This article from NYTimes.com
Bird Lovers Hope to Keep Cats on a Very Short Leash
March 18, 2003
By JAMES GORMAN
Every afternoon that she can make it, Dorothy May rolls her
wheelchair down the road to a big thicket at the boundary
of her condominium complex in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Then the
cats come running.
"I'm just meals on wheels," Ms. May said. In fact, she is a
lot more. She takes the cats to a veterinarian for spaying,
neutering and vaccinations. She tries to find homes for
them and offers unlimited ear scratches. She is well aware
that many people, including some neighbors, disapprove.
But, she said, "I'm taking care of them and I love them."
Dr. Christine Storts is the vet who treats the strays
because she sees what they mean to Ms. May, but she is dead
set against maintaining such colonies. She is also dead set
against letting house cats roam free.
Dr. Storts wants to see all cats indoors or on leashes all
the time, and no feral cat colonies, even if that means
trapping and removing strays, many of which will inevitably
be killed in shelters. The environmental damage the cats
cause and the diseases they can spread are too important to
ignore, she said.
Her views have brought her personal attacks and accusatory
leaflets. "It's been a struggle," Dr. Storts said.
Ms. May and Dr. Storts are on opposite sides of the debate,
but they are unusual in that they can talk to each other.
More often, the serious disputes break out when cat lovers
square off against bird lovers, environmentalists against
animal defenders and veterinarians against veterinarians.
Town meetings erupt in shouting, and otherwise mild
suburbanites trap neighbors' cats and drop them at
shelters.
The problem, or one problem, is that cats are killing
birds, perhaps in the millions, perhaps in the hundreds of
millions. Cats that roam free can also spread rabies,
feline leukemia and other diseases.
So a movement has begun to stop the comings and goings of
America's favorite pet. The goal, in essence, is to take
the final step in taming Felis catus, the domestic cat, and
confine it to a life that is truly domestic.
The United States has 73 million pet cats with homes of
their own, according to a survey in 2001 and 2002 by the
American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. Many
"owned cats" spend some time running free, and millions
more un-owned cats prowl urban alleys, rural fields and
suburban yards. Estimates of the feral cat population run
up to 100 million, but can hardly be relied on. Counting
cats is only slightly less difficult than herding them.
If cats spent all their hours stretched on divans, licking
their paws and manipulating their owners, the numbers would
not matter much. But cats love to hunt as much as they love
to preen, and they are good at it. The American Bird
Conservancy and the National Audubon Society want them
stopped.
For those groups, the cat is no mere pet, but a dangerous
invasive species, a non-native predator that is creating
havoc for certain native species. The bird conservancy,
after noting that no one really knows how many birds are
killed by cats, puts the number of cat-killed birds, based
on "reasonable extrapolations from scientific data," at
hundreds of millions a year.
A vice president of the Humane Society of the United
States, Martha Armstrong, said other estimates were as low
as seven million. "I don't think it's well documented," Ms.
Armstrong said.
Dr. Julie Levy agreed. She is a veterinarian who teaches at
the University of Florida and runs a program to trap,
neuter, vaccinate and release stray cats. But she has no
interest in joining a numbers argument. "It is somewhat
unproductive to see what number we put on how many birds
cats kill," Dr. Levy said. "If we can stipulate it's
probably a lot, then let's see what we can do about it."
Six years ago, the bird conservancy started a campaign,
Cats Indoors, with the goal of keeping all cats indoors all
the time. Linda Winter, who started the campaign and still
directs it, said feral cats should be trapped and removed
to adoptive homes, one of the rare sanctuaries for feral
cats or to shelters. That approach is sometimes called
"trap and kill," by critics, because when it is carried out
many of the cats that go to shelters are killed.
Ms. Winter has cats that she keeps indoors. Cats should not
run free, she said, and they are "not wildlife, not native
to North America."
But unlike other invasive species, cats have political
teeth, as well as real ones. They have their own
foundations, lobbyists and grass-roots support. The Humane
Society supported Cats Indoors at first, but has begun its
own campaign, Safe Cats, to urge owners to keep cats
confined and controlled. The society does not endorse
trapping feral cats.
The group supports, in some cases, volunteers' managing
feral colonies, an approach that has been promoted for 10
years by Alley Cat Allies in Washington, a group that says
it has 80,000 members dedicated to the welfare of feral
cats. Colonies, which can range from a handful of cats to
hundreds, are maintained by volunteers, sometimes
officially, sometimes surreptitiously.
Like Ms. May, the volunteers feed the cats, search for
adoptive homes, arrange for neutering and vaccinations and
return the cats that are too wild to keep to where they
came from. That approach is called Trap, Neuter, Release or
T.N.R.
"The ultimate goal is that there should be no more feral
cats," said Donna Wilcox, executive director of Alley Cat
Allies. As cats are neutered, she said, the colonies
decline.
As with everything else involving cats, others disagree.
Though some studies show colonies that have declined in
numbers or even disappeared, others show they just keep
going. Harold Mitchell, a biologist with the Florida
Department of Environmental Protection, who spends much of
his time trying to protect endangered beach mice and birds
like the piping plover from free-roaming cats, said
trapping and neutering cats worked in theory, but not in
practice.
"If it were a closed system," Mr. Mitchell said,
"definitely it would work."
But, he added, new cats keep arriving, and "people use
state parks as a dumping ground for unwanted pets."
Florida has some of the biggest feral colonies and some of
the most emotional fights. In the summer of 2002, a woman
who was feeding feral cats on Singer Island in Palm Beach
County was bitten by a feral cat that was found to be
rabid. For public health reasons, the county decided to
eradicate all the stray cats on the island, causing an
uproar. The woman who had been bitten was one of the cats'
most vocal defenders.
In another part of Florida, at the Ocean Reef Club on Key
Largo, a feral colony, more than 500 strong, lives next to
the habitat of the endangered Key Largo wood rat.
Florida has a particular problem, because a number of wild
species are in trouble. Natural land is dwindling, often
abutting residential development (read: cat habitat), and a
large population of transient northerners, the snowbirds,
may abandon pets when they go home for the summer.
Dr. Lorna Patrick, a biologist with the United States Fish
and Wildlife Service in Panama City, works in coastal
environments on the recovery efforts of endangered species
like sea turtles, beach mice and shore birds. Because of
the popularity of houses near the coast, she said, "We are
starting to see lots of feral cats and free-roaming pet
cats in the beach and the dune system, mostly in the
dunes."
The cats will, of course, prey on the birds and mice and
baby turtles. Dr. Patrick does not blame them. "The cats
aren't the problem," she said. "It's people."
The cats themselves often suffer, from illness, automobiles
and predation. Coyotes are particularly attracted to cats.
There are even studies suggesting that in certain canyons
in San Diego coyotes help native birds because they prey on
cats and other small predators.
Of course there have always been free-roaming cats, and
they have always hunted birds. One reason for the intensity
of the current debate is dwindling habitat for wild
creatures. Dr. Margaret Slater, a veterinarian and an
epidemiologist at Texas A&M, spent a year traveling around
the country talking to people about cats and produced a
pamphlet, "Community Approaches to Feral Cats," for the
Humane Society. The biggest problems occur where cats move
into wilderness areas or parks, she said, "especially
places where things are already fragile."
Another factor, she said, is "a fundamental shift in the
way people view nonhuman animals." Not only are many more
people concerned about the fates of birds and beach mice,
but also trapping cats and taking them to shelters where
they are killed offends many people.
Dr. Slater said many laws were on the books for dogs, but
fewer for cats. "Cats are not dogs," she said. "They don't
run in packs and kill livestock. They don't run across the
street and bite your child."
In parts of the world where feral dogs are still a problem,
nobody worries about cats. "Once you get rid of the dog
problem, then you get into this cat thing," she said.
Dr. Harriet Ritvo, a historian at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology who has studied the relationship of
people and domestic animals, said: "The habits of cats have
always been perceived as less vulnerable to human control"
than those of dogs. "It would have been unheard of in 19th
century to imagine a cat under constant control."
Even now, Ms. Ritvo said, the idea meets resistance,
adding: "It is perfectly easy to keep cats inside. But
people haven't processed that."
Everyone involved in the debate over cats agrees on the
fundamental importance of teaching pet owners that cats
cannot thrive on their own and should not be abandoned. The
lesson has not yet been learned.
"People think there's all these cats here," Ms. May said of
the Cape Canaveral colony. "Why don't we just leave our cat
here when we go back north? For some reason, people still
think that cats can handle themselves out there, and that's
just not the case."
Until human behavior changes, Ms. May's goals are small.
There is one particular cat that she thinks is ready to be
adopted. "If I could just find a home for Teddy," she said.
"I really would like to find him a home."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/sc...4ff55390d53c32
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Thank goodness there are people like this woman who cares, and the organizations that are finally recognizing the problem that exists with feral cats, and doing everything to help.
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