CHAPTER SEVEN
It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.
—Malcolm Forbes
The lobby of the Oregon Humane Society (OHS) facility in Portland is a pleasing space, with high ceilings and big windows that let summer sunlight pour in. Near the front of the lobby is the Kitten Colony, a little glassed-in room where kittens play. One July day a gray kitten tussled with a calico, as a black kitten with a white neck watched from a windowsill within the enclosure. Another white kitten batted a feather toy about. An eighteen-month-old girl sat spellbound outside the window watching the activity, occasionally tapping the window and calling, “Hi, kitty!” All the fun can be streamed to your desktop computer via OHS’s Kitty Cam. The kittens are eligible for adoption, and given the attention they garner from visitors and their general level of cuteness, one suspects their odds of finding a home are quite good.
Fifty yards farther into the OHS building, some eighty-three cats rested in stainless-steel cages and on surgical tables in various stages of sedation. If all went as planned, there would be fewer kittens in greater Portland in the near future, as all of these animals were waiting to be or recovering from being spayed or neutered, procedures that will terminate their ability to reproduce.
There are not many facets of feline management on which bird and cat advocates agree, but one point universally acknowledged is that there are simply too many free-ranging cats. Groups ranging from the American Bird Conservatory to the Humane Society of the United States agree that the most effective and humane way of controlling cat populations is to spay and neuter as many cats as possible. As invasive procedures go, these are fast (four to six minutes to spay a female, less than a minute to neuter a male), inexpensive (fees are $42.50 for spayings at the Oregon Humane Society, $32.50 for neuterings), and readily accessible from providers ranging from nonprofit humane societies to city- or county-run animal shelters to private veterinary practices. Sliding-scale fees (down to free) make the procedures affordable for people from any socioeconomic background.
Just about everyone agrees it is important for cats to be spayed and neutered. Sterilization among owned pets is very high; the Humane Society of the United States estimates that 91 percent of owned cats have been fixed. The percentage of free-ranging cats that have been fixed is unknown, though much lower—as low as 2 percent according to some estimates. Where opinions diverge is on what to do with free-ranging and unowned cats once they have been sterilized. Most outside-cat advocacy groups—and a surprising number of municipalities and mainstream animal welfare organizations—have embraced an approach called trap-neuter-return (TNR). TNR works as its name implies. Volunteers trap free-ranging cats, generally at sites where the cats are fed by caregivers (fig. 7.1). The cats are then taken to a clinic, where veterinarians remove animals’ testes or ovaries, rendering them unable to reproduce. Once revived, the animals are returned to the site where they were trapped to live out their days.
Sarah Smith, a sixty-something volunteer, has devoted an enormous amount of time and resources to capturing outside cats, conveying them to clinics for sterilization, and returning them to the farm areas and apartment complexes where they were found in the first place. (“Sarah Smith” is a pseudonym, used to protect the privacy of the person profiled.) She has been practicing TNR for over ten years, most recently in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, to which she relocated from the East Coast, with seven rescued cats—and her husband. She had not planned to get involved with free-ranging cats in Oregon but found she could not stand to see their suffering; as an animal lover, she felt she had to do something.
Cats were an acquired taste for Smith. She grew up in the Midwest, and all her relatives had dogs. When she first moved to the East Coast, Smith had a roommate who had two cats, but Smith did not care for them. Eventually she married, and when she and her husband moved to the suburbs, they got Petey, a Yorkshire terrier. Petey’s presence in the household contributed to Smith’s “cat-tharsis” and her commitment to trapping. During a big thunderstorm one evening, Petey kept going to the door and whining. Finally, Smith went to the door and could make out a meow from the bushes in front. She felt around and pulled out a little black-and-white kitten, which she took in. Conversations with neighbors and a little investigative work revealed that a free-ranging cat had given birth to a litter of kittens in a nearby shed; “Lucky” had probably been dropped in Smith’s bushes as the mother was moving the kittens to a different spot. Smith called a local cat advocacy group and borrowed a trap, hoping to catch and spay the mother cat.
“That first attempt at cat trapping, I didn’t have any luck,” she recalled. “A few months later, I saw the momma cat running down the sidewalk. A neighbor and I followed, and we found yet another litter of kittens in a nearby pool pump house. Catching this female turned out to be quite difficult. So I decided to gather all of her kittens in a cat carrier first and then place a trap outside the pump house along with the cat carrier containing the kittens. Finally, after several days of bottle-feeding kittens and unsuccessful trapping, I looked out the window and saw that the trap’s door had gone down. It was the momma cat. I took her in to a local clinic and got her fixed and then released her and her kittens back behind the pump house.”1
The exact time and place that TNR was first implemented as a potential population control measure is unclear, though by the 1970s it was being selectively practiced in England and Denmark. The earliest formal TNR efforts in the United States date back to the early 1990s, though the practice was discussed in the feline press (but not by name) as early as 1984. Proponents tout it as a way for individual populations of free-ranging cats to slowly disappear through a more “natural” death process rather than through the six- to twelve-second respiratory arrest experienced by an animal when a veterinarian or humane society employee injects a dose of sodium pentobarbital during the euthanasia process. TNR advocates believe that the practice also improves the lives of cats, relieving them of the intermittent stresses of mating and pregnancy, and improves their physical health, as cats are generally given vaccinations against distemper, herpes virus, feline calicivirus, rabies, and sometimes feline leukemia virus. Proponents also argue that TNR provides the humans who happen to live in proximity to colonies some relief from troublesome cat mating behaviors like roaming, caterwauling or yowling, urine marking, and fighting.
A case could be made that TNR makes life a bit more bearable for free-ranging cats, though it still leaves them to face all the challenges of living in an outdoor environment they are ill-equipped to face. But returning neutered cats to their colonies also returns them to preying on any animals they can catch and kill, an instinctive behavior they cannot resist. From a conservation perspective, this is unacceptable. And even though TNR cats may receive some vaccinations, very few receive boosters. The absence of boosters leaves the animals susceptible to diseases, which can be passed on to other cats, wild animals, and humans. From a wildlife and public-health perspective, this too is unacceptable.
There is also the uncomfortable truth that TNR has repeatedly been shown to fail to reduce free-ranging cat populations (fig. 7.2).
TNR and its no-kill tenets have their roots in the animal liberation movement, a crusade that began to take shape in the pubs and hallowed halls of Oxford University in the late 1960s–early 1970s. Eminent philosophers such as Peter Singer, Richard Ryder, and Richard Hare began to argue that animals—that is, nonhumans—should be afforded the same rights as people. The reasoning was that every nonhuman animal had inalienable rights as a living thing because each animal could suffer much as humans do. To fail to account for the rights of animals, they argued, would be a form of “species-ism,” or animal discrimination. Suddenly, wearing fur was not a statement of wealth but an act of cruelty. So were participating in a rodeo, eating a steak, all forms of animal research, and holding up your trousers with a leather belt.
Thanks to several influential books, notably Animals, Men and Morals, and Animal Liberation, the movement gained momentum in Europe, the United States, and Canada. One of the most visible expressions of the movement’s legacy is found in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, which was founded in 1980. As the organization notes in the history section of its website:
Before PETA existed, there were two important things that you could do if you wanted to help animals. You could volunteer at a local animal shelter, or you could donate money to a humane society. While many of these organizations did useful work to bring comfort to animals who are used by humans, they didn’t question why we kill animals for their flesh or their skins or why we use them for tests of new product ingredients or for our entertainment.2
PETA, of course, has gone on to champion a broad range of animal rights causes; for example, the group fights for bringing to a halt the use of animals in product testing, better living conditions for livestock slated for slaughter and consumption, and a moratorium on the use of fur in fashion products. (PETA’s “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” advertising campaigns and red paint–drenched fashion shows set a high bar for animal welfare media hijinks; see fig. 7.3.) PETA, it is worth noting, does not support TNR:
Sadly, our experience with trap, spay-and-neuter, and release programs and “managed” feral cat colonies has led us to question whether or not these programs are truly in the cats’ best interests. We receive countless reports of incidents in which cats—“managed” or not—suffer and die horrible deaths because they must fend for themselves outdoors. Having witnessed firsthand the gruesome things that can happen to feral cats, we cannot in good conscience advocate trapping and releasing as a humane way to deal with overpopulation.
Advocates argue that feral cats are just as deserving as other felines and that it is our responsibility to alleviate their suffering and assure their safety. We absolutely agree. It is precisely because we would never encourage anyone to let their own cats outdoors to roam that we do not encourage the same for feral cats. In fact, the act of releasing a feral cat is, in the eyes of the law, abandonment and is illegal in many areas.
We believe that although altering feral cats prevents the suffering of future generations, it does little to improve the quality of life for the cats who are left outdoors and that allowing feral cats to continue their daily struggle for survival in a hostile environment is not usually a humane option.3
PETA stops short of advocating that all free-ranging cats should be euthanized, but the group’s position underscores the point that such animals lead grim lives and that returning animals to such a predicament borders on cruelty.
Back at the Oregon Humane Society two vets—Margaret Wixson and Wendi Rekers—strode purposely about the Coit Operating Suite of the 4,000-square-foot Holman Medical Center, trailed by several veterinary techs. Everyone was attired in scrubs. The center averages more than 12,000 surgeries annually, and boasts a near-zero euthanasia rate for pets who arrive at the shelter in need of care, even though most owners cannot afford to cover the cost of procedures. Every pet that OHS takes into its shelter is spayed or neutered, and the center also sterilizes thousands of other owned pets for a nominal fee, or free of charge, as part of the organization’s Spay & Save program for low-income families. Holman Medical Center is a teaching facility, through which veterinary students from Oregon State University College of Veterinary Medicine cycle every three weeks. “Dr. Wixson interned here last year, and decided to stay on as an employee,” Ron Orchard, the shelter’s medicine manager, explained. “We’re lucky to have her.”4
From an observation window outside the operating suite, we could watch two cats—each on its own table—in the process of being spayed. Spaying is the desexing procedure for females (fig. 7.4). The cats lay on their backs, legs secured by blue ties attached to the table to hold the animals steady during the procedure. Before being delivered to the operating suite, the cats are sedated—a cocktail of morphine and a tranquilizer followed by an injection of propofol. Then they are intubated; once on the table, they receive oxygen mixed with a small percentage of anesthetic gas to keep them sleepy through the procedure. Each cat’s paw is fitted with a monitor to measure heart rate and oxygen saturation. Once the cats are secured, they receive a sterile scrub, three swabs each of alcohol and chlorhexidine, and a squirt of iodine for good measure. At this point, one of the techs opens a sterile pack, which includes a scalpel and other surgical tools. A suture pack is opened and placed on the table, and a towel is placed over the animal’s upper torso to keep her warm. A drape is then placed over the cat’s body to create a larger sterile field; there is a small hole in the drape for the area over the abdomen.
Dr. Wixson approached the table on the right and picked up the scalpel. Reaching through the hole in the drape, she made a tiny incision in the skin, not more than a few millimeters; the extremely sharp knife cut through easily. She then cut through the animal’s body wall and removed a bit of fat. Picking up the spay hook, a longer instrument with a small hook on the end, Dr. Wixson swept it through the cat’s abdomen, trying to loop the hook around the uterus. “This is the toughest part of the process,” Orchard explained. “The vet sometimes has to hunt around a bit until they find the uterus.” Dr. Wixson quickly located the uterus, a Y-shaped section of thin pink tissue, and slowly worked both segments of the Y out onto the drape. The cat’s ovaries are attached at the end. She ligated the bottom of the uterine body to minimize bleeding. Another cut below the forks of the Y, and the uterus and ovaries were removed. No blood was shed. It took only a few stitches to close the body wall. A small tattoo was applied—a tiny green line—to indicate that the animal had been spayed. After a small bit of glue was applied to seal the skin, a vet tech carried the still-unconscious cat from the operating room to a table in the immaculately clean main room of the center and laid it down upon a warming pad. Another tech was there to attend to the cat as it returned to consciousness. Once the cat moved a bit, the breathing tube was removed. The tech gently rubbed the cat and spoke softly to ease it back into consciousness. “The wake up period can be the most critical part of the process,” Orchard said, as the kitten in question slowly opened its eyes and tried to struggle to its feet. It was then brought back to a cage with its identifying card—white, to show it is a shelter cat, now ready for adoption.
The process of neutering—desexing of male cats—is less invasive and thus much faster. Male cats are sedated (but not intubated), and then a tech shaves their scrotums and sterilizes the region with one scrub each of alcohol and chlorhexidine. Then the cat is brought to a table with a bright light positioned above. The vet picks up a small scalpel no longer than a pinkie finger and makes two tiny incisions. The cat’s testes are pulled out, the spermatic cords are tied off, and the testicles are severed. Then the cords are tucked back inside the animal, and it is sutured up. The procedure is done in less than thirty seconds.
The Oregon Humane Society does not practice TNR. “We don’t return sterilized animals to the outdoors,” Orchard explained. “But we respect the roles of other animal advocacy groups. TNR is the Feral Cat Coalition’s domain.” (This organization focuses on training TNR practitioners and performing spay/neuter procedures for free-ranging cats.) When asked about the appeal of his job providing medical services to animals—some of which have been neglected or mistreated—Orchard did not pause a moment. “It’s a super feeling to be able to help. But it’s unfortunate that we can’t help them all.”
Sarah Smith certainly feels that she is helping to make a difference in the lives of the cats she traps. She conducts most of her trapping on Thursdays, as the clinic where she generally takes the cats—Willamette Humane Society—provides spaying, neutering, and vaccination services on Fridays. The service is provided for a donation of $43, which is covered by Salem Friends of Felines, a nonprofit cat advocacy group that underwrites much of its expenses through a sizable grant from PetSmart Charities, the charitable arm of the pet store chain. Smith learns about colonies of cats that might be in need of TNR services through Friends of Felines; individuals in the community contact Friends of Felines for help, and the group in turn reaches out to volunteers like Smith.
One Thursday afternoon in April 2013, Smith arrived at a two-story low-income apartment complex behind a Red Lion hotel and adjacent to Interstate 5 in Salem, Oregon. Approaching one of the units, she spied several plates out with remnants of cat food along the edges. She sighed. “We have a snowball’s chance in Hell of trapping any cats tonight,” she said.5
A resident of the complex—the woman who had called Friends of Felines seeking TNR assistance—approached her. She is in her mid-fifties, a home health attendant, and was agitated. “I took over the feeding this week,” she said. “Regular amounts on Monday and Tuesday, light yesterday. But someone else fed them today. I wanted to scream when I saw the feed bowl.” After a moment she added, in a lower voice, “We have some people with mental health issues here.”
Smith carried five live traps out of the side of her minivan and fanned them out along the back edge of another shabby apartment unit, where several open casements gave way to a crawl space below. The traps are manufactured by Tomahawk Live Trap, which was founded in Tomahawk, Wisconsin. Each is thirty inches long by ten inches wide by twelve inches high and built from one-and-a-quarter-inch mesh in the United States. There is an opening in the front for the cat to enter and a sliding door in the back where users can slide food in. The trap’s trip pan is roughly a third of the way in; when the cat steps on the pan, the door closes, and the animal is trapped. Tomahawk also manufactures traps for armadillos, badgers, bats, beavers, birds, Bobcats, chickens, chipmunks, Coyotes, crayfish, dogs, foxes, gophers, groundhogs, ground squirrels, jackrabbits, mice, moles, muskrats, opossums, pigeons, prairie dogs, rabbits, Raccoons, rats, reptiles, roosters, shrews, skunks, snakes, squirrels, turtles, voles, and woodchucks. Smith lined the bottom of the traps with newspaper and then opened a few cans of cat food. She spooned the food onto some plastic plates and set them in the traps.
“You should tell the people that put the food out that they’re not being fair to the kittens by letting them breed,” she said, turning to face the woman. “Next time I’m out, I may as well have a gun. Animal control will be next. The management company will hire an exterminator to kill these cats. Someone will complain about the smell. And it will only get worse when they mate again.”
“These cats aren’t into mating,” the woman replied.
“They’re all into mating,” Smith said curtly.
This venue is not atypical of the places where feral cats tend to congregate in the Salem area. Smith has certain conditions for the cat colonies and caretakers she will work with: the caretakers must be committed to continue feeding and otherwise providing for the cats after they are neutered or spayed and returned, and she will not work with people who just want the cats removed. Many of the people with whom Smith works lack disposable incomes and will forgo small comforts for themselves, such as dinner out, to provide for the neighborhood cats. In a study in which a number of TNR participants were asked about their motivations, “love of cats,” “opportunity to nurture,” and “increased self-esteem” were among the top reasons.6 Smith noted that she encounters very few wealthy people who actively support cat colonies; people who have some means tend to write a check instead.
After setting up the traps, Smith returned to her van—roughly twenty feet away from the nearest trap—rolled up the windows, and tuned into the local jazz station at a low volume. And the wait began. Trapping cats is a lot like fishing or hunting; lots of preparation and waiting, with the occasional reward of a capture. When asked about cats’ proclivity for hunting, she paused. “It’s easier to make cats out as the bogeyman than to look at larger problems we have. We’re degrading forests, polluting the water. If cats are the only problem with birds, why are butterflies and bats dying out? No one wants to deal with the bigger problem. Cats don’t have a chemical industry behind them. Aren’t there bigger issues to worry about?”
Ten minutes later, a black-and-white cat stuck its head out of one of the casements. It walked around one of the traps, then sat down and yawned. Up again, the cat slowly inspected another trap, sticking its head inside the trap a bit, then stepped out before inspecting another trap, sniffing its contents from the side. “‘There’s food in this one, I’ll sniff it’,” Smith said, channeling the cat’s thought process. “‘There’s food in that one, too, I guess I’ll sniff that.’ I didn’t realize that cats like to sniff as much as dogs. They won’t walk in a trap unless they’re really hungry.” The cat returned to the crawl space for a minute, then crawled out again. It seemed to be looking at the van with its green eyes, cocking its ears as if listening to the music, though the windows were closed.
Smith keeps detailed records of the cats she traps and has had spayed or neutered. In 2012 she trapped 240 cats. Her best haul on a single evening was fourteen; the average is four or five. Smith estimates that there are perhaps ten other people around Salem who do TNR. It is not clear how many managed cat colonies there are in Oregon or even in the mid-Willamette Valley.
In its early stages of practice, TNR was something of a fringe movement, embraced and espoused by volunteer-driven outdoor-cat advocacy organizations like Alley Cat Allies and the Feral Cat Coalition. But now the activities of Sarah Smith and other like-minded caregivers have entered the mainstream, receiving enthusiastic endorsements from animal welfare organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).
Many government entities have gotten into the TNR game, endorsing such programs and in some cases even underwriting them. Take the city of Houston, for example, which makes the case for TNR on its website:
For a long time, “catch and kill” was a widely accepted method of managing community cat colonies. The cats were trapped and removed from their established colony to be euthanized. While this method causes an instant decrease in the overall colony numbers, it is not effective over time. Colonies subject to “catch and kill” typically end up increasing in number back to their original size as a result of what is known as the vacuum effect [emphasis added; more on this subject below].
Once the community cats within a colony are spayed and neutered, not only will the population size gradually decrease, but the cats will also be healthier and coexist more peacefully within a neighborhood. Female cats, prevented from having any more litters, will be healthier. Male cats will gradually lose the urge to roam and fight, and will be less prone to injury. Behaviors associated with unaltered cats, such as yowling and marking territory with urine, will disappear.7
Anticipating objections from members of the birding/ecology community, the city addresses the following question: Does putting community cats back into the community increase the risk for birds and wildlife to be harmed?
It has been argued that cats should be collected from the community, impounded and euthanized in shelters to protect wildlife and public health. However, euthanizing or removing all community cats from an area may lead to an increased population of other non-native species with an even more detrimental effect. There are many more cats in the community currently than BARC [the city of Houston’s animal shelter and adoption facility] can take in over a short period of time. The TNR program will decrease the number of cats that could potentially harm birds and wildlife over time.8
San Francisco has also been promoting TNR, pointing interested participants to the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which spearheads efforts in the city. The SPCA has devoted considerable resources to promoting its TNR program under the rubric Community Cares. Laura Gretch, a vivacious and much-tattooed forty-something, managed the program from 2009 to 2014. “We began with the idea that fewer cats on the street equals less of an impact on bird and other animal populations,” she said from her office on the less fashionable side of Potrero Hill. “Whether people agree with TNR as a solution or not, you can’t deny that it does reduce the number of cats on the streets.” (Actually you can—more on that later.) Gretch was quick to admit that feral cat populations are hard to pin down. “If you sit in one place and try to count, you’ll inevitably start counting twice. However, we can count the number of cats that we’ve spayed and neutered, and that’s one cat that’s not reproducing. We’ve had community cat caregivers report that they have seven cats that they feed. The cats were captured, spayed/neutered and returned. We came back and counted five years later, and there are only three cats. This would suggest the program is working, though it’s hard to know.”9
Under Gretch’s guidance, the San Francisco SPCA took its TNR campaign to the streets. “I’d call the spay/neuter program aggressive,” she said. “We wake up and want to see how many cats we can fix.” Gretch and her communications team wanted to steer away from any hints of preachiness. “There’s a lot of didacticism in animal welfare circles, and that gets ignored or turns off the average Joe who’s not interested in community cats or doesn’t even know what they are.” Instead of telling the community what they should think or feel about these cats—or that they should think anything—the SPCA developed a simple campaign titled Do You See Cats? The hope was to open up a conversation and, at the same time, ask people to help in a simple way, without confusing them. The message seemed to resonate. “Whether you like cats or not, you might call to say you saw some,” Gretch explained. “We thought this would play well in a city like San Francisco, where many people want to get involved. People tell us where they see the cats; we take it from there.” The campaign ran advertisements on buses and bus shelters and sent out direct mail pieces, all in Mandarin and Spanish as well as English. The copy below the campaign slogan informed readers that the SPCA would spay or neuter cats free of charge and listed a phone number.
“While the campaign was running, we doubled the number of cats we fix, from just under 1,000 a year to over 2,000,” Gretch said. She is sincerely committed to her TNR mission. For several years she auctioned off a section of her skin to be tattooed with a TNR-centric message. The winning bidder got to choose a tattoo to join the many that already festooned Gretch’s body. An inking from the 2012 auction reads “Spaneuter” (fig. 7.5).
San Francisco SPCA’s ad hoc data points and “statistics”—which are cited by thousands of municipalities, humane societies, SPCA branches, and cat advocacy groups across America—purport that TNR reduces free-ranging cat populations (and by association their impact on wildlife). The truth is that trap-neuter-return makes people—not cats and certainly not wildlife—feel better. It gives individuals and government entities the affirming sense that they are taking action, while allowing them to escape facing any of the hard decisions that reasoned action demands. There is a dearth of good science supporting the claim that TNR works to reduce cat populations. And there is considerable evidence that suggests it does not.
One example that is frequently trotted out to demonstrate the efficacy of TNR for cat colony decline comes from a ten-year (1991–2001) study by Julie Levy and colleagues on the campus of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. The study combined two different approaches—TNR and TNA (trap-neuter-adopt)—which blurred the researchers’ ability to carefully assess the efficacy of TNR alone. UCF has a large, wooded campus, and as happens in many places with transient populations (college campuses, military bases, field stations), cats are often left behind as people come and go. Before the study began, the university was dealing with a growing unowned cat population. In 1991 volunteers with the group Friends of Campus Cats began a TNR program to reduce feline populations. Feeding stations were established at eleven different areas around campus to concentrate cats. This created eleven different colonies. Cats were then captured and transported to veterinarians for neutering and vaccination. Any cats testing positive for feline leukemia virus or feline immunodeficiency virus were euthanized. The tip of the ear was clipped in cats that were returned to the outdoor environment to allow easy field identification. The Levy et al. report includes only one brief mention of a census of the colony, in 1996, and it includes no details of how the count was done. Counting free-ranging cats is notoriously difficult; for a study aimed at examining the impact of TNR on the number of outdoor cats, the absence of details on census procedures suggests a first serious flaw.
Levy et al. reported a significant decline in the number of cats, from the initial census of 155, over the course of the study and attributed this to TNR and to the adoption program. Here is what happened to the cats: Seventy-three of the 155 (47 percent) cats were adopted. This is a wonderful result, but it is not a test of TNR. That brings the cat population for the TNR study to eighty-two. Seventeen of these animals were euthanized for various reasons, most at the beginning, but a few others over the course of the study. That leaves sixty-five outdoor unowned cats. Of these, ten were found dead; six were hit by cars and four died from unknown causes. Nine cats apparently were known to have left and gone into the woods, although it is not clear what that means. Twenty-three cats (42 percent) were “lost,” so their fates were also unknown. (They could have dispersed into the woods, they may have died, and their carcasses were never found, or perhaps they were adopted—although this is doubtful.) This left a final population of twenty-three cats. But again, Levy and colleagues do not explain how or when the cats were counted, so it is not clear how reliable any of these figures actually are. What the Levy study shows is that cat colonies will reduce in size if 60 percent of the cats are adopted or euthanized, and if another 21 percent emigrate from the colonies. It says nothing about the efficacy of TNR.
A more careful study of TNR comes from a dissertation completed in 2006 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Felicia Nutter, a board-certified veterinarian, who had wildlife experience in Gombe National Park in Tanzania researching baboons and chimpanzees, began a study in Randolph County, North Carolina, in 1998 to determine the survival of outdoor and unowned cats. Her study design involved placing cats into three random treatment groups: (1) unneutered, (2) castrated (testicles removed, resulting in loss of production of sex hormones), and (3) vasectomized (vasa deferentia severed and tied, production of hormones such as testosterone retained). Nutter’s dissertation research was unique, differing from most TNR colony studies in that she captured 98 percent of the cats in her study colonies (a rate rarely achieved in practice and perhaps possible in this case only because it was the prime focus of her dissertation and occupied much of her time), and she also added the interesting twist of treating the cats with two different types of sterilization. What she found after four to seven years was that most unneutered colonies increased in population size, whereas colonies receiving both types of sterilization, and experiencing low rates of immigration of new members, significantly declined. As she had predicted, colonies with vasectomized males declined more rapidly than colonies with castrated males. Presumably cats still able to secrete reproductive hormones are prone to fighting. What killed the cats in the two sterilization groups? Nutter assigned a cat the status “dead” when either it simply disappeared (not distinguishable from emigration) or more commonly was killed from trauma (struck by cars, mauled by dogs). Such an ending contradicts the suggestion that TNR is beneficial from an animal welfare perspective. From Nutter’s study one can conclude that TNR can work to reduce colony populations but only if nearly 100 percent sterilization rates are achieved and there is little or no immigration into the colony.
Only one truly rigorous analysis has examined the impact of TNR in reducing free-ranging cat populations from a long-term quantitative and population modeling perspective. The effort was headed by Patrick Foley, a theoretical population biologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the California State University at Sacramento. The stated objective of the study was to use data from two large and long-term TNR programs to mathematically assess whether TNR was successful and to determine the rate of neutering necessary to cause colony decline. The first program involved TNR data collected by the Feral Cat Coalition in San Diego County, California, where cats were studied from 1992 to 2003. The second program analyzed TNR data collected by a group called Operation Catnip, Inc., located in Alachua County, Florida, where cats were studied from 1998 to 2004. Over the course of the San Diego study, a total of 14,452 unowned colony cats were submitted for neutering to veterinary clinics under the aegis of TNR programs. Of these only about 5 percent had already been neutered. In Alachua County a total of 11,822 unowned cats were submitted for neutering as part of TNR programs. Of these only 2 percent had already been neutered. In neither the California nor the Florida colony had TNR efforts achieved colony decline. Both colonies experienced ongoing population growth and never achieved the high rates of neutering needed to achieve population decline. Foley et al. estimated the necessary rates to be 71 percent in California and 94 percent in Florida. Such levels of neutering, the authors conclude, are unrealistic to attain. Thus, TNR will not lead to colony extinction. This study, unlike any other to date, was long-term, had sufficient sample sizes, and covered a large spatial area rather than a single site, all factors contributing to the credibility of these results.
There are two primary reasons TNR typically fails to reduce free-ranging cat populations through attrition. The first is that caretakers fail to trap and neuter enough cats. Foley’s mathematical models showed that 71 percent to 94 percent of a population must be desexed for the population to decline, and this is assuming that no new cats have joined the colony. This level of neutering has not been consistently documented and is extremely difficult to achieve in the field. The Nutter study described above is a rare exception. The second reason is that most colonies are constantly receiving new animals. Most cat advocacy groups argue that colony populations remain stable and resist immigration from surrounding regions, though the scientific literature—and even anecdotal reports from colony caretakers—refutes this argument. Research has shown that cats regularly move between established colonies, and that territories are not defended from interlopers so long as a regular food source is available.
Opponents of lethal removal programs—that is, trap and euthanize—argue that such efforts do not work to reduce colony size because of the “vacuum effect” that draws new cats to colonies from which members have been removed. Not unique to cats, the vacuum effect is based upon the idea that territorial animals residing in high-quality sites (i.e., those with resources like food and shelter) will exclude certain—presumably weaker and otherwise inferior—individuals from that area. This sets up a “winners and losers” situation, in which the excluded animals are forced either to be transient or to occupy nearby territories without adequate resources. TNR advocates claim that, thanks to the vacuum effect, there is a never-ending supply of cats to be “sucked in” to the preferred areas when cats are removed. Given this assumption, removing cats is a pointless exercise if the objective is to reduce the overall population of the cat colony in question.
There are several problems with this logic. First, domestic cats do not commonly exhibit territorial behavior. Second, there is no such thing as an infinite supply of cats (or any other animal, for that matter). If cats continue to appear, it is likely due to the presence of a feeding station—the very resource, of course, that led to the higher than expected population of cats in the first place. Third, and perhaps most important, is the idea at the core of TNR—that colonies will decline due to natural mortality. Wouldn’t the vacuum effect that (purportedly) draws new cats into the colony when members are trapped and removed also be at work when a member of the TNR colony dies?
Recent field research from Israel on cat colony population fluctuations suggests that the vacuum effect may indeed exist, yet not the way TNR advocates would like to think. In 2011 Idit Gunther and colleagues studied cats in four feeding groups, two groups receiving TNR and two groups of cats left untreated. The authors then monitored rates of immigration, emigration, and kitten survival between neutered and unneutered groups on a weekly basis over an entire year. They found that the number of adult cats in the two neutered groups increased significantly over the yearlong study period thanks to higher immigration and lower emigration rates than were recorded in the two unneutered groups, where the population decreased. In this case, the vacuum effect actually increased the number of animals in existing TNR colonies. This, of course, will not always be the result. What one can conclude from this study and other research on the vacuum effect is that replacement will sometimes occur after animals have been removed and sometimes it will not. The outcome is dependent upon how many cats are in the surrounding area, the degree to which those cats are reproducing, and the number that are behaviorally dominant, as well as how many cats are being abandoned.
The veterinary profession has also grappled with the conundrum posed by TNR. David Jessup, a past recipient of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine Alumni Achievement Award, has argued that the American Veterinary Medical Association cannot condone TNR given the organization’s stated goal of having a positive impact on the health and well-being of all living creatures. After all, TNR is barely advantageous to one species—cats—and clearly disadvantageous to many dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of other species. Jessup wonders how veterinarians advocating for TNR can justify being party to what amounts to abandonment, an illegal act of animal cruelty. He also worries about the message a pro-TNR stance sends to millions of conservationists and the veterinarians who provide care for birds, native species, and their ecosystems. Another vet, Paul Barrows, chief of the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps, retired, also has advocated for removal without return as the most responsible course of action regarding free-ranging cats. “We must seek to make it politically incorrect and socially unacceptable to engage in biological littering resulting from irresponsible cat ownership and promotion of TNR programs,” he reasons.10
In an article published in Conservation Biology, Travis Longcore, Catherine Rich, and Lauren Sullivan sought to set the record straight on the inefficacy of TNR for reducing free-ranging cat populations by performing a careful analysis of the available scientific (and nonscientific) literature. One of the key conclusions they reached is that TNR is usually framed as an animal welfare problem rather than an environmental problem. A “successful program,” given this context, is defined by the welfare of the cats, not the elimination of the free-ranging cats from the environment. (Welfare, it is implied, means staying alive.) They cite one study that concludes that “the effectiveness of the program was demonstrated by the low turnover and improved health of the colony over the 3-year period,” though the colony size decreased only from forty to thirty-six. They found that a county in Florida had implemented TNR “to decrease the number of healthy cats euthanized, decrease the costs to the county, and decrease complaints.”11 In such contexts the input of scientists and conservationists is generally not even brought to the table when the subject of TNR is broached, and claims made by free-ranging cat advocates often go unchallenged—and slowly take on the patina of truth.
The scientific community has been wringing its collective hands over the free-ranging cat community’s successful whitewashing of the shortcomings of TNR for some years. Given the pro-TNR stance that more and more governing bodies have assumed—and the lack of understanding among the general citizenry about the impact cats are having on wildlife and public health—there is little question that cat advocates are winning the war in the court of public opinion. It is not as if conservation and ecology experts have been unaware of TNR’s shortcomings or have not taken positions against the practice. Many influential entities, including the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, the American Ornithologists’ Union, the American Society of Mammalogists, the National Wildlife Federation, and the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), have come out in opposition to free-ranging cat colonies and TNR. Yet only ABC has made significant investments in educating the public, with its Cats Indoors Campaign. (It should be noted that the budgets for ABC’s advocacy efforts pale next to those of such organizations as Alley Cat Allies, Best Friends, and PetSmart Charities.)
A curious omission from the list above is the National Audubon Society, which has a stated mission to “conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth’s biological diversity.” National Audubon has not taken a firm position on TNR, beyond a board of directors’ resolution approved in 1997, which stated, in part:
National Audubon Society will convey such science-based conclusions [on the impact of feral and free-ranging cats] to its chapters so that they, if they so wish, will be in a position to advocate that local and state wildlife agencies, public health organizations and legislative bodies restrict and regulate the maintenance and movement of feral and free-ranging domestic cats out-of-doors and to support programs to vaccinate cats and to neuter or spay cats.12
The United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds not only takes no position on TNR, it goes so far as to dismiss the impact of cats on birds as largely irrelevant, and refuses to advocate for keeping cats inside.
It could be conjectured that Audubon, RSPB, and other broad-based conservation organizations have avoided this issue for fear of alienating a portion of their member base. This conjecture is reinforced by Audubon magazine’s suspension of longtime contributor and editor at large Ted Williams after Williams argued against TNR in an editorial in the Orlando Sentinel. Williams ruffled feathers by stating that there were “two humane alternatives to the hell of TNR. One is Tylenol (the human pain medication) —a completely selective feral-cat poison. But the TNR lobby has blocked its registration for this use. The other is trap and euthanize. TE is practiced by state and federal wildlife managers; but municipal TE needs to happen if the annihilation of native wildlife is to be significantly slowed.”13 After much backlash from the conservation community, Audubon reinstated Williams, though with limited duties.
Back at the apartment complex in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Sarah Smith still had no cats in hand after almost an hour of sitting in the van. A few of the residents she had encountered on her arrival approached the vehicle to check on our progress as several other residents stood nearby. The low hum of Interstate 5 could be heard in the near distance. “I went around and talked to everyone about not feeding the cats,” the health aide said, returning to the string of the earlier conversation. “They said they weren’t. There’s one woman who lives with her daughter. I think it’s too painful for her to think of the cats going hungry, and she convinces her daughter to feed them.”
Well into her second hour, with still no captives, Smith mulled her options. One would be to simply pick up and leave, though she is loath to go home empty-handed. Another would be to leave the traps overnight, though this was not a viable option. “This isn’t the kind of place that you can leave a trap,” she said. “The crazy people might destroy them, because they think they’re hurting the cats. I had two teenage girls destroy my traps at another complex. They jumped up and down on them. At $55 a trap, I don’t want to have to replace them. At this point, I don’t trust anyone.”
A small calico cat with expressive green eyes poked its head up out of the basement. It walked around the traps and sat down. “Come on, sweetie,” Smith coaxed. “Go in the trap so you don’t get pregnant. Females only have to be four months old to have litters. It’s like teenagers getting pregnant—babies having babies.” A tawny tabby with brownish stripes made its way across the lawn behind the apartments to the traps. It went from one trap to another, sniffing hard at the food, trying to claw through the top of the trap and then to dig underneath. The tabby stepped halfway into one trap, then backed out. It stuck its head in another, paused, and then stepped in. The trap’s door closed, startling the calico. The captured cat circled twice within the cage. Smith stepped briskly from the car, flung a towel over the top of the cage, and placed it in the van. The cat yowled once, rattled around a bit, and became quiet, almost disturbingly so. “These cats are very quiet,” Sarah said. “It’s part of their survival instinct. I can have a whole carload of cats [she once carried a total of twenty-eight to a clinic in Portland], and it will be silent.”
It was nearly dusk, and the apartment complex’s shadowy feline population was becoming more active. The calico has been joined by several black cats. The threesome was then joined by a large orange tabby, which promptly began spraying each trap with its scent. A smaller tabby soon joined the group. None seemed too interested in the traps. “A drop trap would be handy,” Smith said softly.” With a drop trap, the cage is elevated by a stick that is connected to a rope that the trapper can pull when cats are under the cage. Cats tend to be less put off by the elevated cage. There is a slight breeze, which is not helping; the breeze rustles the newspaper, and the cats do not care for that sound. Taking in the five cats, Smith seemed pensive. “It’s a shame. Look at these pretty cats. They should be living in someone’s home, not under a building. I usually don’t wait this long. I probably would’ve left, except these guys are showing interest. It’s supposed to be illegal to kill them, but nobody enforces the law. If people killed dogs like they kill cats, there would be an uproar.”
The orange tabby entered a trap with little fanfare, and the door dropped. It circled the trap a few times before Smith draped a towel over the cage and placed it next to the first one. She then fielded a call from someone who reported having a dozen cats roaming her farm. “Do they have any shelter? Good. Are you feeding them? Good. If they have shelter, food and water, those are the main ingredients.”
A few more cats were visible, nosing around the cages, just silhouettes in the gloaming. Finally the little calico entered a trap and sprung the door. Smith dropped a towel over the cage and placed it in the car.
It was time to go.