Feral Colony Management and Control

Overview

Alley Cat Allies is part of an international campaign to educate the public about feral cats and focus attention on the plight of unmanaged feral colonies. For years the feral cats issue has been neglected by most animal welfare groups in the U.S. Through a lack of understanding and misinformation, ferals are often treated as pests and exterminated. Simply ignoring the problem also causes suffering for unmanaged colonies. Humane control measures pioneered in the United Kingdom over two decades ago are becoming a popular choice for many groups and individuals concerned with the welfare of ferals in the U.S.

Brief History

The domestic cat evolved from the African wild cat, Felis libyca. Feral cats are the offspring of stray or abandoned domestic cats who revert to a wild state. Raised without human contact, they are fearful of humans. Feral cats are successful survivors, especially in urban areas, where they scavenge off garbage, left-over food from restaurant areas, and feedings by sympathetic people.
The domestic cat was introduced throughout the world by explorers and scientists, taken to new regions to control other introduced species, such as rodents. Labeled an "exotic" species, they are often unpopular with biologists. However, in some urban areas, they represent one of the few remaining predators since humans have either killed all native predators, or caused their demise through urban expansion.

Why Are Feral Cats Living in Streets and Alleys?

Feral cats live in streets, alleys and parks because of human caretakers' neglect of their unsterilized domestic house cats, allowing them to roam and reproduce. A California study revealed that about 60% of unneutered household cats become feral within three years. Many people abandon or dump unwanted unsterilized cats, and these animals often end up in feral colonies.
Stray and lost cats congregate near food sources such as garbage dumpsters where rodents collect to feed. The cats start breeding and form colonies. An estimated 60 million feral cats live in the U.S., and worldwide are part of the urban ecology in virtually every city. They live in deserts near human settlements as well as on islands near Antarctica where scientists transported them to control imported rodents.

Where Are Feral Cats Found?

College campuses
Students feed unsterilized cats, then abandon them when they leave for vacations or finish their education. Campuses are often located in residential areas. Cafeterias insure that a constant supply of left-over food will be thrown out in dumpsters. Attracted by this food source, lost or abandoned cats enter from the residential areas and start feral colonies.

Military bases
Army and Navy bases have a transient human population, and abandonment of cats is commonplace when people are transferred to other bases. Many of these animals are not altered.

Fast food places and restaurants
There is usually a constant source of left-over food in dumpsters, attracting rodents and stray cats.

Densely populated urban areas
Negligent owners allow domestic, unaltered cats to wander, and garbage left in alleys encourages the formation of colonies.

Hospitals
In the United Kingdom, hospital grounds represent areas where successful colonies of managed, sterilized cats live. Left-over food outside kitchens attracts rodents and therefore stray cats. Hospital personnel have found that caring for feral cats is therapeutic for long-term patients, providing a great deal of enjoyment. Such programs have been particularly successful for patients in mental institutions.

Farms
Most farmers allow feral cats to live in barns to control rodent populations. Often these cats are underfed in the mistaken belief that this will make them better "mousers." This is a false notion, as hungry cats will move away to areas where better food sources exist. Poorly fed cats are also susceptible to diseases. All too often, farmers do not sterilize the animals causing further overpopulation problems.
ACA suggests relocating cats to farms, if they need to be removed from unsafe urban areas. The program permits sterilized, vaccinated cats to be relocated under strict supervision and guidelines, and encourages an educational program on how to properly care for cats (see ACA fact sheet, Relocating Feral Cats).

Holiday resorts, hotels, parks and camp grounds
Many cats are found here for the same reasons mentioned above. During the summer months, vacationers often feed the cats. During winter they are left to fend for themselves. Left in freezing conditions, they suffer from malnutrition, starvation and illnesses which are often fatal. The fittest survive to breed.
In parks it is difficult to remove all the cats because of constant food sources and close proximity to residential areas. Therefore, it is advisable to stabilize and reduce the colonies through sterilization programs. Feeding and caring for the cats will create less of a problem with wildlife predation.

Colony Management

Attempts to eradicate whole colonies of cats usually fail because the ecological vacuum created is soon filled by other strays. Unmanaged colonies are often regarded as a nuisance because of territorial behavior such as spraying, fighting, and caterwauling during mating periods. Stabilizing the colony by neutering results in healthier animals and much of their undesirable behavior is eliminated.

Health Hazards to Humans

A managed program includes a three-year rabies vaccination for cats. This helps alleviate the current rabies epidemic, as the vaccinated cats form a buffer zone between wildlife and humans. ACA has initiated a campaign to help promote licensing the oral wildlife rabies vaccine to help control rabies in raccoons. Cats are not natural vectors of the rabies virus and rabies control in wildlife populations is essential.
Individuals involved with trapping or working in any capacity with feral cats or other wild animals should have pre-exposure rabies vaccinations.
Although certain diseases can be transmitted between animals and humans, instances of diseases being contracted by persons working with feral cat colonies are rare. ACA has collected research from other countries and the U.S. spanning two decades, and there is little evidence of such occurrences. One problem often cited is toxoplasmosis, the most common source of which is raw or undercooked meat. Although cooking usually destroys this protozoan parasite called toxoplasma gondii, when raw meat is placed on cutting boards and kitchen counters the organism can survive and contaminate other foods.
Public health officials often cite stray cats as "health hazards" and this can cause panic among the general public and result in eradication programs. The public and animal welfare organizations need a better perspective of what constitutes a "health hazard." Many myths exist regarding feral colonies and misinformation is often spread through ignorance or fear.
In reality, many more people get sick each year from food-borne illnesses such as salmonella and camphylobacter, transmitted by contaminated beef and chicken products, than ever fall ill from contact with feral cats. Over 5 million people in the U.S. alone get sick from consuming contaminated meat products and more than 9,000 die from these illnesses annually (see "Danger Lurks in Your Supermarket Meat Cases" JAVMA, February 15, 1988).
More panic seems to be created by an occasional rabies case in animals or by otherwise well-meaning animal welfare advocates, stating that alley cats are a health threat to humans. Statistics confirm that such panic is unfounded. Three humans died from rabies in 1992; none of the infections were caused by cats.
Two real health concerns for humans with regard to ferals are fleas and ringworm, both of which can be controlled. Fleas can be controlled by regularly cleaning and spraying the colony's sleeping quarters during the summer. Ringworm among feral cat caretakers is only transmissible by handling an infected cat. Ringworm can be detected in cats during hospital exams, and any person infected can be easily treated.
Practicing common sense and good hygiene when dealing with managed cat colonies, such as cleaning up feeding areas and sleeping quarters and providing clean litter boxes, virtually eliminates disease transmission from colonies to humans.

Attacks by Feral Cats

Lost or abandoned domestic female cats teach their offspring to be "feral." These latent instincts, acquired from their African Wildcat ancestors, help cats survive in nature. Feral cats are elusive, often nocturnal, and usually fearful of humans. Like most wild animals, they will not attack if unprovoked, but will defend themselves if threatened or cornered. Their strongest instinct is to run. If they feel trapped and escape is blocked they will bite or scratch.
Never try to catch a feral by hand. Always use a humane trap. Even little kittens can inflict painful bites and scratches. Caretakers who have been feeding alley cats for years can sometimes pet them, but still may not be able to catch them by hand.

Predation and Wildlife

The topic of wildlife predation by cats is usually a very emotional issue between cat lovers and bird lovers. The books listed in the bibliography will help you become more informed about the issue. As illustrated by this material, many studies have been done worldwide on continents and islands since the early 1940s'. However, much of this information is either ignored or unavailable to researchers in the U.S. More often quoted are two studies in which the numbers have been extrapolated across a state or a country. The results of such extrapolation are deceptive and add up to the impression of tremendous numbers of birds and small mammals killed by cats each year.
Cats are carnivores, equipped with highly developed senses, sharp teeth and claws. Wild cats are the supreme predators among terrestrial mammals and although they have a reputation for wanton slaughter, only well fed domestic cats can possibly be accused of this, as they often do not eat their prey. They hunt, in essence, because they are compelled to do so by nature. Even in such cases, scientific evidence shows cats mostly catch small mammals, such as rodents, and insects.
Feral cats who rely solely on hunting for food, as with all other wild cats, spend much of their time seeking food and stalking it. They often have to wait for hours for potential prey to come by and often are unsuccessful at making a kill.
Many zoologists have observed that feral cats are mostly scavengers, hanging out next to dumpsters to wait for a hand out. Peter Neville, a pet behaviorist and author of many books on cats, worked in England for two decades with feral colonies. Neville states, "a deliberate strategy of scavenging has enabled many feral cats almost to give up hunting altogether. They may learn instead to lie around waste bins of hotels for fresh supplies or to cadge from well-meaning human providers in urban areas."
This "begging" and opportunistic behavior started with the domestication of the cat approximately 4,000 years ago. Cats congregated around grain storage barrels, attracted by the rodents who fed off the spilled grain. Cats are opportunistic feeders and hunters, living off the easiest source of available food and will scavenge from human refuse and carrion.

Island Cats

The much publicized studies of the effects of feral cats on island bird populations have added to the misinformation about their effects on continental wildlife and therefore made them very unpopular animals. Cats were transported to islands around the world to control rodents, and they also prey on ground nesting birds. There are usually no mammalian predators on islands for birds to adjust to, so they have little defense mechanism against the imported cats, mongooses or rats. Even on islands, cats often eat dead birds and other carrion as well as the introduced rodents.
Feral cats in both urban and island environments often are hungry, which contradicts their image as wanton killers. In her book Maverick Cats, Ellen Perry Berkeley reports that on San Nichols Island, 22.5 percent of ferals showed mottled livers, a sign of inadequate diet. Ferals sometimes fall prey to avian predators in island environments. The Galapagos Hawk, for example, preys on feral kittens.

Cats as Rodent Specialists

Ethologist Paul Leyhausen considers the domestic cat generally as a rodent specialist, because its preferred sit-and-wait strategy is much better suited to catching mice and young rabbits. Cats will wait for hours outside burrows for these animals to come out. Even though birds can fly in any direction and are more difficult to catch, some cats seem to become bird specialists and learn to raid nests and burrows for ground nesting birds.
A wildlife biologist recently said that researchers were "obsessively preoccupied with predation by cats and often overlooked other causes of wildlife depletion." An investigative journalist found many U.S. researchers using the Stanley Temple study in Wisconsin and the Churcher study in Britain, were unaware of the international studies conducted during the past forty years, all clearly reflecting the predominance of feline predation on mammals over birds.
The Temple study was done in a rural area and the figures were extrapolated across the state. The Churcher study of 70 cats in a rural area brought about an outcry that cats were killing 100 million birds and small mammals in Britain each year.
Roger Tabor, British naturalist and biologist, says of the study: "It is not realistic to multiply the numbers of catches of these (70) rural cats by the entire cat population of Britain. Most cats are town cats with small ranges, and catch fewer items of prey than the village cats of this survey. The mesmeric effect of big numbers seems to have stultified reason."
Tabor goes on to say the survey found the house cat is a "significant predator" and not that it was devastating Britain's bird population. Although a quarter of the town's house sparrows were consumed by cats each year, after each breeding season the sparrow population doubled. In winter many people feed garden birds, while nest boxes and domestic buildings provide additional nesting sites and in this way bird populations are kept well above "natural" levels.
The stomach contents of cats confirm that they are specialized predators of small mammals. Berkeley details six studies from 1936 to 1957 in various states in the U.S. In these studies the stomach content of feral cats was analyzed. The results confirmed mammals make up the largest percentage of food in those cats relying solely on hunting. Results from two studies follow:

1940, Oregon: Mammals 61.8%, Birds 18.9%, Carrion 10.7% Garbage 8.3%.
1941, Oklahoma: Mammals 55%, Garbage 26.5%, Insects 12.5%, Birds 4% and Reptiles 2%.

A New Zealand study showed mammals account for 93% of consumed food and birds 4.5%. In Australia, biologists Brian Coman and Hans Brunner concluded after studying feral cats that mammals made up 88% of the diet and birds 5.2%. They reported:
"The common belief that feral cats are serious predators of birds is apparently without basis. Although birds were common in all sampling areas, they were a relatively minor item in the diet. Presumably, other factors such as difficulty of capture are responsible for the low intake of birds."
A study in Pennsylvania in 1954 found the food of urban feral cats consisted of 85% garbage and 15% rodents and birds.
The following is a good summary of the conclusions reached by many biologists after studying cats, predation and wildlife on four continents:
Europe (13 studies), North America (12 studies), Australia (9 studies) and Africa (1 study). The diet of cats has also been studied on 22 islands from the equator to latitude 57 (see Bibliography).
C. J. Mead, 1982: "[T]he birds in suburban and rural parts of Britain have coexisted with cats for hundreds of generations, and they may now be under less pressure from cats than they were in the past from the assorted natural predators. Any bird populations on the continents that could not withstand these levels of predation from cats and other predators would have disappeared long ago. But populations of birds on oceanic islands have evolved in circumstances in which predation from mammalian predators was negligible and they, and any other island vertebrates, are therefore particularly vulnerable to predation when cats have been introduced."
B. M. Fitzgerald summarizes his findings of the feral cat diets by stating: "On all continents birds are usually much less important than mammals; birds were present on average at 21% frequency of occurrence, and mammals at 68%."
These biologists agree with Tabor, "In terms of the cats as threats to wildlife, generally for countries like Britain and America where other species have co-existed with the cat family predators for a long time, cats are no more harmful than other predators. Only in cases of small islands and the unique circumstances of Australia has the effect of cats, both feral and domestic, been very harmful. In biological systems it is insufficient merely to have found one animal will eat another, that, after all, is what predators do-but is that predation pressure within normal limits? Is the prime predator the cat?" Tabor concludes by suggesting, "disturbances by man" should be considered.

Double Standards

At this time in history when the human population causes so much destruction to the earth, we need to remind ourselves of our species' responsibility and consider our "double standards." We often excuse or ignore the devastation done to the environment by humans and the results of this destruction on our wildlife. Urban sprawl, shopping malls, road building, golf courses, etc. all play a part in reducing habitat and food sources and all have negative effects on wildlife. We poison our air with exhaust fumes from over 120 million automobiles and spray 4 billion pounds of pesticides into the atmosphere annually. The WorldWatch Institute cites deforestation due to razing of forests for croplands, pastures and real estate as one of the major factors contributing to the loss of all birds, including songbirds.
There are 14,136 golf courses nationwide, each of which uses 150 acres of land. Each acre is treated with 18 pounds of pesticides annually. Pesticide use causes enormous losses in bird populations. In the U.S., 220 million acres have been deforested for livestock production, yet environmentalists are eager to eradicate all alien and introduced species except cattle. Rather than blaming cats for so many of our problems, perhaps we should look toward modifying our lifestyles and animal-based agriculture, so destructive to natural ecosystems, and move toward methods which are less damaging to our environment.

Why American Songbirds Have Vanished

Although songbird populations are declining, other birds such as blackbirds and greenfinches, blue jays and brown-headed cowbirds (both nestling-eating predators) are exploding. Year-round U.S. bird residents are stable or increasing in numbers, indicating the need for serious consideration and urgent attention to reasons why songbirds are in decline. Blaming cats for songbird decline is a facile and simplistic solution to a complex problem.
Professor John Terborgh of Duke University reports in the May 1992 issue of Scientific American that little can be done about restoring songbirds in rural and suburban areas and conservation efforts should be directed towards consolidating and expanding large tracts of forest, such as the Smokies and Adirondacks, to maximize habitat for nesting birds. Another suggestion is for farmers to practice fallowing their fields every two to three years. He also mentions the damage done by clear-cutting national forests and overgrazing federal lands.
More than 250 species of song birds migrate south of U.S. borders. Tropical deforestation is occurring at the rate of 142,000 to 200,000 square kilometers each year, an area roughly the size of Florida. At this rate the world's remaining tropical forests will be depleted by 2030 and many species of songbirds will disappear along with them.

Preventing Colonies from Forming

ACA promotes low-cost sterilization programs to control breeding until the crisis of pet overpopulation is ended. We also promote and support breeding ordinances limiting animal breeding, provided these ordinances do not penalize colony caretakers trying to alleviate feral cat suffering.
Many blame caregivers for perpetuating the problem by feeding stray and feral cats. While it is true supplemental feeding creates healthier animals and increases the chance of more kittens surviving, feral colonies survive even if only meager food sources such as garbage and rodents are available. This has been proven in deserts and on deserted islands throughout the world where ferals survive without any nearby human habitation.
Instead of blaming the feeders and criminalizing their actions (which is often suggested), we should encourage their acts of compassion by assisting them with the resources and information available to sterilize the animals.
In a recent poll, it was estimated that 17.5 million people feed 35.2 million stray and feral cats in the U.S. It seems a natural act for humans to feed an animal to keep it from starving. Those cats turned away from a possible food source will cross busy highways in search of other sustenance. They will suffer from malnutrition and starvation, and most will still survive and manage to add to the overpopulation of feral kittens. Isn't a good life in a managed sterilized colony with a caretaker providing nutritious food much more preferable?
Alley Cat Allies is a national non-profit organization promoting a scientifically proven approach to controlling the estimated 60 million feral cats in the U.S. Endorsements come from many sources worldwide and include: Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, In Defense of Animals, The Doris Day Animal League, The Fund for Animals, World Society for the Protection of Animals, and in the United Kingdom from the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, the Cat Protection League, Cat Action Trust and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Alley Cat Allies believes introduced, alien and exotic species should be treated with respect and compassion and humane and non-lethal controls should be used as population control measures.

Bibliography

Berkeley, Ellen Perry, Maverick Cats, New England Press, 1992
Bradshaw, John, The Behavior of the Domestic Cat, Cambridge University Press, 1988
Brett, Caroline, Wild Cats, Dorset Press, 1992
Seidensticker, Dr. John and Lumpkin, Dr. Susan (eds.), Great Cats, Rodale Press, 1991
Sproule, Anna & Michael, The Complete Book of the Cat, Gallery Books, 1989
Tabor, Roger, Cats. The Rise of the Cat, BBC Books, 1991
Tabor, Roger, The Wild Life of the Domestic Cat, Arrow Books, 1983
Turner, Dennis & Bateson, Patrick (eds.), The Domestic Cat, Cambridge University Press, 1988

This will return you to the Feral Cat Coalition Home Page