The last white plastic trash bag whumps down and the silence is sudden. Last bedroom lights, above, are winking out. The street is remarkably dark. River mist dims the Portico d’Ottavia, slicks the basalt cobbles black, muffles the puncture and pull of crows’ beaks ripping into garbage. Shadows slide along the walls, becoming cats. From the ruins of the Theatre of Marcellus, the Temple of Apollo Sosiano, scrambling up the pitted stone walls from the brush along the Tiber quays, out from between the security sensors of the Great Synagogue’s bosky garden they come, all converging on this one short restaurant block. The crows flutter and give way; the cats paw in. Ba’Ghetto Milky has plentiful leavings of fish, BellaCarne of meat. No fighting, only the occasional hiss or swat—there is plenty for all—Daruma Sushi Kosher, Fonzie the Burger’s House Kosher, Zi Fenizia Kosher Eatery, Antico Ghetto Ebraico Sheva, Il Giardino Romano, La Dolceroma, Giggetto.…
All across the sleeping city, cats are in motion, deploying from their haunts in the ruins and parks to alleys, rooftops, gardens, windowsills, doorsteps, the plinths of monuments. There is food everywhere, here or there a run-over rat, mouse, or pigeon, dropped hot dogs, neglected spills of refuse, but all those together could never sustain these thousands of cats. What does keep them thriving are the ton on ton of commercial cat food lovingly placed at official, city-registered feeding sites by Rome’s ubiquitous gattare, cat ladies. There are cat gentlemen, too, gattari, but few.
Care is what the cats of Rome get, not just food. Rome has long taken pride in its identity as La Città dei Gatti, The City of Cats. In its streets, and in the ruins of the ancient imperial city, live uncounted cats, most of them feral. Others of Rome’s free-roaming cats are abandoned pets, or just lost. Estimates of the population size vary wildly, up to three hundred thousand. One hundred thousand seems more plausible, but they have never been counted. Even the biologists who study them can do no more than hazard a guess.
In 1988 the Roman municipal government forbade the euthanasia of any cat or dog except those deemed to be incurably ill or fatally injured. In August 1991 the Parliament of Italy passed a parallel measure, stipulating, “Feral cats have the right to live free… and cannot be moved from their colony,” and also that they must “be surgically neutered by the local Veterinary Public Services and reintroduced to their colony.”1 Despite the ongoing campaign of neutering, the feral cat population is probably growing.
The biologist Eugenia Natoli (pronounced with emphasis on the o), who has been studying the cats of Rome since the early 1980s, had already foreseen a population explosion that would result in massive starvation, early kitten deaths, widespread disease among the cats, and the prospect of zoonoses (illnesses that escape from animals to humans). Working with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, Natoli proposed that because many of Rome’s feral cats were injured or otherwise unhealthy, the capture necessary to neuter them could also afford an opportunity to administer veterinary care.2 This was going to require mobilizing and coordinating a welter of government agencies and, most important, an army of volunteers, drawn mainly from the city’s plenitude of gattare.
It was going to be the most comprehensive program ever attempted to control a feral cat population by the technique known as Trap, Neuter, and Return, or TNR. Because not a single large TNR program had ever been carried out comprehensively, anywhere in the world—that is, because not enough of the population had been neutered, or because the population wasn’t sufficiently isolated and, therefore, new fertile animals continued to enter it—the record had been one of failure after failure. The colonies kept growing. “Trap, Neuter, and Re-abandon,” its detractors dubbed it.
Rome’s program was heroic. Natoli and her colleagues studied the city’s feral cats for ten years, from 1991 to 2000. They monitored 103 colonies, whose gattare captured almost eight thousand cats to be neutered (of whom only two died). Each neutered cat had a corner of an ear lopped off for easy subsequent identification. At the end of the ten years, fifty-five of the 103 colonies had grown smaller, twenty had shown no change, and twenty-eight had actually grown larger. What was totally unexpected was the tremendous amount of leakage, both in and out. Cats ran away, and cats showed up—the latter usually abandoned surreptitiously by their owners, often accompanied by kittens. The kittens were fairly easily adopted out, but the colonies were stuck with the adult newcomers. If there had been no in-migration, the program would have been a success. But this was the real world, and, as Natoli’s study concluded, “TNR programs alone are not sufficient for managing urban feral-cat demography, and we suggest that they be matched with an effective educational campaign directed to citizens to reduce the high risk of owned-cat abandonment.”3 That remains the Achilles’ heel of no-kill shelters: the never-ending influx of abandoned cats, most often kittens.
As dawn spreads the city’s distinctive golden light across the tumbled columns, the still-standing temples and arches, the unmown grass and climbing vines, the last of the street-prowling cats saunter home full-bellied to groom themselves in slices of warm sun on the marble, eyelids heavy. In the immense rectangular pit known as the Largo di Torre Argentina, dug into the heart of the modern city in the early twentieth century, tall umbrella pines and rampant weedy wildflowers grow amid the remains of four temples from the time of the Roman Republic—the oldest of them four centuries older than those of the Imperial Forum—plus the Theatre of Pompey, where on March 15, 44 B.C., a group of senators led by Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus (Cassius and Brutus, in Shakespeare’s rendering of the event) stabbed the emperor Julius Caesar twenty-three times.4 As morning takes hold, Romans by the hundreds hurry past without looking. The Via di Torre Argentina is a major bus stop, and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, along the excavation’s north side and, in fact, built atop part of the temple complex, is one of the few remaining heavily trafficked streets in the historic center (much of the rest of central Rome is a blessedly traffic-free pedestrian zone). Along the southern boundary, tram line 8 rumbles along its rails toward Trastevere. Shops and bars crowd all four streetsides, and along the wide western promenade stands the legendary Teatro Argentina, where The Barber of Seville had its premiere. Tourists come to the railing and peer down, interested less in ancient history than in the current occupants. Cats lived here when Caesar was murdered, and cats live here now, the most famous cats in Rome.
In a corner of the site is a steel-barred door, beyond which a steep steel stair leads down to a small, neat garden. On the door is a sign:
Another sign informs you that minors may enter only if accompanied by adults and that whatever it is down there at the bottom of the iron stairs is open seven days a week from noon to six. It also says, “Adoptions 1 p.m.–5 p.m.”
The Largo Argentina was once, like all the other ruins in Rome, full of cats in chaos, without veterinary care, never neutered, but always fed by Rome’s sweet-hearted cat ladies. This particular population began to attract attention when the film and stage star Anna Magnani, who appeared often at the Teatro Argentina just across the street, joined the ranks of the gattare. After Magnani’s death, three local women struggled to keep the cats cared for, but abandonments were out of control. In the dank half-open temple rooms beneath the Corso Vittorio, without electricity or running water, the gattare created a primitive shelter. In 1995 an organization called the Anglo-Italian Society for the Protection of Animals discovered their plight and began to pitch in with money and materials. The volunteers began to solicit money from the tourists drawn to the archeological dig. Wealthier and worldlier donors took an interest and taught the Roman gattare about big-time fund-raising—dinners, raffles, galas. Soon not only were the volunteers able to provide full care for the Largo Argentina’s cats, they began to share their wealth with other Roman cat colonies. They opened a clinic to which owners could bring their cats for sterilization and medical care. An ancient tunnel was adapted as a refuge for sick or injured cats and for cats recently abandoned to the colony, so that the newcomers could be introduced gradually to the longer-term residents. Two books set in the sanctuary were published, and they sold well. Tech-skilled friends built a website, www.romancats.com. An English volunteer produced a film that the Largo staff distributed on DVD. A Cat Pride march demanded municipal funding for the protection and care of Rome’s feral cats.5
Being a gattara was becoming fashionable. Fewer than half of Italian women work outside the home,6 and it is an affluent country with a strong social conscience, so there were plenty of well-off women with the time and the desire to take care of the cats. Most of the volunteers today are notably well-dressed and prosperous-looking.
It remains a struggle to keep the population under control, because people continue to sneak in at night and abandon their cats in the Largo, knowing full well how nicely they’ll be looked after. It’s not seldom that litters of kittens turn up. It’s well known as an adoption center: In the year 2013, 143 Largo Argentina cats were adopted; in 2014 there were 165 adoptions; in 2015, 148.7
It’s not all that hard for a cat who wants to leave on his own to do so. In May 2015 I was walking late at night in the dark, narrow Via dei Funari southeast of the Largo Argentina when I came on a fresh white poster on a seedy, graffiti-covered wall, with a photograph of a bright-eyed gray-and-white tabby cat and this copy (translated):
is a cat in the care of the Cultural Association of the Torre Argentina Cat Colony. He loved to wander around near the entrance of the refuge. Unfortunately we haven’t seen him for several days. If anyone could give us news of him, we would be very grateful. Otherwise we must think the worst.
If you have seen him, please call us at [three phone numbers].
Thank you for your help,
The volunteers of Torre Argentina.
What a shame, I said to myself. I walked on, and two minutes later, in Piazza Campitelli, there was a gray-and-white tabby drinking from a tall Baroque fountain. No question, it was Karamazov. It was so quiet you could hear the soft mizzle of water from the high uppermost bowl to the great middle one down to Karamazov’s shimmering marble pool. (The fountain is the work of Giacomo della Porta, and spectacular.) I walked toward him with my phone camera at the ready, as stealthily as I could. I had come within ten feet of him when he looked up at me like, What do you want? This was clearly a cat accustomed to humans. I managed to snap two quick pictures before he dashed away, tail high and curved in horseshoe shape, the full let’s-play position. I found him waiting for me under a Vespa three minutes farther on, in Piazza Mattei, with its superb tortoise fountain (also a late-sixteenth-century design of Giacomo della Porta, though supposedly the famous bronze turtles were added seventy years later by none other than Gian Lorenzo Bernini). Again Karamazov let me come close enough to click another photograph before he fled, every ounce of him calling out Chase me, chase me! but I had to get back to that poster. It was late, and I knew I might be waking someone, but I thought they might want me to, and I was right. Did he speak English? He did.
—I think I’ve found Karamazov.
—Oh my God!
—I got a couple photographs of him.
—You can text one to me?
—Sure.
I did so. My phone rang immediately after.
—It’s Karamazov! Where is he?
—Five minutes ago, he was in Piazza Mattei.
—Oh my God! Two minutes away from the Largo! It’s a good place, no traffic. We find him tomorrow.
The next afternoon, I went to the volunteers’ office and met the guy I had talked to, Daniele Petrucci. They hadn’t found Karamazov, and all the volunteers were distraught. (I imagined how I would be feeling if Augusta had disappeared into the streets of San Francisco, and some stranger had called in the middle of the night to say she was just down the block, in a safe place, and now I couldn’t find her.) Karamazov was a longtime resident of Torre Argentina, and beloved. It took a week for Daniele and his friends to find that cat. Karamazov had traveled into the Imperial Forum, the heart of ancient Rome—still an active archeological site, a maze of magnificent ruins, as well as the home of hundreds of cats. He had let himself be caught with no trouble, ready to come home.
But a year later, Karamazov moved on again, and once again toward the Forum. This time he took up residence on the Campidoglio, with its piazza designed by Michelangelo and, for shelter and cover, just enough of a little pine-shaded park below, from which he had (if he cared) a commanding view of the Forum of Caesar, including the ruins of the once all-marble Public Lavatories, the most luxurious public bathrooms in history.8 Policemen assumed the feeding of Karamazov, and he became popular with the many tourists there as well as Roman regulars and, naturalmente, the neighborhood cat ladies.
This was a cat with charisma. When I first spoke with Susan Wheeler, the American head of Friends of Roman Cats, and started to tell her the lost-Karamazov story, she interrupted me—“I know Karamazov.” I went on, how he was found in the Forum, and she said, “That was Daniele?” She was surprised to hear that Karamazov had moved house—he had been at Largo Argentina for so long, and was such a favorite there. To give you an idea of the intensity of attachment these cats inspire, Susan Wheeler conducts cat tours of Italy, visiting feral colonies in Rome, Florence, Venice, Arezzo, Montecatini Terme.
Eugenia Natoli observed that between the 1970s and 1990s, the gattare of Rome had greatly improved. They used to leave plastic bags behind, they didn’t clean up uneaten food, they paid scarce attention to neutering and other medical needs—pretty much, they just fed cats. And when the population got too big, cats were killed. By the ’70s the gattare were officially sanctioned, and registered with the government, so it seems unlikely that they themselves would have done the killing, but nobody knew who did, or nobody was saying.9 Municipal oversight, however, and probably also the evolution of conscience everywhere regarding animals, brought real change. The city of Rome now publishes and distributes a “Ten Commandments of the Perfect Cat Lady (and the Perfect Cat Gentleman).” Paraphrased in English and shortened, they are:
1. Distribute food at fixed hours.
2. Create feeding stations in the shade to avoid decomposition and odors.
3. Serve food in disposable containers and remove them promptly.
4. Choose food rationally and not “whatever.”
5. Assure that there is always water available.
6. Choose a safe place for shelter boxes and clean them often.
7. Avoid leaving food under parked cars.
8. Obtain the agreement of condominium owners for where food may be left for cats in courtyards and gardens.
9. Remember that these rules are insufficient if you have not seen to the sterilization of cats by the municipal veterinary agency.
10. Every colony is entitled to care under National Law 281/91 and Regional Law 34/97. Inability to protect cats constitutes the crime of mistreatment and is punishable by imprisonment from three months to one year or a fine of three thousand to fifteen thousand euros; the sentence to be increased by half if you cause the death of an animal.
In a study of the Largo Argentina colony and two other Roman colonies beginning in 1995, Natoli found that the volunteers were still bringing excessive amounts of food, but now they were taking away yesterday’s leftovers when they brought today’s feasts. They also cleaned up trash, and were so dedicated to humane population control that they were paying for veterinary care out of their own pockets even though by then Rome’s Public Veterinary Services would provide it for free.10
So it was certainly not in quest of food that Karamazov had made his escape. Once on the loose, in fact, he may have been getting hungry. Urban feral cats, contrary to popular belief, are not great hunters11—there wasn’t much to hunt, anyway—and the skinny local street cats and the Forum’s established residents would have been guarding their resources fiercely against this sleek, well-fed intruder.
Was it that he couldn’t stand the crowding? Natoli’s study showed that in the 5,400 square meters of the Largo Argentina colony—about an acre and a third—the population density was equivalent to 14,444 cats per square kilometer, or just under 38,000 per square mile. That is a whole bunch of cats. But studies12 have shown that where food is abundant, cats develop completely new systems of sociality that can allow for high density. Picture how New Yorkers and Parisians preserve their dignity on a crowded subway car.
In Rome and a Villa, Eleanor Clark wrote of watching the cats of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele—a very dense population indeed—hurrying to cover from an imminent cloudburst:
The lines they trace are… all in a criss-cross as of night projectiles over a battlefield. It is each not to the nearest cover but the pre-determined one, which may be halfway round the ruin or all the way across the lawn, one way to some nook in the structure, another to the sheltering brown pantalettes of a pygmy palm, so for a few seconds the whole ground is a contradiction of flying cat-furs, which resolves itself in a moment without collision or argument or even a swerve of line unless a particular place were taken, when the late-comer shoots off by the same mystic geometry to the nearest alternative. Then there is no further move.13
Population density, then, surely, was not what prompted Karamazov to wander. As is so often the case with cats, his escapade offered little room even for a guess. He just went. When he was brought back, he showed every sign of being glad to be back. Then he left again, for pastures new.
People liked Karamazov because he seemed to like people. A fair number of the cats who end up in Rome’s more privileged shelters have had some amount of domesticity and human companionship in their backgrounds, and will let themselves be petted and even picked up. Others are hard-core feral and look it, with gouged-out eyes or missing legs or patches of raw skin—unpleasant, scary-looking critters, whom one best not try to touch. Yet even they, once adjusted to colony life, almost all become peaceable and calm. Rome and Romans have a civilizing effect. You see it everywhere.
Take for example two Roman wildlife biologists. American wildlife scientists tend toward attire somewhere between safari and thrift shop, and usually need better haircuts. Eugenia Natoli dresses with elegant flair, tailored jackets, slim skirts, silk scarves, fine jewelry, high heels, just-so coiffure. Luigi Boitani, one of the world’s most renowned wildlife scientists, is given to silky tweed, chic dark shirts, cashmere sweaters over the shoulders, a big scarf wound high up to the chin, soft Italian leather shoes. Perhaps Karamazov wanted a better-looking place to live.
I take a long bus ride to another refuge. The Pyramid of Cestius is a striking bright, white, steep one, sharp-edged and sharp-pointed, which rises from a bright green sunken meadow strewn with fragments of monumental marble, a good twenty feet below street level. If you wonder why it is that all the ruins in Rome seem to be so far down, the science writer David Quammen offers up Charles Darwin’s idea:
At least some… species of earthworm had the habit of depositing their castings above ground. A worm would back tail-first out of its burrow and unload a neat castellated pile around the entrance. As a result, Darwin recognized, soil from a foot or more underground was steadily being carried up to the surface.… Earthworms therefore were not only creating the planet’s thin layer of fertile soil; they were also constantly turning it inside out. They were burying old Roman ruins.… 14
Traffic whizzes by and the earth shakes as the Metro hurtles into the Piramide station, but the cats snooze in the shade and in the sun, oblivious.
Adjacent to the Pyramid is their nighttime prowling-ground, the leafy, cool Protestant Cemetery, where John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley are buried, not to mention the Beat poet Gregory Corso, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and Giorgio Bulgari, the diamond meister. Many of the monuments are fancifully ornate examples of the gravestone-maker’s art, and the whole place is impeccably kept. Somebody, doubtless from among the gattare, evidently picks up the cat poop, because there’s none to be seen. There must be a lot of it, too, for the Pyramid cats are very well-fed, some of them tubby even. Someone—the city of Rome? the volunteers?—has hidden audio somewhere in the ruins, so that at night the cats have classical music playing for them.15
In the dreary industrial reaches of Trastevere, Eugenia Natoli and I walk down a long, lonely, graffiti-walled street, to the Colonia Felina Comunale di Porta Portese. The colony is home, today, to 231 cats in what for feline Romans surely is idyllic luxury: a long blue pool filled with clear water constantly refreshed, blanketed beds, abundant and clean litter boxes, little private houses for cats wishing solitude, big ones for the more social, spreading old plane trees for shade and to climb, high walls to perch on and survey the world—either their own realm, full of their own well-groomed, civil friends, or the larger world just outside, featuring the ratty, untameable cats of the Tiber banks (who sneak in just before dawn to feast on the residents’ leftovers). The Porta Portese compound is chockablock with cats, but the mood is of tranquility. Matilde Talli, in charge of the colony, is a soft-spoken older woman with a quiet, reserved manner and a radiant love for her cats. I watch as she calls to an old, stone-blind cat some twenty-five feet away and he at once comes trotting briskly, navigating around a tree and not falling into the pond, both of which are on the straight line between him and her. A couple of other cats step politely out of his path. Signora Talli scratches the blind cat’s ruff vigorously, explaining, “He knows his way around by now, and the others respect him.”
Starting in 1911, this was a dog shelter. Lost and abandoned dogs had three days to be claimed; when not, they were killed. With the passage of the national anti-euthanasia law in 1991, it became a true hell for dogs, if you believe, as I do, that for a dog solitary confinement is worse than death. Each dog was locked in a cage and never let out unless adopted, its world a ceaseless cacophony of barking, whining, moaning despair. In 2003, renovated, the compound became a humane cat shelter, and in 2014 it was transformed to its present cheerful and immaculate state. There are conscientiously tended flower beds, a granite mosaic terrace, fresh paint, a sense of orderly peace.
Porta Portese is a good place for abandoned kittens. Adoptions are frequent. There is a wall of portrait photographs of adopted alumni, in chronological order since the renovation and reopening: “N.3 Liliana,” a sleepyhead; “N.4 Perla,” a big-eared brown tabby, looking startled; “N.5 Birba,” a sad-eyed dark gray; “N.6 Volkswagen,” a gold-muzzled kitten; “N.7 Landini,” a classic golden-eyed solid black; and dozens more. In addition to three full-time paid staff, Porta Portese has forty-five volunteers. That comes pretty close to one human for every five cats.
This extent of voluntarism tells you how hard it would be to replicate the Roman experience in the United States. Where would we ever get so many and such loving volunteers?
Colonies like these—Torre Argentina, Piramide, Porta Portese—demonstrate pretty conclusively that feral cats can live peacefully in colonies at very high density as long as their lives are made comfortable. Istanbul famously sustains a huge population of feral cats, as adored by their city as the cats of Rome are by theirs. The Turkish cats are not cared for with the official rigor seen in Rome, but there are cat shelters everywhere, some built from packing boxes, and bowls of food and water bearing signs of welcome—“Cat restaurant, bon appétit”—and warning—“If you don’t want to be desperate for a drink of water in the next life, don’t touch these cups.” Istanbul’s love of cats goes back thousands of years. During construction of a subway tunnel on the shore of the Bosporus, a cat skeleton was found with a healed broken leg and dated to be 3,500 years old. A zoologist from Istanbul University concluded that the bone could not have healed in the particular way it did unless the fractured leg had been wrapped by a human.16
The widespread assertion, even by self-proclaimed experts, that domestic cats are strictly loners, like their desert ancestors, is so false in so many ways it’s amazing that it persists. There are orderly populations of cats all over the world. Whenever cats need to live together in groups, they form their own sort of civilization, with rules, boundaries, social strictures, dominance hierarchies, gender-related customs, and systems of behavior for protecting the young and their mothers. When hunger sets in, just as in human societies, social order may begin to break down. When resources are abundant, however, social harmony—the feline version, anyway—can become well established. A study comparing a feral cat population in rural France and a very dense urban one in Lyon tells how decent urban life can be (and also hints at how an inherent, and flexible, talent for social bonding has made it possible for cats to live happily with people):
Urban cats [can] live in large multi-male–multi-female groups reaching very high density. In these groups, cats exhibit frequent amicable interactions and olfactory recognition of group members versus strangers, while females cooperate in rearing offspring. The social structure of males is organized around a linear dominance hierarchy. There is general agreement that the cat social system is a recent construct brought about by the changing environment due to human influence (dispersion of resources), and by the capacity of domestic cats to be opportunistic.17
Sex is big trouble in the country, but in the urban colonies, again, getting along seems to be more highly valued than individual advantage:
In rural areas males seem to be polygynous, fighting aggressively to copulate with as many females as possible, whereas in urban populations cats are promiscuous—males and females copulate with several partners. Aggressive behaviour among males during the breeding season is not severe, they allow subordinates to remain within the social group and reproduce.18
That study, obviously, was looking at cats with full sexual capacity. The denizens of Rome’s shelters are all neutered, which makes them more peaceful yet.
Great, great. If only all feral cat life were like that. It isn’t.
Conditions for ferals in the United States range from not bad to abysmal. Estimates of the national population vary by tens of millions. Definitions of “feral” vary, too. “Homeless” is one. “Un-owned” is another. “Semi-owned” cats are an especially saddening population because many of them are the unintended consequence of kindness.
One night after a literary event in the American South, I was sitting in a grand old parlor with a group of the gathering’s rich, refined, and intelligent participants when the subject of cats arose. A striking and sophisticated couple told me about a cat whom they believed they were helping. It (as they referred to the cat; they had not determined his or her sex) had turned up in their carport one evening, meowing. They fed it; it ate. They approached it; it ran away. It returned; they fed it again. Rain came, and winter. They put out an old towel and the cat slept there. This had been going on for six months.
Had they taken the cat inside?
—Oh, no. It wanted to come in, but they didn’t want a pet. They traveled a lot.
Who fed it when they were away?
—It was just a stray.
Had they touched it?
—They thought it might have fleas.
Had they called the city, or the SPCA?
—Well, no.
Were they aware that some cats have a bar-coded microchip implanted in their backs, so that if they’re lost they can be identified and returned to their owners?
—Well, yes, I suppose we have heard of that.
Had it occurred to them that some child six blocks away might have been crying her eyes out over her precious lost kitty? (I was getting mad.)
—No, there’s this gully full of weeds down below the house, and all these cats…
Does this one seem wild?
—Not really, no.
Has it crossed your mind that it keeps coming back simply because you’re feeding it?
—Yes, exactly. It might starve otherwise.
Or go home.
—We hadn’t really thought of that.
This cat was an archetypal victim of semi-ownership. There are millions more. Sometimes people let them in and they sit on laps while the family watches TV till it’s time to turn them back outside. Sometimes they’re actually owned cats who keep getting fatter and fatter because “helpful” neighbors are feeding them—then suddenly, mysteriously, they slim down when the neighbors go on vacation. More often they’re like that miserable, disoriented cat being intermittently fed in the literary sophisticates’ carport, deprived of human company, in fact untouched, barely sheltered, fated never to get medical care again, bereft of any emotional connection.
This is the classic, almost universal behavior of the semi-owner—only to feed cats, and to do nothing further for them, least of all to have them neutered. The result, metastasizing nearly everywhere at this moment, is more and more free-roaming cats with nobody to look out for them.
There are many studies of the phenomenon. Here is part of one, from Alachua County, Florida, home of the University of Florida:
Although provision of food for un-owned free-roaming cats was a common activity in the present study, few individuals who fed such cats took further action to have the cats neutered.… At this geographic latitude, free-roaming cats may produce more than one litter of kittens each year. Given the high percentage of pet cats that were neutered, un-owned free-roaming cats likely represented the greatest source of cat overpopulation in the area. During 1999, 74 percent of the 4,827 cats admitted to the county animal control facility were classified as strays, and almost half were kittens. A total of 3,714 (77 percent) cats admitted to the facility were euthanized.…
Many individuals do not covertly harbor these animals or feed them in secrecy.… Individuals who feed un-owned cats feel a protective bond for the cats they care for, even if the cats are too feral to be handled. Individuals who feed un-owned cats reported they would resist efforts to control the population of these cats by lethal means, and… most Trap-Neuter-Return programs are operated by private organizations capable of neutering, at most, a few hundred cats each year.… The magnitude of the un-owned free-roaming cat population is much larger than the capacity of many existing programs.…19
In Australia, over the course of the last two centuries, domestic cats have been significant contributors to the extinction of at least twenty-seven endemic mammal species. Australia’s estimated twenty million feral and semi-owned cats prey on more than a hundred of the continent’s currently threatened species. The situation is so bad that in July 2015 the government announced a program to kill at least two million feral cats.20 One hardly need say that there was a furious public backlash. The French movie star Brigitte Bardot and the English singer-songwriter Morrissey have made the “saving” of Australia’s feral cats an international cause, and the battle continues.
Meanwhile, a lot of Australians continue to feed free-roaming cats without the least thought of neutering them or providing any other kind of care (much less a thought of the harm they do). In a study of the situation, Australian researchers wrote, “Whilst these actions [feeding] [are] undertaken with a degree of benevolence in mind, they [are] unlikely to produce a favorable welfare outcome.… Cat semi-ownership may be the product of cats being undervalued… regarded as disposable and able to fend for themselves.”21
A piece in the Dallas Morning News of April 25, 2010, reported on an all too typical reader who “began feeding three kittens several years ago and now has a colony of about twenty cats. ‘I have a real bad problem with feral cats and I brought some of it on myself, but I need some help [she wrote]. I do not want them killed and I don’t know what to do.… There is nothing I can do because I’m crippled.…’” The reporter contacted a nonprofit called the Feral Friends Community Cat Alliance. “The first time Feral Friends went trapping for [her],” he wrote, “volunteers caught four males and one female. They also found another neighbor who was feeding the rest of the animals and who promised to help with them. The group has more trapping rounds scheduled.”22
In the United States, between 9 and 15 percent of all households feed feral cats, and very few of them take any further responsibility.23 Oh, you know, they’re cats, they can take care of themselves.…
Elizabeth and I found ourselves confronting the problem of semi-owned cats up close. We had thought that our little postage stamp of a back yard in San Francisco was certainly going to be safer and more peaceful than the wilds of Montana, but we were wrong. The source of difficulty was the house next door, with which we shared the yard. The old woman who headed the household had lived there for decades, and she was very poor. The house was a twin to ours, built in 1875 and lavishly ornamented in San Francisco’s famous “Painted Lady” style, but it had not seen paint in many years. There were holes in the plaster, and the floors were filthy raw wood. Soon after we moved in, I counted nine broken windows. Family members came and went irregularly. Sometimes we would hear furious shouting. In reply to our friendly greetings the old lady could often do no more than mumble through her frown.
The basement door hung open on one hinge, and behind it lay a jumble of broken furniture, bicycles, rotting cardboard boxes, stench—a prowling paradise for Augusta. As our first summer there ripened into warm October, Augusta would burst through her little flap-open cat door into the kitchen and drop on the floor the tiniest rodents I’d ever seen, so new, so hairless they seemed almost transparent, so nearly boneless that one chomp and a swallow were all it took her to ingest one. I chased one and grabbed it with a pair of tongs and examined it up close. It was a neonate Norway rat. Oh, nice.
We did not think little black Augusta a sufficient system of defense against a soon-to-be-burgeoning population of rats. But at almost the same time, a kitten about three months old appeared in the window next door. As she grew older, she was often to be seen in the window pawing against the glass, over and over, for an hour and more, as if to say, Let me out, let me out! The people there did feed her, but for reasons we never knew they did not touch her, and she was, in effect, semi-feral. One of the broken windows, giving onto the back yard, was close enough to the ground that it could have offered egress and ingress to the cat, but it had been blocked by a piece of cardboard. Then one day the cardboard was withdrawn. Thereafter, in the evenings, we would hear one of the daughters of the house calling the cat by name, over and over, “Devon, Devon, Devonnn.” Sometimes Devon came for a furtive meal, sometimes she would be gone for days. Clearly she had found companions in the neighborhood. The nights were filled with the squalling, hissing, and shrieking of cats.
About nine weeks later, Devon came home and gave birth to a litter of three kittens. “I don’t know what to do,” the daughter said. Consequently, neither she nor anyone else in the house did anything. Well, no, they did feed Devon, and in due course the kittens, irregularly. Also they left the broken window unblocked. Perhaps Devon hunted late at night.
One day I saw one of the kittens, maybe ten weeks old, squashed flat in the middle of our busy street. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours no one came to remove the body. I shoveled it into a plastic bag and dropped it in a public trash can on the corner.
About this time I discovered that somewhere down the block we had our own version of a Roman gattara, who put out enormous amounts of dry cat food late at night for—well, for come who may. Her several feeding stations in the vicinity attracted dozens of feral cats, as well as raccoons, crows, ravens, and rats who horned in on the surplus. It didn’t take long for Devon and her two surviving kittens to discover these nocturnal feasts.
I couldn’t bear the idea of keeping our freedom-loving wild-at-heart Montana cat confined to the house. Augusta could bound to the top of our six-foot-high fence with ease—and disappear. We had a shaky confidence that our entire block—of houses, apartment buildings, and little shops all contiguous, on all four sides—afforded no access to the street. (Then how had Devon’s kitten gotten out to be run over? Another broken window, we told ourselves.) In any case Augusta had always had a deathly fear of the sound of internal combustion engines. As for the dangers of feral gangster cats, it was a rule that Augusta must never be allowed out after dark, for that was when the bad cats roamed. If she was out in the late afternoon, we called her and she would come.
A year later, after Devon’s first two kittens had drifted off into the dark universe of ferals, she had another litter—a girl named Mocha, a boy named Snowy, and another male whom I called Feraldo. Like their mother, they were in and out of the house through the broken window and occasionally fed, but they were even wilder and more untouchable than their mother. Mocha and Snowy stayed close to home, however, while “Feraldo” disappeared.
By then Augusta could no longer leap to the top of the fence: She had hip dysplasia, a rare condition in cats—rare enough not even to have an entry in the comprehensive Cornell Book of Cats. It was thought to be usually an affliction of purebreds, especially heavy-boned ones like Persians and Maine coons;24 Augusta was notably fine-boned, and the furthest thing from purebred. What we did not know, and at that time our vet may also not have known, was how common degenerative joint disease actually is in cats: Osteoarthritis may have been what caused her hip dysplasia, rather than the other way around. It was not until the early 2000s that researchers found that between 40 and even 90 percent of all domestic cats show some symptoms of joint deterioration.25
Though no longer able to bat a hummingbird out of the air, Augusta seemed content to watch birds at the feeder. Then in the summer, in Montana, freedom resurrected her strength: She could climb trees, bound as ever in great arcs through tall grass, dash at a fleeing vole, pounce on it, seize it, and bring it proudly home. No, Augusta, you may not come in with that thing in your mouth, you have to kill it outside.
Within less than a year, Devon was pregnant again, and Elizabeth and I said to each other, This has got to stop. We went to our next-door neighbors and said, Listen, you know Snowy and Mocha are old enough to have kittens of their own. We’ve called the city, and they told us that the SPCA will neuter feral cats for free, and they’ll lend us Havahart traps, which don’t hurt the cats at all. We’ll catch them, and we’ll take them, and they’ll have their little operations, and we’ll bring them back. Okay?
The neighbors meekly acceded.
We got the traps, we caught the cats, and we did what we said we were going to do. Snowy and Mocha each had an ear clipped short, just like Roman cats, to signify their new non-reproductive status. When the kittens were old enough to be fostered—four weeks—we went to the neighbors again, and asked if they would let us take Devon to be neutered, and let the SPCA give the kittens to a foster home, where they would be raised to be tame, and when they were ready, they would be adopted into good homes (unsaid: not be run over in the street or disappear into oblivion). This was harder for them, but again they agreed.
Devon gradually became almost a house cat. Though she would let no one else touch her, she was able to bring herself to sit in the lap of the daughter of the house. Snowy and Mocha continued to lurk around the neighborhood, feeding mostly at the cat lady’s heaps of kibble in a church parking lot and fleeing at the sight of any other human being. At some point, both of them were trapped, and Mocha was evidently tractable enough to be adopted. Snowy was too wild, however, and so was spayed and returned. Years later, when the old lady died and the daughter sold the house and moved away, she took Devon with her and left Snowy to his own devices. As of this writing, he is still around, filthy and rather fat. The cat lady’s feeding continues.
Snowy’s life is better by a considerable degree than those of most other feral cats in America. The San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has one of the most successful Trap, Neuter, and Return programs in the country. According to Cynthia Kopec, chief operating officer of the SFSPCA, in 2015 the “live release rate”—the fraction of cats taken in by the shelter and then either adopted, returned to their owners, or transferred to another nonprofit that will guarantee finding them homes—was 96 percent, the highest of any major American city. Since 1989 the SFSPCA has had a rigorous no-kill policy. The citywide rate of euthanizing cats and dogs is 0.0009 per capita. Only mortally wounded and fatally ill animals are euthanized. About a thousand feral cats are trapped, neutered, and returned to their colonies every year, and for the last two years all the known colonies are tracked on the SPCA’s computer system. The apparent total population of feral cats in the city is trending down. San Francisco is lucky in being surrounded by water on three sides, so that in-migration from adjacent feral cat populations is limited. Until recently, the city’s thousand-acre Golden Gate Park was swarming with feral cats, and they were blamed for the virtual eradication from the park of its entire population of about 1,500 California quail—the California state bird. The feral cat population there is now down to about thirteen. The quail have yet to return.
San Francisco is rich, and soft-hearted. The SPCA’s success there owes a lot to those financial and cultural advantages. Elsewhere in the United States, there are valiant efforts in nearly every major city to educate the public about the need to neuter their pets. There are nonprofit organizations—local SPCAs and many others—that lend traps and provide free neutering by volunteer veterinarians. Some cities have adopted total no-kill policies and have established expensive, municipally funded TNR programs. But nearly everywhere it is a losing battle.
According to Dallas Animal Services, that city “has approximately 350,000 homeless, wild, or untamed cats,” and it’s generally agreed that that population is growing. The agency now has an active Trap, Neuter, and Return program and provides “colony managers” for each targeted population. Euthanasia is sharply down from the rate of a decade ago, but the city still kills more than ten thousand cats a year.26
In Atlanta the nonprofit group Catlanta has sterilized more than thirty thousand feral cats, and has enabled the neutering of another thirty thousand by independent veterinarians. But an additional twenty-five thousand feral cats end up euthanized in Atlanta’s shelters every year, at an annual cost to the city of $3.5 million.27
Baltimore has about 185,000 feral cats.28 Chicago, half a million.29 Los Angeles, three million.30 The Humane Society of the United States estimates the national population of feral cats to be thirty to forty million.31 The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals says, “It is impossible to determine how many stray dogs and cats live in the United States; estimates for cats alone range up to seventy million.”32 The PBS News Hour, not citing a source, reports “an estimated eighty million.”33 New York Times reporter Bruce Barcott reports “fifty to ninety million,” but then adds, “(exact figures are impossible to ascertain).”34 Without estimating an ongoing total, Becky Robinson, president of Alley Cat Allies, looks at reproduction, stating, “Forty million feral kittens will be born throughout the country this year, but twenty million of them will die at birth.”35
Another way of considering the magnitude of the feral cat population is to measure its effects. The most comprehensive study, a study of studies, from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, published in 2013, asserted: “We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.9 to 20.7 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals.”36
This was big news. In the New York Times, Natalie Angier wrote that the Smithsonian study was “the first serious estimate of just how much wildlife America’s vast population of free-roaming domestic cats manages to kill each year.… The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation.”37 The same primary researcher, Scott R. Loss, and his co-authors also looked at bird mortality caused by collisions. The range of the estimates was very wide—89 to 340 million birds per year killed by motor vehicles38 and 365 to 988 million by buildings39—but, even at the high end, those numbers pale beside the bird deaths attributable to feral cats. It’s important to note here that the Smithsonian study states up front that “Un-owned cats, as opposed to domestic pets, cause the majority of this mortality.”
The study sounds alarming, but there’s a great deal it doesn’t tell us that might make the numbers less frightful. It doesn’t say which bird species are most affected, and many species are capable of rebounding from intense predation. If we’re going to control the truly harmful predation by cats, we need to know where to concentrate our efforts. There is also the question of habitat loss, which is irreversible and which is the prime factor in the decline of rare species of not only birds but other animals as well as plants all over the world. In short, the lack of specificity in the Smithsonian paper makes it a good spur to more accurate research, but is hardly cause for panic.
In the United Kingdom, no less fierce a gang of bird lovers than the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds accepts that cats kill about 55 million birds a year, but they nevertheless state: “There is no scientific evidence that predation by cats in gardens is having any impact on bird populations UK-wide.… Those bird species that have undergone the most serious population decline in the UK (such as skylarks, tree sparrows, and corn buntings) rarely encounter cats, so cats cannot be the cause of their declines. Research shows that these declines are usually caused by habitat change or loss.”40
There is a true global emergency, however, on islands, much of it attributable to feral cats. Because of their isolation, most island-dwelling animals never evolved in the presence of mammalian predators and therefore have little or no defense against them. Island populations are particularly vulnerable to extinction, because when they are reduced to very small numbers there are usually no adjacent populations to restore those losses; and very small populations of any living creature have a very high risk of extinction simply owing to random fluctuation of environmental conditions and their own reproductive success or failure (failure often abetted by inbreeding). Domestic cats have spread to most of the planet’s islands, and because the species is adaptable to so many environments, feral populations have thrived on many islands.
Feral cats’ prey can be identified by analysis of their stomach contents or scat. Using that technique, a meta-analysis of seventy-two studies of feral cats’ diets showed that “at least 248 species were preyed on by feral cats on 40 worldwide islands (27 mammals, 113 birds, 34 reptiles, 3 amphibians, 2 fish, and 69 invertebrates).… At least 175 vertebrate taxa (25 reptiles, 123 birds, and 27 mammals) are threatened by or [have been] driven to extinction by feral cats on at least 120 islands.”41
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has documented the extinction of 238 vertebrate species; feral cats contributed to 14 percent of those extinctions. Feral cats threaten the survival of 8 percent of the 464 species now listed by IUCN as “critically endangered.”42
Cats don’t even have to kill birds to reduce their populations. Birds simply scared by cats sometimes don’t reproduce at their normal rate. A study at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom shows that “a small reduction in fecundity due to sub-lethal effects”—namely, fear—“can result in marked decreases in bird abundances (up to 95 percent). Thus, low predation rates in urban areas do not necessarily equate with a correspondingly low impact of cats on birds. Sub-lethal effects may depress bird populations to such an extent that low predation rates simply reflect low prey numbers.”43
The diseases you can contract from feral cats are really scary. Feral cats are now the primary source of rabies in the United States—60 percent of all cases. Parasites in feral cat feces, which can be easily picked up in playgrounds, sandboxes, gardens, and the like, can cause nerve damage, blindness, abortions, and birth defects, particularly hydrocephalus. Hookworms attack through bare feet on beaches and lawns, and cause skin lesions, pneumonitis, muscle infection, and eye disease. Cat scratch disease produces fever, headaches, and lymph node enlargement; 5 to 15 percent of cases involve encephalitis, retinitis, or endocarditis, which can be deadly. Eight percent of plague cases in the United States originate in contact with cat fleas. Worse, cats “frequently develop the pneumonic form of plague, which is considerably more infectious to humans… and results in rapidly progressive and frequently fatal disease.”44 There’s more, but that feels like enough.
There lately has been a flurry of alarmist baloney about a protozoan parasite common in cat feces called Toxoplasma gondii. It is in fact very easily transmitted to humans and other animals—about a third of all people alive today are carrying it. The alarms have been ringing about toxoplasmosis causing (or being “correlated with”—always a sign of shaky science) schizophrenia, major depression, suicide, criminality, memory loss, mental decline, poor impulse control, road rage, and more. It does seem to be bad news for some marine mammals, and immunocompromised people can be badly affected too. But after a string of years with the sky about to fall, a team of researchers led by the neuroscientist Karen Sugden of Duke University found, quite definitively, “little evidence that T. gondii was related to increased risk of psychiatric disorder, poor impulse control, personality aberrations or neurocognitive impairment.”45
It’s easy to think of feral cats as agents of harm. What we must remember is how they suffer, how miserable their lives are. Feral adult females average 1.4 litters a year, with a median litter size of three, but 75 percent of the kittens die or disappear before the age of six months. The median survival time for feral kittens is 113 days.46
Feral cats don’t get old. People poison them, torture them, and shoot them. They die from diseases and infections that a veterinarian could easily cure. Often they’re run over and then die of wounds that with medical care could have healed.47 They’re captured and sold for illegal medical experimentation. Dog fighters use them as bait.48
There seems to be universal agreement that there are too many feral cats—that wherever feral cats occur, in fact, there are almost always too many of them. There is not agreement, however, about whether certain feral cat populations should be reduced to smaller sizes or reduced to zero, nor is there agreement on the question of whether the world would be a better place if there were no feral cats at all. Two related questions, much debated, are, one, Can feral cats have a good life? and two, Owing to all the damage they do, as well as the suffering of the cats themselves, is the feral life by definition not a good one?
Population reduction—the proposition on which we seem to have unanimous agreement—would address both those issues: Harm to other species would be reduced, and the welfare of the surviving feral cats would increase. So far, so good. Here, however, our proposition hits a brick wall. The disagreement over how to reduce feral cat populations has become a virtual war. Let’s call the antagonists the Cat Faction and the Bird Faction.
The Cat Faction puts the welfare of feral cats first. They tend to deprecate the impacts of predation by feral cats—in fact many of them refuse to face the facts at all—and they believe in Trap, Neuter, and Return. They believe, in fact, that properly conducted, TNR is capable of reducing feral cat populations to zero—if that’s the goal agreed to.
Theoretically, the Cat Faction’s case for TNR is unassailable. As the trapping and neutering succeed, the number of reproducing cats falls. They can point to TNR programs all over the world that at this moment are bringing about declines in feral populations. SPCAs across America have charts and graphs documenting their success. But there’s a problem. To re-quote Eugenia Natoli: “TNR programs alone are not sufficient for managing urban feral cat demography.”49
Eighty percent of the eighty-million-odd owned cats in the United States are neutered, which means, ipso facto, that 20 percent are not. When you break down the 80 percent by family income grouping, you start to see where the problem is concentrated. Ninety-six percent of cat-owning families with a household income of more than $75,000 have had their cats neutered. For families with an income between $35,000 and $75,000, the percentage with neutered cats falls only a little, to 91. But of households with an income below $35,000 only 51 percent have had their cats neutered.50
Most cities and many rural areas offer neutering at low to no cost. It may be that more than a few people living in households with low income just don’t know what’s possible. That was certainly the case with our next-door neighbors in San Francisco. A further problem is that lower-income people are disproportionately likely to feed semi-owned neighborhood cats as well as ferals. The San Francisco SPCA’s computer map displays a pin for every un-owned cat they’ve trapped in the last two years, and those pins are most crowded in the city’s least advantaged areas.
A study comparing rates of cat mortality in United States census tracts in Boston found a strong correlation between low household income and a high death rate for cats (both owned and un-owned). Cat mortality in the poorest tracts was more than forty times that in the richest. Not surprisingly, premature human death was a lot more common in poor neighborhoods as well.51
One long-term study of a TNR program with a heavy emphasis on adoption, on the campus of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, found quite favorable results. The study and the program began in 1991 with a population of 155 free-roaming cats—some socialized to people, some feral. It wasn’t totally no-kill: Severely ill cats were euthanized, and there was intensive trapping of the rest. By 1996 the population was down to 68, and all but one, a tomcat, were neutered. New arrivals were not allowed. By the end of the study in 2002, only 23 cats remained in the colony. Half of the original 155 had been adopted. The quality of life of the survivors was greatly superior to that of the original population.52 A study like this supports the Cat Faction’s contention that TNR can work. It must be realized that a lot of volunteer labor is indispensable, and if abandoned cats and kittens make their way into the population, the program will fail.
The Bird Faction is led primarily by scientists and conservationists, most of whom will tell you that they love cats, and they often own cats themselves, but they see feral cats as essentially an invasive species. They also have a number of studies demonstrating that Trap, Neuter, and Return simply doesn’t work. Some scientists have developed innovative alternatives that could work well in combination with other approaches.
The disagreements have been passionate. One report from the University of Nebraska—admittedly having originated as an undergraduate project but ultimately compiled by faculty members—proposed the use of “integrated pest management,” suggesting habitat modification, fencing, netting, chemical repellents (among them benzyldiethyl [2, 6-xylyl carbamoyl methyl] ammonium saccharide, “the world’s bitterest known substance”53), and “shotguns with No. 6 shot or larger, .22 caliber rifles, or air rifles capable of shooting 700 feet per second or faster.” Also Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Release.54 Shooting a cat, by the way, is illegal in all fifty states.
Needless to say, that proposal didn’t get much traction, but most serious scientists ultimately conclude that humane euthanasia is a necessary part of any feral cat population reduction plan, however repugnant the idea. Quite a bit of thought has gone into possible ways of resolving the conflict, but this paper aptly sums up the difficulty:
We conducted a survey of opinions about outdoor cats and their management with two contrasting stakeholder groups, cat colony caretakers (CCCs) and bird conservation professionals (BCPs) across the United States. Group opinions were polarized, for both normative statements (CCCs supported treating feral cats as protected wildlife and using Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) and BCPs supported treating feral cats as pests and using euthanasia).… Most CCCs held false beliefs about the impacts of feral cats on wildlife and the impacts of TNR (e.g., [only] 9 percent believed feral cats harmed bird populations).55
Except for the rare cases in which abundant resources, intensive effort, and colony isolation combine, sooner or later the Cat Faction is going to have to admit that TNR is not, alone, the perfect solution. The American Veterinary Medicine Association wrestled for years with the problem, and finally, at its meeting in February 2016, after long, exhausting argument, for the first time the AVMA’s policy on free-roaming cats made this assertion—with the kicker in the last sentence:
The AVMA recognizes that managed colonies are controversial.… The goal of colony management should be continual reduction and eventual elimination of the colony through attrition. Appropriately managed colonies also have the potential to significantly decrease risk to public health, wildlife, and ecosystems. For colonies not achieving attrition and posing active threats to the area in which they are residing, the AVMA does not oppose the consideration of euthanasia when conducted by qualified personnel, using appropriate humane methods.56
Here’s the thing. The temperature on this could be turned way down if one big problem were addressed: abandonment. As Eugenia Natoli says, it has to start with education. But what about a little more pressure? What about penalties? Cruelty to animals is illegal in every state in the United States, but each state has its own definition, and abandonment isn’t always included. It isn’t rare for people to try to give up a pet to a shelter, sometimes for a pretty lame reason, and have the shelter just say no. The San Francisco SPCA does its best to talk people with healthy pets into keeping them, and they try to help, even financially, with animals that are sick or have behavior problems—they even have a full-time behaviorist on staff.
Other shelters have also been developing pet retention programs. When people can’t afford the fee to reclaim a lost cat, or the price of medical care, or even cat food, they often come in tears to a shelter, at their wits’ end, to give up a beloved cat. These new programs can provide financial aid, food, and free veterinary care, including neutering and microchipping. They will even help people find cat-friendly housing and pay the pet deposit on a new apartment. Sometimes there are temporary foster homes that will care for a cat to tide the owner over through a rough patch—a day, a week, even months. This kind of thing saves cats’ lives.
Where assistance like that is not available, and shelters won’t accept a surrendered cat—sometimes because they sense that the person’s stated reason for giving up the cat is a lie—what happens next is usually abandonment. Which in turn most likely means a very bad death—the cat run over or starved. Whoever dumped Augusta in the Montana snow may well have said to themselves, “Oh, look at the smoke coming out of the chimney, what a nice place, I just know they’ll take her in.” Which of course we did. But I’ve always believed she had littermates who died that same night.
In any case, the Bird Faction had better give up the idea that just rolling out the data is going to change the minds of the Cat Faction. It’s now well accepted in psychology—and increasingly evident in politics—that “Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.”57
And yet, on the other hand, one of the most tenacious, indeed ferocious, animal rights organizations, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, now says, “We believe that it can be marginally acceptable to trap, vaccinate, alter, and release feral cats when the cats are isolated from roads, people, and animals who could harm them, are regularly attended to by people who not only feed them but also provide them with veterinary care, and are kept in areas where they do not have access to wildlife, and the weather is temperate. The biggest problem is that most cats, once they are caught to be sterilized, will not be able to be lured by traps again when they are sick or injured.58 A painless injection is far kinder than any fate that feral cats will meet if left to survive on their own.”59
So PETA and America’s veterinarians are softening. Meanwhile the non-softening antagonists may wish to find some things that most of them can agree on. There have been some imaginative alternatives proposed. The Birdsbesafe collar is a big, vaguely Elizabethan, brightly colored thing that perhaps a few cat owners with little concern for esthetics might try. Apparently it scares the dickens out of any bird the cat comes near.60
Cat depredation—indeed cat presence—is greatly reduced in any area where coyotes are active.61 Those are generally less densely settled places, but often rich in bird life. Density is beginning to matter less, however. Coyotes have been expanding their range in the United States for the last fifty years, and they are more and more often seen in suburban and urban settings. When coyotes arrived in the Presidio of San Francisco (possibly from coyote-rich Marin County by crossing the Golden Gate Bridge!), the abundant feral cat population evaporated quite quickly.62 The coyotes may have killed a few cats, but more significant, probably, was that when a cat saw a coyote, the cat got out of Dodge. They just knew. Coyotes will in fact readily kill cats, not necessarily to eat them—perhaps the coyotes think of the cats as competition, for cats’ prey base of small animals overlaps quite a bit with coyotes’ rather broader one (coyotes are not exclusively carnivorous). Cat owners in areas frequented by coyotes must learn to keep their cats indoors, at least from dusk to dawn.
The only hope for feral cat colonies that people are determined to protect in coyote habitat is the construction of well-fortified sanctuaries. Sanctuaries, in fact, may be an excellent solution for feral cats in all sorts of places. Proper construction would prevent not only depredation on wildlife by roaming cats but also the surreptitious introduction of abandoned cats. Life inside the sanctuary could be well regulated and peaceful. Once a successful TNR program had reduced a feral population to a reasonable size, this could be a long-term, permanent solution, and euthanasia would need never to have entered the picture.
Alley Cat Allies fiercely oppose the idea, but their conception of the sanctuary seems to be a small, indoorsy place jam-packed with cats, riddled with disease, and still surrounded by thousands of unprotected feral cats.63 How about nice big rural places? With populations of reasonable size? I fear that too many in the Cat Faction may believe that maintaining the current vast overpopulation sounds like a desirable norm. It isn’t. It’s not desirable and it’s not possible.
How about licenses? Dogs have to have licenses, why not cats? Think what municipalities could do with the money—think how many free sterilizations they could perform or pay for. Alley Cat Allies are against that, too, contending that every cat seen without a collar would be taken to a shelter and probably euthanized.64 Really now, that wouldn’t have to happen. Maybe the license takes the form of the microchip that all thoughtful cat owners already are implanting just under the skin of their kitties’ backs, with full identification in digital form, which can be read like the bar code on your box of Cheerios. It’s painless, it’s cheap, and it’s as close to error-free as any ID system in the world. Alley Cat Allies say only 2 percent of cats in shelters are ever reunited with their owners. Put microchips in 90 percent of a town’s cats, and 90 percent of lost cats will go back home.
Here is a proposal. This would take a while, but it is feasible. Let the states pass laws mandating the licensing of all cats, using implanted microchips. The licensing fee must be very small—perhaps free if you can’t afford it. Every person who takes a cat to be neutered gets a cash payment of one hundred dollars (and a license if the cat doesn’t have one). If the person declines the money, they get a one-hundred-dollar tax deduction. The money comes from private groups and government grants. It will not be long before governments realize they are spending less on that program than they previously spent rounding up and sheltering stray cats.
The average price charged by veterinarians to implant a microchip is about forty-five dollars; that includes registration in the pet-recovery database.65 A portable scanner—which every animal control officer would carry—costs less than a hundred. A veterinarian typically charges between one and two hundred dollars to spay a female cat, fifty to a hundred to neuter a male.66 Although there are plenty of programs that offer discounted or free chip implantation and sterilization, public awareness of those resources is woefully short. Mandatory licensing, with subsidy for any cat owner who couldn’t afford the chip and the neutering, would solve that problem.
If the animal welfare groups—ASPCA, the Humane Society, PETA, maybe the National Audubon Society (which is full of bird lovers)—could get together on raising a cooperative fund and backing consistent legislative proposals for state licensing laws, then the metastatic overpopulation of feral cats could be drastically reduced in a relatively short time with little or even no euthanasia involved. I know, this starts to sound like one of these if-everyone-would-light-just-one-little-candle pipe dreams. But what we have now is not working, so maybe some dreaming isn’t a bad idea.
What Rome does will never happen in the United States, nor, probably, anywhere else. Even Rome’s success is limited, in fact, and, once you leave the city, Italy’s feral cats lead characteristically miserable lives, which often end violently. San Francisco seems to have the money and the determination to succeed in a 100-percent no-kill approach to its feral cats, but so far it is in fact not succeeding. The SFSPCA will tell you that the city is making progress, that the feral cat population will eventually dwindle near zero. That may be true; we will see. But as in Italy, for every almost-ideal example of successful TNR, clean shelters, and plenty of volunteers, there are hundreds of instances of failure, feral populations completely out of control, no funding for humane programs, and no prospect of it. Where else in the world are there counterparts to Rome’s chic and generous gattare?
We who have our happy, healthy cats at home, our Augustas, and through them love all their kind—what shall we do?