TNR Handbook - Neighborhood Cats

The Neighborhood Cats TNR Handbook
change, but we are a long way from that time. Resources are better spent neutering the
feral population rather than going through the long and uncertain process of socializing
and placing feral cats. For the cat’s sake, too, allowing a feral to live out his life in the
wild may be a more compassionate choice than having him spend years in a cage or
hiding under a bed.
Relocation to a safer site or a sanctuary is a solution people often jump to when they
first come upon a feral colony in distress. But there are few reputable sanctuaries and
little room in them. If you’re going to relocate to a new site, you have to find a suitable
place yourself and a reliable caretaker willing to make a life-long commitment to the cats.
If you succeed in finding a good situation, the relocation process is difficult, too,
requiring two to three weeks of confinement in the new territory to teach the cats that
their food source has changed. If everything is done properly and by the book, a
substantial percentage of the cats will probably still disappear if the new territory is not
fenced in.
Rescue and relocation also suffer from many of the same defects as trap and kill when
it comes to population control. Removing ferals from their territory without permanently
altering the habitat by removing the food source means some combination of the vacuum
effect, overbreeding and repopulation by abandoned cats will likely return the colony to
its former size.
Do nothing
If nothing is done, then the size of a feral cat colony will reach a natural ceiling, that
being how many cats the available food and shelter can support. When the carrying
capacity of the habitat is exceeded, population control comes in the form of disease and
starvation. All the problems associated with unmanaged feral colonies remain, including
noise, odor, complaints, dying kittens and costs to animal control when attempting to
address the situation.
In sum, trying to simply remove feral cats from their territory – whether to euthanize,
rescue, relocate to another site or place in a sanctuary – does not end up lowering the
number of feral cats. In nature’s ongoing cycle, new cats replace the old ones and
nothing much changes in terms of overpopulation and nuisance behavior. Leaving the
cats where they are and neutering them through TNR is the only hope for improvement.
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