I live in a suburb where there are always a few feral cats wandering about. We see quite a few because we have an old shed in the back yard that protects from weather. There’s usually a mom cat and a litter of 3-4 babies that grow up and go… where? I have seen a dead one once in 5 years, and it wasn’t even one I recognized. And I recently realized that the mom cat is a new one. Three years ago, most of the neighborhood cats were white. Now they’re calico tabby. Even if this is the only mom cat in the area (unlikely) that’s 6-8 new cats a year that just disappear. Some go while kittens-not babies, but 2-3 months or more. Some grow up and then disappear. They’re not being hit by cars or we’d see them. If they’re dying of disease or starving, where are all the bodies? There are no feral dogs in the area that I have seen, so not getting eaten, either.
I was thinking about this when I considered my grandmother. She lives in the rural south where the temperature hardly ever goes below freezing, so no problems with dying of weather. PLUS she feeds the cats and they live in her barn. So starvation isn’t an issue here either. If they’re living in a mild climate, getting plenty of food and clean water, no natural predators, and unrestricted breeding, where are they all? Why is she not up to her eaves in feral cats?
There are plenty of predators for cats in most parts of the world. Fox, coyote, lynx, large birds of prey, large snakes etc. kill and eat them, and usually do so away from prying human eyes even in suburbia. A feral cat dying of starvation or disease will most likely hole up somewhere to die (it takes very little space to hide a cat), and they end up being eaten by scavengers big and small.
There are definitely no coyote, lynx, or anything of that size right around here. No big snakes either. We did have a skunk family for the first couple of years but haven’t seen them back in the more recent years. I haven’t seen any evidence of raccoons since we moved in, and we not infrequently leave bags of smelly trash out near the curb, so you’d think they would be all over that.
I looked online and apparently there are coyote populations in wooded areas about 10 miles from here, but it seems a long way to travel when there must be similar sources of food nearer to them. But the strongest argument for no predators is that the neighbors across the street have chickens that I have frequently seen free in the yard. If a predator had the choice of slow moving, stupid, defenseless meat versus fast, smart, pointy meat, I would think we’d see a much larger attrition of chickens versus cats. Come to think of it, I wonder why the cats don’t eat the chickens… Hmm…
They’re probably being eaten by other feral cats. Male feral cats are especially fond of eating their fellow felines, at least in my experience.
Every wild animal you see dies some time. Pigeons, squirrels, moose, the lot. Do you ever see their dead bodies? Occasionally you see a squished small one in the street. But you almost never see any of the rest. Why not? Why aren’t we all knee deep in dead wild critters?
The answer is scavengers eliminate the bodies pretty quickly. In some areas it might be crows, while in other areas it’s skunks. But somebody eats all that freshly deceased flesh.
You can turn the OP’s observation around. The fact you’re neither overrun with live feral cats nor seeing bunches of dead ones proves 2 things:
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Birth of feral cats is balanced by predation / disease loss of feral cats.
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Scavenger popultion is in balance with the dead critter suppply, including dead feral cats.
Do you walk everywhere you go? Do you take shortcuts through abandoned lots when walking? I used to, and I would often see bird, cat, possum, raccoon and skunk corpses, often in varying states of decay, which will take at least 2 or maybe 3 months before the flesh all decays, the pelt frays to nothingness and something smashes and scatters the bones. This is assuming the town doesn’t have a sanitation department that is policing this sort of thing. So its possible you may have missed some corpses, but they are/were there. At least for a short time. Perhaps your local ASPCA or sanitation department has hard figures on the topic for you? If you really care about hard numbers, that is.
They’re all at my aunt and uncle’s house.
He started feeding a few feral cats in his back yard after Hurricane Katrina. They were completely wild so he really couldn’t do much with them and they began breeding. He was able to capture a few and got them fixed but they multiplied pretty quickly and there was no way he could keep up.
The last time I was over there, I was able to count 60 from the back window and that’s just the ones that were out in the open. You can’t get near them. He fills several troughs of cat food every day. They don’t seem to leave his yard. Walking through the neighborhood, you would never know they’re there.
They have their own indoor cats and have made a deal with their vet to get the cats fixed on the cheap, but they’re hard to catch and he’s fighting a losing battle.
My aunt and uncle aren’t going to have the pound come get them and I guess as long as they don’t go bankrupt with the food bill they’ll continue to feed them.
They get taken out by their natural enemy: the Chinese restaurant!
You think you are joking, but my first thought was neighbors are killing them. I know my uncle used to kill feral cats on his farm.
It’s a virtual certainty you are mistaken about this. They are essentially everywhere, and extremely good at not making that obvious.
Male cats sometimes kill and even eat kittens in the wild.
Smaller cats, particularly kittens, can be preyed upon by larger raptors. The redtails in my backyard will happily take cats if the supply of rabbits and such run low.
Ill, starving, or injured cats will, if they are able, hide and may expire, unseen, in those hiding places.
A cat hit by a car doesn’t always die immediately, even if severely injured. On two occasions I have seen cats with crushed lower bodies - as in shattered bones, hanging tissue, etc - dragging themselves off into bushes with their forelegs. You are unlikely to see their corpses if they make it into the bushes.
As noted, coyotes are pretty much everywhere, and very good at staying unseen, and when seen are often mistaken for stray dogs, especially at twilight and night. They have zero problem taking feral cats. I understand your point about the chickens, but chickens are frequently locked up in cages/coops at night, behind fences, and sometimes guarded by armed humans. Feral cats are out prowling with no defenders. To a coyote, the cat may look like easier and less risky pickings.