and drop the cage, trapping the feral cats. Then they usually run up and cover the cage with a blanket or tarp – closing off the view outside calms down the cats and they often go back to eating the food.
Then they bring up one of more small carrying kennels. They place them next to the door in the cage, so that when they open the door, there is an exit from the cage to inside the kennel. The cats will be attracted to the small, dark, enclosed space of the kennel and will hide in there, then they close the doors and have the cat safely inside a kennel, ready for transporting. Nobody touched them, no risk to either cats or humans, and no sedation needed.
Then off to the shelter to be vet-examined, treated for any problems, vaccinated, de-wormed, de-fleaed, and spay-neuter surgery. The unsocialized adult will be returned to the area after recovery; the young kittens will be socialized, fostered, and eventually adopted by human families.
Oh the box trap is manual. I didn’t know that. I guess that’s to catch as many as they can at once.
We’ve used the trip plate traps around here. Set them up and leave it be awhile. If it’s mostly wild/feral animals they feed at night. So you go back the next morning.
Yep. MeTV has been running two hours of Wild Kingdom on Sunday mornings, one episode of which featured a chimp (IIRC) getting a shot in such a contraption.
There are also remote-controlled traps, which could be manually triggered by someone watching over the wildlife camera. Report back when you learn more.
Maybe they have a remote twitcher that can be attached to that leg. I will report back. Based on the number of cans of food they left, I think they are expecting to do the capture on Sunday.
From the videos, they found that two of the eight cats we have seen have already been fixed. That leaves two mothers and 4 kittens to try to capture.
For what it’s worth, it’s not impossible for an adult feral to become socialized to humans. I’ve seen it happen. I’m sure some don’t, but as anyone who’s known cats knows, they do what they want regardless of what anyone thinks they ought to.
I believe that is true, but the shelter is not going to be able to do it (IMO), they don’t have the staffing to do it. It would have to be the person feeding the cat and gradually socializing it until it is willing to live indoors. We had a feral cat that we took care of for 10 years, she got pretty close to my husband and he might have been able to bring her inside, but I’m allergic to cats so we couldn’t even try.
And of course, liking humans isn’t the same thing as liking houses, either. My mom had an exclusively-outdoor cat recently that loved humans so much that she literally wouldn’t let you feed her until after you’d petted her, and she’d demand pettings from everyone she met, the moment she met them. But she’d panic if a door closed behind her.
I don’t think I would want the responsibility of an outdoor cat again. I always worried about things like fighting, and bad weather, and so on. I actually provided her with a little house to keep dry in, but I never actually caught her using it. I wouldn’t want a cat of mine to have to be “scrappy” (the SPCA person’s word) in order to survive.
Like most of the cats in our life, we didn’t choose her. She chose us. We always have a number of ferals in the neighborhood, and Mom built an insulated (but not closed) cat house for them to sleep in. There were a number of others who used it, and I suppose we got along well enough with them in a coexisting sort of way, but Ms. Mousey was the only one we really cared about, because she made us care.
It’s not that uncommon for a feral cat to become comfortable with a particular person it knows well. It’s much rarer for them to become comfortable with “humans” in general.
I’ve had my feral barn cat for 8 years. He’s fed every day, talked to, etc. I still can’t get closer than abut 5’. He comes when I come into the stall where I feed him, but hangs well back until I leave the stall. Doofus. I told the rescue I didn’t need a cuddly friend and I’d take their hardest to place cat, but I didn’t think he’d still be so standoffish.
And then the roadrunner sneaks up behind him, gives his characteristic “Meep Meep”, scaring the trapper so he dashes under the trap, knocks the leg over, and he’s then torn to shreds by the cats in a cloud of dust.
