In 2005, there was a law proposed in the State of Wisconsin that would allow rural property owners to shoot feral cats — Felis domesticus housecats that had either "gone wild" or been born in the wild — if they came upon their property, just as they could with gophers and other unprotected pest animals.2 Many who called themselves animal lovers rallied against the bill, and it was not passed.3
Some animal advocates proposed that spay-and-release programs would be a better way to solve the problem of stray cats breeding wild in rural areas.
Here's why both approaches are wrong.
It's tough being a 10-pound predator living outdoors in Wisconsin (or Massachusetts, for that matter) year-round. F. domesticus is not native to North America; like the Norway rat and the European starling, it is an invasive species, introduced by humans travelling from the Old World to the New.4 It has no natural ecological niche here. The American housecat is a descendant of the Kaffir cat, a North African wildcat, and has only limited ability to handle snowy winter weather and the short supply of prey that comes with it. Cats don't hibernate, like some small native North American predators. Only a minority of alley or rural feral cats make it through to spring without human intervention. In the city, fortune favors those who find heating vents, basement window wells, and the undersides of porches and entrance steps that aren't already occupied by skunks or raccoons. In rural areas, some take up residence as barn cats, but competition for such cushy digs is fierce, especially among non-neutered toms. Cats in the woods fall prey to larger wild predators, such as foxes and coyotes.5
Kittens are born to unspayed adult females, some of them as young as 5 months old, so the cycle repeats quickly. Many kittens die in these circumstances, but those born in late spring or early summer are adults by fall, and ready to breed at the first opportunity.
Feral cats live not only on small mammals such as mice, moles, chipmunks, and the like, but also on songbirds. In the city, garbage is a major food source, spreading disease. In farming country, some become egg suckers or chicken killers. Feline infections can spread through wide-ranging feral populations and get passed to barn cats, as well as to pet house cats who go outdoors. (And if you think the solution is to keep your cat indoors, you haven't heard Marmalade demand her birthright to go out. One of the photos of her formerly posted on this site shows her wearing a bandage on a paw wound probably received from a feral tom in our Amherst neighborhood. This experience has not dissuaded her from exercising her freedom. We believe her nemesis may have since been hit by a car.)
In city or country, feral cats are no friend to farmers, birdwatchers, or domestic cat owners who want to keep their pets free of wounds and disease. The feral cat problem is real, severe — and of human origin.
Some feral cats are genuine "strays" who have gotten lost, or have left loving homes for unknown reasons. Some are running away from abuse by human household members or other pets. Some are confused by their humans' moving: Every moving season, there are posters announcing cats lost, in their old or new neighborhoods, during moves. Some of these lost or strayed cats "adopt" new owners by themselves. Some are found and taken to animal shelters, to be claimed, adopted out, or put down.
Yet a significant number of first-generation feral cats, perhaps most, are not "strays" at all, but victims of deliberate abandonment.
Some instances of abandonment, while none the less irresponsible, are almost understandable. People who find themselves moving in a hurry — including tenants being evicted — may not have considered carefully whether where they were going would take pets. Friends or relatives to take them in can't be found on short notice, so they get left behind. It's easy to wish that these people would exercise a little forethought, and drop their animals off at the shelter, rather than leaving them on the street to fend for themselves, but it still happens far too often. The mother cat who kittened under a cast-iron wood stove in my back yard in Quincy in 1993 had been left behind in just such a manner by departed tenants of my building. By the time her kittens were tame enough to take to the nearest no-kill shelter, the female kitten was already pregnant — probably by her own father, a wily and wary black tom we never caught — and the mother cat had borne a second litter.
This is how cats are disposed of — in the city. In the country, unwanted cats get dropped in the pond in a sack, or hit in the head with a shovel; that's the way Grandpa did it. Ugly, but quick at least in theory, and old family stories are made of murder attempts (often delegated to teenage sons) that didn't take. "The Cat Came Back the very next day" isn't just a song.
Far less excusable is how unwanted cats are calculatedly abandoned — in the country — by city and suburb dwellers. Welcome to cat abandonment in the automobile age.
The cat curled up in my lap as I write this was almost certainly the victim of such a drive-by rural cat abandonment. The stately, middle-aged cat known today as Marmalade was found, as a kitten, on the grassy verge between woods and a road shoulder in Norwood, MA, in the summer of 1993. A Meditech co-worker of my then-boyfriend was out on a lunchtime jog, and found her there, far from any human habitation. The woman took her back to the office, where an effort was put forth to find a home for the kitten. As there were no houses nearby, the possibility seemed remote that she could simply have wandered away from her home.
Marmalade is an orange tabby female. There is a widespread misconception that all orange tabbies are male. While it is true that most of them are, due to the sex-linked, non-dominant nature of the orange tabby gene,6 some are indeed female — far more orange tabby females exist than tortoiseshell males, which have to be XXY. Even the receptionist at my cat's first vet back in Quincy was surprised to find that Marmalade was a female.
One of the most infuriating ideas is the notion that female cats are undesirable because "she'd have kittens all over the place." That's only true if you don't spay her, and you do let her out (or there are non-neutered toms in the house). Years ago, when the cat I got in high school had kittens, we gave the female in the litter to some kids whom we overheard saying as they left, "Mom's gonna kill us when she finds out it's a girl." If we'd thought of the worst possible fate she would face, we should have taken that kitten back right then and there. Of course, it's no picnic living with an un-neutered tom, either. My first cat, as a kid, was one such, who regularly came home with his face bloody from fighting.
As for Marmalade's secret origin, most likely, whoever first took this little orange ball of Hell in thought at first it was a male (based on the coloration) and then found out differently. Apparently, for some people, it was more appropriate to toss their kitten out of a car near some woods than spend the $100 it cost me in 1993 to have her spayed.
That's not the only drive-by cat abandonment I've been privy to. Earlier in the summer of 1993, I had been visiting Dreamtime Village in West Lima, Wisconsin — yes, Wisconsin. The "village" was not so much a village any more, as a collection of buildings that had once been a village, with small farms and a largish brick school, that had experienced depopulation, abandonment, and decay. Some of these buildings had been bought up by former Madisonites Miekal And, Liz Was, and others, to create an arts and permaculture colony in rural Wisconsin. An old America LaFrance fire engine sat in the meadow between the school and the main house where Liz and Miekal lived and kept their zine headquarters.
I was there for a few days during the annual Dreamtime Corroboree, and many hippie, punk, zine, and mail-art types were gathered there for several days or weeks of work and play unlike what they were used to at home. Mud baths, blackberry picking, bread baking, house restoration, mural painting, stargazing, zinemaking, musical improvisation, treehouse-building, and experimental experiences of various kinds were going on from dawn well past midnight. When I arrived late the first night, there was someone projecting art slides on the white clapboards of the main house. It was all sort of like Burning Man, only with fewer people, smaller bonfires, and an ethic of leaving the place better than we found it rather than just the same.
There were barn cats all over the property. One had kittened in the old schoolhouse, a floor below where I was sleeping; another near the main house. Cats and kittens everywhere. Even I wondered if there were too many cats there.
And then, out of nowhere, there was another one. Someone in a sedan had driven along the country road that passed through the village, stopped long enough to toss a brown tabby kitten onto the grass near (but not too near) the main house, and sped on. Nobody got the license plate number.
I was not witness to this, but others at the village were. The kitten, male, fit right in with the other kittens in the village, and was particularly friendly to me, walking around the brim of my Panama hat while I was wearing it. I didn't have Marmalade yet; I was tempted to bring him home, but as I was planning to get to my next destination by plane, I thought better of it.
There is another common misconception among city and suburban people: That a farm won't mind having one more barn cat. That the countryside is wide open, so it's big enough for just one more critter. That a cat in the country can get by on mice and birds. The cats at Dreamtime Village were fed cat food (which is not to say they never caught or ate mice). One more mouth to feed was one more mouth to feed.
It's been a long time since I've been in touch with Dreamtime Village. One of the houses being restored burnt down. Liz moved out, and later died of cancer. I sometimes wonder if they ever established a spaying fund or adoption program for all those cats.
The cat is out of the bag: There are too many cats in the country as well as the city. Neither shooting nor spay-and-release, alone, provides a solution.
Cats are dumb in some ways, but, unlike dogs, they won't come back right away to a place where they've been threatened. Ferals, who are wary of humans to begin with, certainly won't, unlike the old barn or farmhouse cat who "came back the very next day" after being led to his intended doom by people he'd known all his life. If they see one of their number shot in someone's yard, they won't go back to that yard for a very long time. Mother cats will move their kittens if they feel they're in danger. Humane or not, picking feral cats off one by one in this fashion is highly inefficient; the problem may simply shift to someone else's property, where, as always and always and always, the cycle begins again.
I haven't heard of anyone suggesting poisoning feral cats — probably because of the danger of poisoning one's own or one's neighbor's animals. This was one of the legitimate criticisms of the Wisconsin bill — that one could mistakenly shoot one's neighbor's cats as readily as a true feral. I think it's important to put a collar and name/address/phone tag on my cat — many pet owners have been conned into implanting IC chips with identification information into their cats, and don't consider that not all people who find a stray cat will take it to a pound, shelter, or vet where a (ahem) cat scan can be done.7 I realize that not all cats will submit to being collared, and tags may jingle enough to interfere with mousing. The one case I can see for chipping is described in my point plan below.
Spay-and-release8 programs in urban areas have been a way of curtailing alley cat proliferation, while allowing those cats who are tame enough to be adopted to go to shelters, and those that aren't to continue the difficult life of the street, living on mice, sparrows, and garbage. Most spay-and-release advocates know it is an imperfect solution. At least, the thought goes, they're not going to a certain death in the pound gas chamber or at the tip of a needle. The main problem with extending the principle of spay-and-release to rural areas is that it's much more difficult to catch feral cats in the country. In the city, just look for the porches, cracked basement doors, window wells, heat vents, etc., put out a little food in a Havahart trap behind the garbage can, and wait. Even so, a few wily ones always slip through from one year to the next. In the country, there's so much more territory to cover that catching even half of the females is a hopeless task; the best you can do is target documented communities of feral cats, and before you've caught more than a few, the rest will be on the move. And it's catching the females that's important; neutering males is easier and cheaper per animal, but it's a waste of budget resources, as it doesn't create a population bottleneck.9 It's also touch-and-go how many of the cats that survive the winter will be the ones that didn't get caught and spayed.
Neither piecemeal death nor sterilization is adequate to provide a real solution. Somehow, even though disease, starvation, and frostbite are the fate of many ferals that are not captured or killed, there seems to be a neverending supply every year. Any program for controlling rural feral cat populations needs to include addressing the problem at its source.
In both Massachusetts and Wisconsin, as I have demonstrated, there are definitely people who commit rural cat abandonments. Yet, other than one article I saw in the Boston Globe at least 5 years ago, I have seen nothing in print condemning this practice.10 I have seen no ad campaign on this subject by the Commonwealth, ASPCA, Humane Society, or other organizations which make the welfare of pets and livestock their business.
On the other hand, how would such a campaign be framed? Animal shelters, both "no-kill" and otherwise, already get more abandoned pets than they can handle. That's why the larger shelters have gas chambers and needles; there's just not room enough for every critter that comes in the door. And that's why "no-kill" shelters will not accept every animal brought to them — it has to be healthy, so it doesn't infect other animals at the shelter, and tame, so it stands a chance of being adopted. One of the kittens I rescued in Quincy wasn't tame enough to go to the no-kill cat shelter in Weymouth, so I took him with me when I moved to Cambridge. Although he was becoming more used to human company, he became another moving casualty — he was lost within 2 months of the move.
Some animal lovers are going to cry foul when I say this. But I feel strongly that the only solution must be multi-pronged — and allow for putting down non-adoptable feral cats. Any program for controlling the rural feral cat population must:
Farmers and other rural property-owners who backed the shooting bill may be wary of what seems like an excessively complicated, statist solution. Country folk jealously guard their independence, and see any program administered by the state government as yet another case of urban and suburban dwellers meddling in affairs of which they know nothing. The trouble is, in this case, urban and suburban dwellers, and their dismally poor understanding of the rural environment and its ability to absorb unwanted housecats, are the cause of the problem in the first place. Any solution has to confront the source as well as the result, and the right hand must know what the left is doing. This means involving both town and country in a coordinated effort to control the scourge.
It's painful to treat former pets as pests. But sometimes it has to be considered as part of a comprehensive, practical, responsible plan. Humans caused the feral cat problem. Humans have to have the guts to solve it.
Updates and corrections on this topic, especially regarding the status of Wisconsin penalties for and enforcement against pet abandonment, and publicity campaigns discouraging such abandonment, are invited. Please contact me with such information. The above essay will be revised accordingly. ejb
© 2005—2007 E. J. Barnes