I am more of a horse person than a cat person (except my own cat at home), but if you have a young feral cat who is a hissing ball of fury crouching in the back of the trap, how certain are you of the cat’s sex? Once you have induced anesthesia and found out, it seems that you might as well do it - for vets who do large numbers of spays/neuters, the surgery itself only takes minutes.
There are also health benefits to neutering pets. Your beloved dog can’t develop testicular cancer if his testicles were removed at a young age in a low-cost, low-risk procedure. Overall, neutered males live longer than unneutered. Why wouldn’t you neuter?
That’s what I was thinking. There might not be as much extra cost as you’d expect, since the vet’s already there and the animal’s probably already anaesthetised (for the ferals and semi-ferals). It would also help reduce the spread of FIV.
This human female feels that fixing male cats is worth it because neutered male cats are far, far less likely to spray. In cats, the urine of even fixed males is more pungent than the urine of females. An intact male’s urine reeks so much that it should be classified as gas warfare. And the tomcat’s spray, which adds other stuff to the urine, is even stinkier.
I get my male cats fixed for the sake of my nose as much as anything. I get my female cats fixed for the sake of my ears as much as anything.
Others have said it. In the case of personal pets, the idea is to stop the personal pet from procreating and/or reduce behavior associated with intact males (or females). Like Lynn mentioned, even lack of procreation may come as a distant reason compared to “I don’t want the house to stink of tomcat”.
In the case of ferals and semi-feral cats, I second what horsetech mentioned. In those programs, some of the most expensive things/time consuming things are trapping and anesthesia drugs (although a “lower cost” drug combo is often used that’s cheaper than what used for private sterilizations). It is very hard to tell, before the animal is asleep, whether it is male or female. Calicos and torties are most likely females, cats with huge bellies are likely pregnant cats, and there are some older males with a typical “tomcat face” and reek of urine. But they’re not the majority. Juvenile cats look very similar. Cats are seasonally in heat, and off season, you may not see many pregnant females.
Once the cat is out, what is the extra expense? The veterinarians who gave their time are already there. The equipment that would be used for females, some of it (or well, a fraction of it) can be used for neutering the males. It takes even less time to castrate a male than sterilize a female (although experts can do the second one fairly quick). Therefore, all the cats that go through trap-release are sterilized.
Yep. My cite is my experience in a high-volume S/N clinic where we do a LOT of TNR!
And also what KarlGrenze said.
Often, there are more females than males in any given TNR group that shows up. These are colony caretakers who bring 20 cats in traps at a time, from the same area. Mostly I’d say without counting stats that aren’t available to me right now, that it’s nearly never a 50/50 split between males and females. Probably 60/40 female to male in most groups, and in the summer when many females are pregnant it can be 15 females and 5 males. Our unscientific consensus is the pregnant females are after the food resource found in the traps.