We have tons of feral cats in my neighborhood. They really don’t want anything to do with people, besides sniffing around our garbage. If there’s a cat running around free that’s friendly to you, it most likely belongs (or belonged) to somebody.
If you do some searching you’ll see this topic pops up pretty frequently. And often gets derailed in the politics of whether one ought to sterilize males or females or both, in addition to the politics of feral pet species vs. wildlife.
**FasterThanMeerkats **nailed it in #3. The actual population in most urban/suburban area is orders of magnitude below the ecological carrying capacity. And thank goodness for that.
Widespread capture and kill is the only rational response to the problem. That plus a huge effort to re-educate the dumbass humans creating the excess to begin with. Anything else is feel-good emotionalism largely devoid of logic.
Isn’t the point of sterilizing insects to sterilize the males, so that they mate with the females, who then don’t produce offspring, since they only mate once in their short lifetimes?
But cats aren’t like insects, in that they can mate multiple times with multiple partners, and are in fact, superfecund, meaning that kittens in one litter may have multiple fathers.
So I’m kind of with Shodan, in that let’s say we catch a cat. What’s the advantage in spaying and releasing the cat vs. just euthanizing it? The first seems to be more costly, and leaves the cat out there as a disease vector and nuisance, while the second takes care of everything.
The advantage is 100% political.
The local residents will gladly donate money to your neuter and release effort. They’ll only contribute to the lynch mob if instead you proposed opening a search and destroy sweep of teh cute widdle kittehs & puppehs.
Really Habeed the ecology is much more complex than you make it out to be and even than most trap neuter release advocates think it is (although there are some, albeit also some conflicting, studies that suggest it can work if the numbersare high enough).
Indeed the stray cats coming up and looking cute plaintively mewing are likely not feral but escaped pets. The big numbers and the big damage to more native wildlife are the feral colonies.
We have feral cats set up near our house … they are not cute, they do not mew, they are not friendly. They give the raccoons a battle and probably are crowding out some predator birds and even native foxes and coyotes for the smaller mammal prey. And they kill many many more birds than the native predators ever could. (I suspect though that is the raccoons more than the feral cats that require me to take such extra care with my garbage cans.)
The idea of that a community has a carrying capacity for feral cats that will be met by reproduction (or immigration) in the face of what is essentially increased predation (human capture and euthanasia) is both incorrect and cruel. Incorrect because we know from long experience greater predation pressure on a species can reduce the numbers of the species - be it the unfortunate near to complete losses of many native species predators and prey alike by hunting over the years to controlled hunting policies to keep deer populations in check. Cruel because what it is essentially saying is let starvation take care of it.
Simple trap-neuter-release (TNR) is a bit simplistic because all a feral colony needs is one dominant male. Catch even that dominant male and neuter him and you do nothing; without testes he simply loses his dominant position and another one, who was better at avoiding capture, becomes the breeding dominant male, with just as many cats still there and reproduction rates just as high. If the concept is to effectively reduce the birth rate (fecundity) then trap and vasectomy and hysterectomy (leaving them hormonally intact and thus able to have sex but reproduce) would likely work better. Not done mostly I think because it is way more expensive and TNR is already much more costly than trap-euthanize.
Trap-euthanize creates the mortality pressure on feral cats that is otherwise essentially absent in the ecosystem and both gives their native predator and scavenger competition a better chance to succeed, and gives the prey that the ferals more effectively hunt (most often birds) a chance.
Trap-euthanize is less cruel than saying let the excess number born just starve to death instead as they exceed the hypothetical carrying capacity.
Trap-euthanize is much more cost effective.
Feral cats are an alien invasive species. The population needs to be controlled for the good of the native ecosystem. You like cute kittehs. I get that. Ferals are not cute pet kittehs and even if they were cuteness is no metric on which to base policies.
That is correct. The ideal situation would create feral colonies with a dominant, vasectomized male. Castration of a male cat is easier (and therefore less costly) then vasectomy.
I don’t think you’re correct on starving to death - as I said, female cats who don’t have enough energy reserves don’t go into heat. In terms of a control system, this is similar to duty cycling an electric motor. Once the population of cats gets high enough, the females are only going into heat a smaller rate of the time. If a female cat goes into heat once a month, and due to lack of food, the average female cat has 2 months between heats, that’s 50% duty cycle. Etc. As the cats are killed and food becomes more widely available, the females go back to 100%.
That is also assuming that the carrying capacity of a given ecosystem has been reached. As mentioned, it usually isn’t.
And the cats are still going to breed above replacement level. They don’t stop - the “extra” cats either die, or wander off to other territories. If the other territories can’t support them, they die. If the other territories can support them, the population expands there.
Regards,
Shodan
We don’t need this to happen. If the city of Houston is currently unhappy with the population of strays within its city limits, if the OP’s plan were followed, that population would balloon!
So it sounds like trap & vasectomize would be the most effective in the long term, followed by trap and kill, with trap and neuter being the least effective.
AFAICT trap and kill is the most cost effective. Trap and vasectomize is next.
Regards,
Shodan
Catch and kill is the only possible best solution for dogs and probably cats also. Human intervention throws things out of ballance. Street dogs will usually live a horrid existence anyway. I believe that the current influx of coyotes into urban areas is largely due to cats and small dogs being a major food source for them.
You’ve said that, but you’ve also described ferals as cute mewing kittehs, so your reliability is a bit questionable. Any cite to support the claim that feral colonies go into low fecundity at any level of size? Of how starved do female adult cats need to get before they don’t go into heat?
Only if you trap and kill a significant percentage of the population yearly. Trapping and vasectomizing allows you to handle a small percentage of the population while stopping/slowing population increase.
I’ve done some shelter work and have seen leukemic, emaciated, pregnant queens as the norm in some populations. In the early spring every adult female cat that is trapped is pregnant.
Yeah I thought that was a BS claim. Sort of like that politician who said that a woman won’t get pregnant by rape. Biology does not work like that.
Cats are prolific breeders and females will increase the rates of estrus frequency until they get pregnant often having a couple of litters a year. Yes about half of the kittens do not survive … trauma, becoming prey, so on … but more than enough do that the population increases … even though most ferals also die by age two. It is not a kindness to trap and re-abandon a cat.
Ecologically feral cats are a menace. They are also a substantial risk to human health.
I don’t see why that should be the case. Female cats don’t stop mating because they have been mounted by a vasectomized male. Only if they are no longer in heat.
You trap half the male cats in a population and vaectomize them, and release them. Female cats mate with the sterile males, don’t get pregnant, mate with the other half of the males, and get pregnant. Population is the same, and the kittens either increase the population beyond its current level, or die.
You trap half the male cats in a population and kill them. This temporarily reduces the population. Female cats go into heat and breed with the remaining males, and the population returns to the former level. The cost of killing the males is lower than vasectomy, and the population is temporarily reduced. Ergo, the cost of capture and kill is more cost effective in reducing the population, even if the reduction is temporary.
Obviously educating/forcing human idiots into spaying or neutering their pets is more cost-effective still, but for an ongoing process, it would seem that capture and kill is marginally more cost-effective in the short run.
Regards,
Shodan
I am another one who doesn’t have any problem with kill shelters. I think it’s exceedingly naïve to think that somehow ever feral that is brought to the shelter can be somehow saved, and I think lots of dog and cat lovers do the animals a disservice by somehow thinking life in the wild is better.
I don’t like stray cats or dogs and I think that they cause a lot of problems. TNR still costs more than just to trap and kill. And they kill birds, and indeed, kill animals much bigger than them.
We are not running out of either cats and dogs. People melt all over the cute kitties but I don’t think they realize how much damage they do, or the fact that bird species have actually gone extinct because of them.
Not sure how that follows. Trap and vasectomize only works if you do it to enough males that the dominant males are highly probable to be sterile. I don’t see how a small percentage achieves that. The simulation I linked to made a substantial impact at 35% of all the cats having been given vasectomies or hysterectomies (leaving them hormonally intact) … I suspect the same dollar investment would be able to trap/euthanize a higher fraction, would have a more immediate impact on the population and greater prevention of the harms that large numbers of ferals cause.
Cats are induced ovulators. They remain in heat until the ovulate. Being bred by a vasectomized male causes ovulation to occur and the female is no longer receptive until reentering estrus.