CHAPTER EIGHT
The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.
—Rachel Carson
If you care about animals—especially companion animals—you owe a debt of gratitude to Wayne Pacelle. In his twenty-five years of advocacy leadership at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS)—including ten years and counting as CEO and president—he has successfully championed many significant animal protection bills and dramatically expanded both the size of the Humane Society (now the 155th largest charity organization in the United States, with annual revenue of $160 million and 11 million members) and the scope of its animal care programs. With movie-star good looks and an Ivy League pedigree, he has been an ideal and effective spokesman for animals. The NonProfit Times has named Pacelle to its “Power and Influence Top 50” in five of the last eight years.
As part of his outreach efforts, Pacelle keeps a blog entitled A Humane Nation. In several postings over the years, he has spoken to the same question we have been attempting to address in the course of this book: what to do about free-ranging cats? And he (or at least his public relations department) has consistently recognized the paradoxical position in which the issue places an organization like HSUS. In a post from November 2011, Pacelle wrote:
The Humane Society of the United States advocates for the protection of all animals, and that includes domesticated animals and wildlife. It’s often a clear case of right and wrong, and the moral path is clear. There are times, however, when the protection of one species appears to conflict with the protection of another. Perhaps the most common example is the case of outdoor or feral cats and wildlife. Feral cats typically don’t live long lives; they’re at risk from other cats, dogs, coyotes, cars, disease, and other threats. At the same time, during their lives, they may kill songbirds, small mammals, and other native wildlife, since predation is built into their DNA.1
There is no doubt that the scientific community has its differences with Pacelle and HSUS regarding how best to tackle the problems that free-ranging cats pose to the health and well-being of our environment. (For example, HSUS supports trap-neuter-return as an approach for managing cat colonies.) Yet behind the inflammatory rhetoric that frequently cloaks discussions about free-ranging cats, there are many points on which Pacelle, conservationists, and most reasonable parties can agree: (1) there are too many free-ranging cats in America; (2) these cats have an impact on wildlife; (3) cats spread disease to humans; (4) these cats lead a short and often perilous life; (5) domestic cats are better off inside or, at the least, contained; (6) people are the root cause of the problem and as such are morally obligated to address the problem.
It is abundantly clear that free-ranging cats are not the primary threat to the future of birds and other wildlife. Habitat destruction, climate change, and pollution all come to bear on the well-being of wildlife populations; if we as a society hope to maintain these species for future generations, we need to act on all fronts to stem the tide. In the same light, we must act on many different fronts to reduce the populations of free-ranging cats and reduce their impact on native animal populations, both as predators and as vectors of disease. No one solution will prove a silver bullet; only a multipronged strategy will begin to reduce the number of free-ranging cats in the wild. A landscape with no (or at least fewer) free-ranging cats is the only hope for mitigating the toll these animals take on native wildlife and diminishing the spread of disease from cats to human populations.
The first step in working toward a landscape with fewer free-ranging cats is to foster more responsible cat ownership. If pet owners keep abandoning their cats, it will be impossible to ever stem populations of free-ranging animals. If pet owners fail to spay or neuter their cats, it will be impossible to ever stem populations of free-ranging animals. If pet owners continue to let their cats wander freely outside, those cats will take a toll on birds and other wildlife and be subjected to the threats of life on the street—disease, predation, and automobiles, among others.
Convincing people to change their behavior is no easy task; just ask American advertisers, who spent an estimated $177 billion in 2014 to sway people’s actions. But this is perhaps the most important step that needs to be taken. Considering cat abandonment, wildlife veterinarian David Jessup drew an analogy with littering. “When I was a four- or five-year-old boy, I’d walk along the road looking for pop bottles to return. There was garbage all over. You could watch people throw crap out the window as they drove by. Over time, attitudes about littering changed, thanks in part to government-sponsored ad campaigns. Now it’s considered as disgusting as spitting on the floor in a public building. We need to make abandoning your pet, and failing to get it fixed, and letting it go outside—as socially unacceptable as littering.”2
One explanation for why so many people have such cavalier attitudes about cats is that they consider the animals somehow able to fend for themselves in the wild—and that being left in a parking lot or park gives the animals a better chance at survival than being dropped off at the local humane society. It may also follow from an assumption that given the surplus of available cats, one animal—should it become slightly inconvenient, given its personality or the owner’s life situation—can easily be exchanged for another down the line. Perhaps cats are perceived by some people as relatively expendable. “I think that as a society, we don’t value cats,” Sharon Harmon, president of the Oregon Humane Society, offered. “If you value an animal, you don’t allow it to go without vet care, you bring it in at night, you go look for it if it’s lost instead of just getting another one. If you and I were to go to dinner and saw a dog by a dumpster, odds are good we’d try to save it. It doesn’t matter how good the restaurant, how long we’ve waited to get reservations. We’re going to try to catch him, check for missing dog notices, take it to a vet. The evening will be gone. If it were a cat by the dumpster, we’re not going to miss a beat of conversation. We accept it’s the animal’s place. Cats aren’t served by this attitude.”3
Anecdotal evidence suggests that a number of pet owners abandon their cats because they believe a visit to an animal shelter is a death sentence, and a loathsome end at that. Taking an animal to the shelter may, for some, carry more shame than abandoning the animal.
If we were to raise the status of animal shelters in the eyes of pet owners, we might discourage some pet owners who are no longer able or willing to care for their cats from leaving them at the city park or college campus. Shelters should be viewed as a resource for the community, a place where your cat has the best chance to find an everlasting home—and they should be funded as such.
It is an unfortunate fact that shelters must kill millions of cats each year; there is simply no room, or resources, to accommodate the tens of millions of unowned/unwanted animals that exist on the landscape. Some will point to so-called no-kill shelters as an alternative to such large-scale euthanasia. While noble in principle, no-kill shelters are not so sanguine in practice. Such shelters have finite resources. Most operate at or near capacity most of the year, which means they must turn away many animals. Some of these animals may then be taken to a traditional shelter, where they will likely be put to sleep. In the case of cats, many owners will simply release their animals onto the landscape, where they frequently face a more prolonged, painful death, while perpetuating the ecological and public-health problems detailed above. A recent trend among no-kill shelters that are trying to enhance their live-release rates is a practice that has been dubbed Return to Field (RTF). Under this model, cats and other stray animals that are picked up by animal control officers (and presumably not part of a colony) are given vaccinations, sterilized, and returned to where they were found. Proponents claim that this gives these “owned but lost” cats a better chance of finding their way home, though how it has been determined that these are “owned” cats is unclear, as they lack microchips or tags. More critical observers might look at RTF as a way for no-kill shelters to pad their live-release numbers. The animals that are returned to the field are likely to die, but not in a humane manner—and not on the no-kill shelter’s spreadsheet.
Allowing owned cats to roam freely outside can be seen as another example of irresponsible pet ownership. The advantages of keeping cats inside have been presented here at length. Inside cats are shielded from diseases that can be contracted from other free-ranging cats and wildlife. They are safe from predation by Coyotes, Bobcats, and dogs. They will not be hit by cars. They will not prey on other animals. (Bibs, bells, and other so-called predation deterrents have not been shown to be effective in preventing cats from killing wildlife and do nothing to curb the problem of cats spreading or getting diseases.) And, finally, they are much less likely to transmit diseases to the broader public. Yet in survey after survey, a majority of Americans show a preference for allowing owned cats to wander freely. Part of this potentially destructive attitude seems to stem from ignorance—at times willful—about the impacts individual cats can have on wildlife and about the dangers that await them. (“I understand that some cats might be naughty, but my kitty certainly doesn’t kill birds.”) Part of it stems from an informed desire to let cats be cats; many pet owners believe cats are hardwired to roam and hunt and take the attitude that, as a loving cat owner, “I’m going to enable my cat to pursue this behavior to enrich its life.”
This attitude of indifference toward the predatory impact of pet cats on bird and mammal life was confirmed in a 2015 study by Jennifer McDonald and colleagues. McDonald et al. enlisted a number of cat owners in England (in Mawnan Smith, Cornwall) and Scotland (in Thornhill, northwest of Stirling) in a survey about the predatory behavior of their cats. The researchers hoped to determine cat owners’ attitudes toward the ecological impacts of domestic cats, to gain insight into potential control strategies, and to learn the influence the predatory behavior of their own cat(s) had on the owners’ responses. Thirty-three of the forty-three cats monitored over four months in Mawnan Smith brought a mean of 1.89 animals home each month; ten of the cats did not return home with prey. Twenty-eight of the forty-three cats in Thornhill brought home a mean of 0.81 animals per month over thirteen months surveyed; fifteen cats did not return home with prey. Presented with evidence of their cats’ handiwork, 98 percent of the cat owners still were opposed to keeping their cats inside at all times. Sixty percent disagreed that cats were harming wildlife. McDonald et al. concluded that the cat owners in their study failed to perceive the ecological footprint of their cat, rejected the proposition that cats are a threat to wildlife, and opposed management strategies, with the exception of neutering. Perhaps the owners did not view the birds and mammals that fall prey to domestic cats as sentient beings but instead as playthings for their beloved companions.
The American Bird Conservancy has consistently cajoled cat owners to keep their animals inside. For over a decade, ABC has championed its Cats Indoors program to educate the public and policy makers about the many benefits to birds, cats, and people when cats are maintained indoors or under an owner’s direct control. The Cats Indoors advertising campaign includes television public service announcements (PSAs), print advertisements, and brochures. One of the PSAs shows a Northern Cardinal at a bird feeder and then shifts to a cat being released from the house, as the owner says “Have fun, Tiger.” The cat moves into the yard to a point below the bird feeder as white text appears on the screen: “Cats Kill 2 Billion Birds Each Year” and then “Please Keep Cats Indoors: Better for Cats, Better for Birds, Better for People.” Grant Sizemore, ABC’s director of invasive species programs, says, “The idea with the campaign has been to engage different stakeholders about the challenge. We wanted to reach people who worry about cats, people who are interested in wildlife who might not know about the impacts cats have, and people who might not have thought about the issue at all.”4 ABC has distributed more than 100,000 Cats Indoors brochures to interested parties, and the PSAs have had hundreds of airings. But this is hardly the kind of media exposure that will reach the 48 million households that claim cats as pets.
Until recently, the Humane Society of the United States promoted a “cats indoors” policy for owned cats. It asked visitors to its website to sign a pledge, promising to keep their cats indoors for the safety of both cats and wildlife. This page has been taken down. Given the Humane Society’s significant membership and the clout it wields in animal welfare circles, it would seem that the organization could do much more.
Veterinarians, pet food manufacturers, and pet supply retailers are three channels that pose great potential for outreach to America’s pet owners. Veterinary practices could easily display Cats Indoors posters and brochures in waiting rooms and in consulting rooms, and the vets themselves could deliver a very brief overview on the importance of keeping cats inside at the end of each consultation. Likewise, Procter & Gamble (Iams), Nestlé (Purina, Friskies) Mars (Pedigree, Whiskas), and the other pet-food conglomerates of the world could reach almost every cat owner with a brief Cats Indoors message on cans and bags—and these brands could garner favorable public relations in the process for their efforts to protect cats and wildlife. Major pet supply retailers could follow suit with Cats Indoors messaging in product displays and could print messages on shopping bags. Such efforts will not change behavior overnight, but the power of any advertising rests in repetition and reinforcement. There is little question that the U.S. surgeon general’s warning that began appearing on packs of cigarettes in the mid-1960s helped raise the awareness of the link between smoking and cancer, and also helped make smoking seem less socially desirable. Such is the power of on-package information, though it must be noted that this posting was mandated by Congress, not initiated by manufacturers.
Millions of cat owners maintain indoor cats that live long, happy lives. Cats that are not allowed to roam freely still need stimulation, of course, and pet owners have many options. Cat owners can get a leash and walk their cats as tens of millions walk their dogs. Cats can be engaged in the living room with a feather toy or laser pen. There is a new device on the market called One Fast Cat that is essentially a hamster wheel for felines. If cat owners have a home with some outdoor space, they might consider building a “catio” (or cat patio), an outdoor enclosure that allows cats to enjoy fresh air and sunshine while limiting exposure to other animals and automobiles (fig. 8.1). Each fall, the Audubon Society of Portland and the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon promote a “catio” tour that showcases various enclosure designs in homes around the city.
City, county, state, and federal governments also have a role to play in coaxing American pet owners’ toward taking more responsibility for their cats. A number of groups have proposed that municipalities and counties require mandatory licensing for cats. Dogs have been issued licenses in America since at least the 1840s. In 1894 the city of New York passed an ordinance requiring dog owners to obtain a permit for their animal, and most municipalities in America have since followed suit. Licensing, now often bundled with the insertion of a microchip, has many benefits. It allows cities to mandate vaccinations and monitor pet owner compliance; it facilitates reuniting lost animals with their owners; it allows cities and counties to track the number of dogs in their region, both for safety and health reasons; and it provides authorities with a means of distinguishing unowned free-roaming animals from pets. Unowned pets can then be processed according to management policies. (Local ordinances requiring owners to keep pets under control are generally enforced for dogs but not for cats; licensing will facilitate enforcement.)
Despite the widespread acceptance of licensing for dogs, only a small percentage of municipalities require licensing of cats. Why has there been so little interest in applying canine standards to felines? “I believe that with roaming dogs, there has always been a fear factor,” ventured Christopher Lepczyk, an associate professor in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at Auburn University in Alabama, who has conducted extensive research on the impact of cats on wildlife and the efficacy of TNR programs. “Dogs posed a risk to human health from either biting or rabies. That element of fear is not there with cats, though there is the potential for disease. I think we’d all benefit if we began viewing pet ownership as a privilege, not a right.”5 Licensing could be part of the exchange for the privilege. A modest licensing fee of $20 a year per cat could create a windfall of $1.6 billion, money that could be applied toward efforts to reduce populations of free-ranging cats.
The historical role of the cat as part outside worker, part domestic pet, may have also impeded licensing efforts. “Dogs used to be kept outside, but there was a point in time where we started to recognize them as part of the family, and they were brought indoors,” Grant Sizemore from ABC says. “We’re not completely there with cats. Many people still think of them as barnyard animals that go out and hunt mice. There’s a perception that they don’t require or even want human interaction or investment. That perception has to change.”6
As part of any licensing/microchip ordinances, it should be mandatory that cats be spayed or neutered. This is an area in which American pet owners are doing well—according to the Humane Society of the United States, 91 percent of owned cats are sterilized. But if a licensing structure can be universally adopted, there is no reason that a near 100 percent rate cannot be achieved, especially if the cost of the procedure can be subsidized so that it is affordable for all citizens. Given the millions of dollars made available for TNR by charities like Maddie’s Fund and PetSmart Charities, funding should not be a problem.
While individual pet owners must take responsibility for their cats, it is everyone’s responsibility to address the challenges of managing free-ranging cats to limit their impact on wildlife, both as predators and vectors of disease. From a conservation ecology perspective, the most desirable solution seems clear—remove all free-ranging cats from the landscape by any means necessary. But such a solution is hardly practical given the legions of cats roaming the land—as many as 100 million unowned animals, plus 50 million owned cats that roam—and the painful question of what to do with the cats even if they could be captured. And as we have seen, leaders see little political capital to be gained from stepping into the fray to propose substantive solutions. Faced with budget deficits, affordable housing shortages, and an ever-widening chasm between haves and have-nots, among other woes, leaders rank the plight of wildlife and the misunderstood and poorly known public-health hazards posed by free-ranging cats low on their priority lists, if these issues make the list at all. But given the devastating consequences of free-ranging cats, this needs to change.
By and large, the general public is blissfully unaware of the issue of free-ranging cats. This is in large part because most conservation and bird organizations, wildlife advocates, and conservation ecologists have not been effective at describing the scope of the problem and the scientific facts that speak to definitive action. Take the example of TNR programs. The casually engaged citizen, upon Googling “TNR,” would come away with the perception that it is an effective means of managing cat populations, is good for cats, and is in fact practiced by hundreds of municipalities and condoned by such hallowed animal welfare institutions as the Humane Society of the United States. Buried much deeper in the results page—perhaps even on page two or three—there might be links to articles detailing the other side of the story, such as the deficiencies of TNR as a means of population control.
The story of the ecological impact of free-ranging cats is not being heard. Frequently it is being drowned out by the strident and inaccurate claims of free-ranging cat advocates (however well meaning). A cursory review of a leading outdoor-cat advocate’s website illustrates some of these claims (presented here with a scientific rebuttal for each):
CAT ADVOCATE CLAIMS: Cats have lived outdoors for more than 10,000 years—they are a natural part of the landscape.
SCIENCE SAYS: Domestic cats are an invasive species throughout their current range, including North America.
CAT ADVOCATE CLAIMS: Today, they live healthy lives outdoors and play important roles in the ecosystem.
SCIENCE SAYS: Free-ranging domestic cats live relatively short, generally brutal lives and play a destructive role in all ecosystems, preying upon and in some cases causing extinctions of native species and acting as vectors of disease.
CAT ADVOCATE CLAIMS: Because TNR is proven to stabilize and reduce cat populations over time, it is now the gold standard for feral cat management in the United States.
SCIENCE SAYS: TNR has not been proven to stabilize and reduce cat populations; in fact, in some cases it has been shown to increase the size of existing colonies (because colonies attract non-neutered and non-spayed cats—including those abandoned in these areas by negligent pet owners).
Thanks to aggressive lobbying efforts, TNR has regrettably become a de facto option for feral cat management; it is not a “gold standard.”
One of the most commonly practiced (and effective) tactics deployed by leading free-ranging cat advocacy organizations is to relentlessly attack any studies that cast doubt upon the efficacy of TNR or that disclose the dangers that cats pose to native species and public health, often relying on a flexible interpretation of facts if not outright prevarications. Science organizations rarely respond in similar fashion. The fallout from such misinformation is wide-ranging and severe. It is also testament to the power of perseverance and stridency; call a spoon a knife long enough and loudly enough and people will begin to believe it—or at least they will cease to doubt it and move on to something else.
Wildlife advocates, conservation scientists, and others who care about finding solutions need to make research results known. Policies promoting cat colonies and TNR should be challenged, and the impacts free-ranging cats have on bird, mammal, and reptile populations must be more clearly illustrated. The urgency of the problem—especially as it pertains to species that are in danger of extirpation or extinction—must be explained. The public must also be alerted to the very real health hazards free-ranging cats pose. The trenches where many of these public opinion battles are fought—local hearings, for example, or outreach events—are open to all. Members of the conservation and science community must mobilize and be heard at such assemblages, even though advocacy is not the traditional role for scientists or a role in which many feel comfortable.
Outdoor-cat advocates claim that nearly 300 cities and counties have enacted ordinances and policies supporting TNR. As of this writing, battle lines over endorsing or rejecting TNR are being drawn in places such as Washington, DC, Delaware, and Sparks, Nevada. For those advocating against TNR programs, it is an uphill battle, but voices for more responsible action can prevail. One recent success story comes from Florida. In the winter of 2013, ABC joined the debate in Florida to combat a proposed state law (Senate Bill 1320) that would have exempted TNR programs from consideration under ordinances prohibiting animal abandonment. Essentially the law would have legalized TNR in the Sunshine State. Working with Audubon Florida, Florida Defenders of Wildlife, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Florida Veterinary Medical Association, ABC presented data regarding the prevalence of toxoplasmosis among free-ranging cats and the impact of cats on wildlife. Though the Florida House of Representatives had passed a version of the bill, the Senate version died in the Agriculture Committee. Farther north, in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo recently vetoed legislation (A2778/S) that would have allocated up to 20 percent of the state’s Animal Population Control Program Fund to trap-neuter-return programs, citing evidence that shows TNR does not reduce feral cat populations and that feral cats have a major impact on wildlife. It is unlikely the governor would have taken this stance without pressure from a coalition of stakeholders that included ABC, Audubon New York, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, birders, animal welfare organizations, and sportsmen’s groups.
Government entities can take proactive steps to combat the escalation of free-ranging cat populations. County, state, and federal jurisdictions should enact legislation to ban free-ranging cats from public lands. With such ordinances in place, animal control officers will have legal recourse to remove free-ranging cats that pose a health risk (e.g., cats frequenting a playground in a state or county park) or have the potential to harm wildlife (e.g., cats living near a campground on National Recreation Area land that is near endangered bird nesting sites). There is precedent for such legislation. Title 36 CFR section 2.15 (from the Code of Federal Regulations) states prohibitions for pets in designated National Park Service areas and is summarized as follows:
Pets or feral animals that are running-at-large and observed by an authorized person in the act of killing, injuring or molesting humans, livestock, or wildlife may be destroyed if necessary for public safety or protection of wildlife, livestock, or other park resources. Pets that do not pose a direct risk to wildlife may be impounded.7
While the conservation and public-health communities must confront claims that have potential to steer management policies away from scientific results, they must also maintain lines of communication with such cat advocacy groups, as well as animal shelters and the veterinary community, in an effort to find some common ground—such as increased efforts to spay and neuter and overall animal welfare. A good starting point would be a frank discussion about the fact that cats kill animals. “We’ll start to make real progress when cat people accept that cats have an impact,” Sharon Harmon from the Oregon Humane Society posited. “Every time a study comes out that says cats have an impact, cat people say ‘No, it’s humans that do more damage.’ We need to agree that cats have a real impact. Until we fully grasp our responsibility for the welfare of all animals—wild and domestic—we’re going to have animal mortality and harsh relationships between people who advocate for one or the other.”8
Over the last decade an unlikely partnership has developed in Portland, Oregon, between two organizations that would seem to be diametrically opposed—the Portland Audubon Society and the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon. “Over the last ten years, we’ve established a high level of trust with the Feral Cat Coalition,” said Bob Sallinger, Portland Audubon’s conservation director. “We work very closely together toward what we feel is a shared goal. People assume it’s a tense relationship, but it’s not at all. In fact, I’d say it’s as close as the working relationships we have with some of our closest conservation partners.”9
In addition to the catio tour (mentioned earlier), the two groups have collaborated on the Hayden Island Cat Project, a multiyear endeavor to reduce the free-ranging cat population on an islet that sits in the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver, Washington, that is part of Portland Audubon’s larger Cats Safe at Home campaign. Some of the island has been given over to industrial use, though several hundred acres remain undeveloped and provide habitat for some of the area’s 200 bird species. Hayden Island has also been used as a dumping ground for unwanted cats and has thus fostered a vibrant free-ranging cat community. The Hayden Island Cat Project aims to assess potential solutions for reducing cat populations on the island, including TNR. “Some in the feral cat community see an effort like this an excuse for capturing and killing cats,” Sallinger says, “but that’s not what’s happening. I think the Feral Cat Coalition people understand that we’re trying to work for the general welfare of all animals. Some people in the bird community—here, and in other places across the country—say that we’ve waved the white flag by advocating for TNR. That somehow we’ve conceded. I believe that we’re working directly on the problem. I’m not saying that we know the best way to handle the cat predation problem here in Portland. But we’re trying something different by collaborating with the Feral Cat Coalition in a fully transparent way.”
Another example of parties with different beliefs joining together to address a common problem comes from the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Expressing concern over the burgeoning populations of free-ranging cats, county officials called for a task force to consider management options and make recommendations. In 2013 the Kauai Feral Cat Task Force was formed, with county funding. The task force drew its members from the spectrum of interested parties, including representatives from the Kauai Humane Society, the Forestry and Wildlife division of the State Department of Land and Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, local businesses, and the Kauai Albatross Network. In a report issued in 2014, the Kauai Feral Cat Task Force made eleven recommendations, which include:
•Pass an animal control ordinance that sets a goal of zero free-ranging cats by 2025
•Strengthen existing cat licensing ordinances
•Identify sensitive wildlife and cultural areas to guide cat enforcement issues at these locales
•Prohibit feeding, sheltering, or maintaining cats on county properties
•Make sterilization mandatory for any cats allowed outdoors
•Mandate more rigorously managed TNR colonies (or, using the task force’s wording, “Trap, Neuter, Return & Manage colonies”), including 90 percent minimum spay/neuter rate
•Make sensitive wildlife and cultural areas high priority for trapping of cats
•Initiate (and fund) a public education program10
Thus far, the county of Kauai has not implemented any of the task force’s recommendations. Individuals from the Kauai Community Cat Foundation continue to block implementation by threatening litigation and deliberate obfuscation. Several species on the U.S. endangered species list, including the Newell’s Shearwater, the Hawaiian Petrel, and the Hawaiian Duck, breed on Kauai and are preyed upon by cats maintained in colonies.
Though the scientific data make it impossible to advocate for TNR, it must be acknowledged that the practice has become as much a part of the landscape as the cats it purports to help. If TNR and the presence of cat colonies must persist, it is essential that the animals in colonies be truly managed—and that several additional criteria be required. Given the human health risks and wildlife impacts colonies pose, colony sites must be located away from critical wildlife habitats (as determined by wildlife management professionals) and densely populated human settlements. Neutering, vaccinating, and ear-clipping the cats should be only the beginning; at the least, the cats should be implanted with microchips and monitored with automated devices, collared with a license tag, and regularly counted in a standardized fashion by trained personnel at and around colony sites. Because of disease risk, cats should be captured multiple times so vets can administer booster vaccinations and assess health status. Colony caregivers should receive formal training and accreditation to show that they possess a baseline understanding of cat behavior, cat health, and the impact that cats can have on other animals. Municipalities that are condoning and/or underwriting cat colonies also need to monitor their success, just as they monitor any other city program. (Success in this case is defined as a reduction in or extirpation of the overall cat population by a certain date.) City administrators should be mandated to ensure that research is conducted at a subset of colonies within the municipality to better understand the impact of the colony on local wildlife. All colonies must also be adaptively managed; if population reduction goals are not met, or wildlife impacts or disease transmissions are recorded, new strategies or policies must be adopted, including the complete removal of the cats. Penalties should also be imposed upon those individuals who feed free-ranging cats without having the animals spayed or neutered, licensed, and properly managed as described. (No data exist to quantify how many people fall into this category, but it is likely tens of thousands.) “Some caretakers want to claim a level of ownership when it’s proposed that a cat be removed,” Grant Sizemore from ABC said. “Yet when that same cat bites someone or causes property damage or nuisance, their response is, ‘It’s not my cat, I just feed it sometimes.’ They don’t want to take responsibility.”11
Though it has been stressed again and again, we cannot overemphasize the importance of spaying and neutering as many cats as possible. Some estimates (cited earlier) place the percentage of a colony’s free-ranging cats that have been desexed as low as 2 percent. “We simply can’t have cats reproducing at current levels and hope to curtail the number of cats out in the environment,” wildlife veterinarian David Jessup says. “As long as we don’t reach a higher percentage of spay/neuter, we’re on an exponentially expanding curve, and we’ll never get ahead.”12
Given the arguments that we have presented thus far in this book, it should be no surprise to the reader to learn that we would find it preferential—if not quite realistic—to see all free-ranging cats removed from the environment. Contrary to what some opponents to removal strategies might think, conservationists, ecologists, and public-health officials who desire cats off the landscape do not wish to see the animals killed. They simply want them off the landscape. In a more perfect world, these animals would be acculturated to human contact whenever possible and adopted out. If assimilation into a human home proved impossible, one option is for animals to be diverted to a cat sanctuary. You may have heard of or visited wild animal sanctuaries—large, fenced-in expanses of land where discarded Lions, elephants, and other “exotic” animals can live out their days, with food and any necessary medical care provided by human caregivers. Cat sanctuaries operate in a similar manner, accordingly scaled. One such sanctuary is the Cat House on the Kings in central California, near Fresno. This sanctuary provides a home for more than 700 cats, which can wander over a twelve-acre area that is completely enclosed by a cat-proof perimeter fence. There are a number of outbuildings on the property where its residents can take shelter from the elements. When cats are admitted to the Cat House, they are spayed or neutered and receive vaccinations. All eligible cats are available for adoption, and nearly 500 animals are placed in homes each year. Many of the cats living at the Cat House were rescued from the surrounding region; for a fee of $5,000, people who no longer wish to care for their cat can surrender the animal to the Cat House for lifetime support and care.
The efforts of the Cat House and its employees and supporters are laudable. They are helping to remove predators and disease vectors from the environment while providing a safe, nurturing home for the feline residents, whether for a few months or a lifetime. Yet sanctuaries do not appear to be a model that can be scaled to meet the current need. If there are 60 million free-ranging cats (a conservative estimate) in the United States, and we take 700 cats as a population ceiling for an operational sanctuary, we would need nearly 86,000 sanctuaries. If twelve acres is an adequate enclosure size for 700 cats, the 86,000 sanctuaries would take up over 1 million acres, or more than 1,500 square miles—an area larger than Rhode Island. The Cat House estimates that it costs roughly a dollar a day to feed each cat in its care, so the annual food budget alone would approach $22 billion—nearly half the GDP of Rhode Island.
So unless the good citizens of Rhode Island are prepared to vacate their fair state, construct 836 million feet of fence (give or take a few million) before leaving, and relinquish at least half of their earnings to support their feline replacements, sanctuaries may not be a feasible large-scale solution. Nor can we look to conventional community animal shelters to shoulder the burden. According to the ASPCA, the approximately 13,600 independent shelters nationwide take in 3.4 million cats a year; 1.3 million of those cats are adopted, and 1.4 million euthanized. Even if shelters could double or triple their intake and adoption success rates—and this is highly unlikely, given how underfunded most shelters are—these would be mere drops in an ocean of cats.
This all points to a larger realization—that given the scope of the problem and the unique circumstances surrounding each colony—there may not be a one-size-fits-all solution to removing free-ranging cats from the landscape. Even if there were an answer that all parties could agree upon, there would be the question of resources. How would we possibly pay for the trapping of tens of millions of cats, or that fence around Rhode Island? The Department of the Interior does not have the money to underwrite such an undertaking, let alone state fish and game or wildlife departments. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could be another matter. The CDC’s projected budget for 2016 is $7 billion; state expenditures for public health amount to over $8.75 billion. Advertising campaigns underwritten by various government entities have helped discourage smoking. Perhaps billboards warning of the potential maladies brought on by cats carrying Toxoplasma gondii could similarly impact public behavior. As free-ranging cats become recognized as a serious threat to public health—and thus become viewed as a public-health issue—there is hope that more resources can be devoted to managing the problem.
While large-scale cat removal success stories have thus far proven elusive, there have been a few bright spots. In 1997 Bidwell Park, an appealing 3,670-acre municipal park in Chico, California, that is bifurcated by Big Chico Creek, was becoming overrun with free-ranging cats. The park’s proximity to the city made it an easy place for residents to abandon unwanted animals. Bidwell Park was home to a number of bird species, and the California Quail (Callipepla californica) populations were plummeting thanks to cat predation. A local conservation organization, Altacal Audubon Society, identified the declining bird species and pressed the city of Chico to take action. Spurred on by Altacal and other community members, the city’s Parks and Playground Commission began enforcing Chico’s abandonment and litter laws (the latter to prevent individuals from feeding cats living in the park). This discouraged citizens from continuing to abandon their cats in the park but did nothing to remove the animals that were already there. The following year concerned citizens banded together to form the Chico Cat Coalition, with the mission of removing the cats from Bidwell. In the first year, they successfully trapped 440 cats; 340 of the animals were placed into adoption, fifty were sent to live in a barn that served as a sanctuary, and fifty were euthanized. With the considerable reduction in Bidwell’s cat population, quail populations rebounded. Ecological balance was restored, with a minimum loss of feline life.
A decade later a more complicated cat removal operation unfolded on San Nicolas Island, roughly sixty miles off the coast of southern California. Cats had been introduced to the thirty-three-square-mile island in the early 1950s, most likely by sailors stationed at the small naval base (to operate a missile telemetry site), and as cats always do, they proliferated. The animals had negatively impacted seabird populations, as well as those of the federally listed threatened Island Night Lizard, Western Snowy Plover, a subspecies of Deer Mouse, and the state-listed threatened Island Fox. Six different organizations (including the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and a nonprofit, Island Conservation) banded together to assemble and implement a plan to remove the cats from San Nicolas—an island perhaps better known as the setting of the acclaimed 1960 children’s novel Island of the Blue Dolphins. The plan—which deployed 250 padded leg-hold live traps, tracking dogs, and a GIS-enabled trap monitoring system—was implemented over eighteen months. Ultimately fifty-nine cats were captured (unharmed) and flown to the mainland, where they were examined, spayed or neutered, and released to a sanctuary near San Diego provided by the Humane Society of the United States. This program cost over $3 million, or roughly $50,000 per cat.
The cats were removed from San Nicolas Island at a significant cost in large part because they were threatening endangered species. That the animals were trapped and evacuated alive may be a function of the navy’s resistance to being perceived as the cat-killing branch of the U.S. Armed Forces—and by the availability of ample funds from the Montrose Settlement Restoration Program, a fund set up after millions of pounds of DDTs and PCBs had been discharged into the waters off southern California by Montrose Chemical Corporation. As mentioned earlier, it is paramount—from an ecological as well as a moral perspective—to give endangered species every opportunity to sidestep extinction. As there will not always be deep pockets available to underwrite nonlethal free-ranging cat removal from high-priority wildlife areas, lethal means will have to be considered under certain circumstances.
First, these high-priority regions with habitats that support endangered, threatened, and declining mammals, birds, and other wildlife—and also have cats—must be identified. They are present in every state. A few that come immediately to mind include Cape May, New Jersey (a key nesting area for Piping Plovers and an important stopover for migrant songbirds); areas around Galveston, Texas (a critical stopover in the United States for Neotropical migrants); areas along the southern shore of Lake Erie, another stopover point for migrants, including endangered species like Kirtland’s Warbler and near-threatened species like the Golden-winged Warbler; and the entire island chain of Hawaii (home for a host of endangered species, such as the Hawaiian Monk Seal and thirty-three endangered bird species found nowhere else, including the Hawaiian Duck, Hawaiian Coot, Hawaiian Stilt, and Hawaiian Crow, which is extinct in the wild). In high-priority areas there must be zero tolerance for free-ranging cats. If the animals are trapped, they must be removed from the area and not returned. If homes cannot be found for the animals and no sanctuaries or shelters are available, there is no choice but to euthanize them. If the animals cannot be trapped, other means must be taken to remove them from the landscape—be it the use of select poisons or the retention of professional hunters.
No one likes the idea of killing cats. But sometimes it is necessary. “People need to recognize that by its very definition, euthanization is humane,” said David Jessup, the wildlife veterinarian. “It’s being put to sleep. It’s not something that we want to do wholesale, but it’s not an evil thing.” The medication that is generally used for euthanasia is pentobarbital, a barbiturate that causes death by respiratory arrest. In appropriate doses, it quickly renders the animal unconscious, shutting down heart and brain functions within one or two minutes.
Some cats will not come to traps, and will need to be removed from the landscape by other means. Australia, as we have seen (chapter 6), is relying upon Curiosity, a sausage-like bait that contains a dose of para-aminopropiophenone, which works by inhibiting the cat’s breathing. The bait is distributed by air in the Outback regions where feral cats pose the greatest threat to endemic wildlife, including some of Australia’s most threatened species. On Marion Island, in the southern Indian Ocean (1,200 miles south of Cape Town, South Africa), a population of nearly 3,500 cats—progeny of five cats brought to the island in 1949—killed an estimated half million petrels in 1975. To protect petrels and other bird species at risk, the Marion Island Cat Eradication Program was launched in 1977. Several cats were infected with feline panleukopenia, a disease that is easily communicable and ultimately fatal. By 1982 nearly 3,000 cats had been eradicated by contracting panleukopenia. The remaining cats were hunted at night by eight two-man teams using battery-operated spotlights and shotguns, from 1986 through 1989. When hunting ceased to be productive, traps were deployed. By 1991 the eradication project appeared to be complete.
Some who oppose the notion of removing cats from the environment to protect endangered species will cite the inordinate cost of such efforts. The case of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, part of a British overseas territory, is often trotted out as an example. Seabird populations, which included Sooty Terns (Onychoprion fuscatus), Masked Boobies (Sula dactylatra), and Ascension Frigatebirds (Fregata aquila), were estimated to be a staggering 20 million in 1815 when the British first settled Ascension—bringing with them the island’s first cats. Over the next 150 years, nearly all the seabird colonies on the main island were extirpated; relict colonies remained only in cat-inaccessible locations. In 2002 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds stepped in to lead eradication efforts. Poison baiting and live trapping were the primary means of culling. By 2006 all the cats had been either euthanized or removed; soon after, seabirds began recolonizing sites that had been accessible to cats. By 2012 Ascension Frigatebirds had returned to the island to nest, the first reported nesting in 180 years. The cost of the eradication project was $1.3 million.
Whether you consider $1.3 million an outrageous sum to pay to save a few birds or a wise investment in biodiversity will depend on your philosophical stance. But from a purely financial perspective, there is little question that eradication—at least on a local level—will trump endangered species remediation every time. A breakdown of per species dollars invested in conservation efforts for endangered species from 2004 to 2007 shows that $60.5 million was spent to resuscitate populations of the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, $67.4 million to protect Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, and nearly $83 million to protect Bald Eagles. (A modest $35.7 million was spent on remediation for Piping Plovers.) Removing free-ranging cats from ecologically sensitive areas is challenging and expensive work, but it is a wise use of resources when compared with the huge investments mandated by the Endangered Species Act once an animal’s population has dwindled to dangerously low levels. Investing resources to keep common species common will almost always be more cost-efficient than recovery efforts.
In concert with more draconian steps of cat removal, conservationists and government entities should be prepared to pursue legal action. It has been shown in one court case that releasing cats into the wild and supporting feral cat colonies is a violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act as well as laws prohibiting animal abandonment. It may become necessary to pursue injunctions against colonies and colony managers, particularly in areas that provide habitats for migratory birds or endangered species.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to convincing humans to take greater responsibility for their pets and act more responsibly on behalf of their environment and the health of the greater society is the growing ignorance and indifference about the natural world. We are an increasingly urban society, increasingly enmeshed with various forms of electronic amusement. Both of these factors serve to reinforce the ever-growing detachment we as a society have developed from the natural world. The further disconnected we become from nature, the less we understand its complexity, its beauty, and, at times, its brutality—and we lose sight of the fact that humans are intricately part of and dependent upon the very natural systems we continue to destroy. If someone does not know about the existence of a Cerulean Warbler, it is unreasonable to think he or she would miss its song once the bird is gone.
A recent poll commissioned by the Nature Conservancy confirmed that American children are spending less time outside and enumerated some of the reasons:
•80 percent said it was uncomfortable to be outdoors due to things like bugs and heat
•62 percent said they did not have transportation to natural areas
•61 percent said there were not natural areas near their homes
There was one bright spot in the poll results. Sixty-six percent of the children surveyed said they had had a personal experience in nature and that it had made them appreciate it more.
In a paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gregory Bratman and his associates attribute decreased experiences in nature to increased levels of mental illness. Their experiment looked at the impact of nature exposure on rumination, a maladaptive pattern of self-referential thought that is associated with heightened risk for depression and other mental illnesses. Some participants were asked to go on a ninety-minute walk in a natural environment; others took a ninety-minute walk in an urban setting. Those who walked in the natural setting reported lower levels of rumination and showed reduced neural activity in an area of the brain (the subgenual prefrontal cortex) linked to risk for mental illness compared with those who walked through an urban environment. The results suggest that access to nature may be important for maintaining mental health in our increasingly urban world.
Giving more children a chance to experience nature may be the best hope for the wildlife suffering from the proliferation of free-ranging cats on our landscape—and for returning some ecological balance to our environment—because you cannot get people to save something if they do not love it. And you cannot get people to love something if they have not experienced it.
If more Americans had the chance to hold a songbird, look closely into its tiny eyes, and feel its fluttering heart, they might be moved to take action against those threats that imperil these creatures, especially the threats we can control, such as free-ranging cats.