Even Feral Cats have to deal with gentrification

October 19, 2016 2:31 PM

New York city is home to tens of thousands of stray cats and there are around 500 registered feral cat colonies in NYC. The latest real estate boom is also pushing out your local stray cat. Vacant lots, old factories, former warehouses and even shuttered hospitals are being redeveloped, forcing colonies of strays to find new habitats. While the cats help keep the vermin population in check, they can also carry disease, kill backyard wildlife “Outdoor cats obliterate wildlife,” said Robert Johns of the American Bird Conservancy, “and yet they get special treatment. We don’t allow colonies of feral dogs to roam around.”

But even gentrification can’t tame the feral cat population. The city’s Feral Cat Initative is attempting to lower the feral cat population through a Trap-Neuter-Return program. It’s an organization that constists of over 5,500 volunteers mobilized to take on one of New York’s more intractable challenges The Feral Cat Initiative is also sending out some contract killers to the Convention center.

All that being said, the bodega cat sleep easy. There are more generations to come.

posted by rageagainsttherobots (45 comments total)

Really, I think we need to do something about the feral developer population. Trap, neuter, shots, release is not helping.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:39 PM on October 19, 2016 [29 favorites]

"We don't allow colonies of feral dogs to roam around."

You don't? There are no street dogs in NYC?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:45 PM on October 19, 2016

We have feral cats around my office complex and someone does good work with a capture-spay-release program (I've been told) but if there were visibly feral dogs roaming around? Yeah, they'd be caught and impounded in a blink.

(yes, I know, I'm not sure what "visibly feral" means either)
posted by GuyZero at 2:55 PM on October 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Pretty sad when the two segments of the NYC population seeing the sharpest increases are the filthy rich and the filthy rats.
posted by strelitzia at 2:57 PM on October 19, 2016 [5 favorites]

So this invasive species gets to live out its lifespan continuing to kill wildlife. Why is this a good idea? These cats don't belong there, they are incredibly destructive, they should be euthanized.
posted by 1adam12 at 2:57 PM on October 19, 2016 [9 favorites]

The Feral Cat Initiative is also sending out some contract killers to the Convention center

"Mr. Sylvester, they say your methods are unsound."
(rubs cheek against leg)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:59 PM on October 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

Humans condemning another species for "obliterating wildlife."

Should I laugh or cry...
posted by crazylegs at 3:00 PM on October 19, 2016 [36 favorites]

Humans condemning another species for "obliterating wildlife."

Trying to fix our own mistake by introducing them. If not precisely laudible then still the right thing.
posted by 1adam12 at 3:05 PM on October 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Look out for the feral rat population exploding if the feral cat population practically disappears, though.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:08 PM on October 19, 2016 [10 favorites]

So this invasive species gets to live out its lifespan continuing to kill wildlife. Why is this a good idea? These cats don't belong there, they are incredibly destructive, they should be euthanized.

I dunno, the end point of this thinking is that humans ought to be euthanized, too, and rather quickly.

Slightly more helpfully, killing feral cats doesn't help (except maybe on some fairly small islands) because there are always more feral cats. Wat the trap, neuter, shots, release programs do is to set up stable populations of cats who are fairly healthy, don't spread disease, and won't breed. It's a much more resource-effective to deal with the problem. Sure those cats kill birds, but killing any group of cats won't reduce the overall number of cats who will keep killing birds. And, if you succeeded against all odds, the rats would probably start eating the birds. And you won't get rid of the rats until you get rid of the humans.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:34 PM on October 19, 2016 [22 favorites]

if there were visibly feral dogs roaming around? Yeah, they'd be caught and impounded in a blink.

(yes, I know, I'm not sure what "visibly feral" means either)

South Dallas is currently dealing with just such an issue.
posted by Ufez Jones at 3:38 PM on October 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

You don't? There are no street dogs in NYC?

No, none. The idea of seeing a pack of dogs running around here is bizarre. Then again I live in Manhattan and have never seen feral cats either so maybe they exist way out in the boroughs. But I don't think "street dogs" are common in any major American city.
posted by Sangermaine at 3:38 PM on October 19, 2016

So this invasive species gets to live out its lifespan continuing to kill wildlife.

Or more precisely, continuing to kill urban birds that are themselves invasive species. Even here most of the birds I see around at cat level are house sparrows and starlings. The cats are not going after the native hawks, Canada geese, and vultures.
posted by dilettante at 3:40 PM on October 19, 2016 [10 favorites]

You don't? There are no street dogs in NYC?

not really, no. there are individual dogs that accompany some homeless people but not huge 50-member colonies of feral dogs.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:41 PM on October 19, 2016

"Outdoor cats obliterate wildlife," said Robert Johns of the American Bird Conservancy

Not that I disagree that feral cat populations need managing, but "obliterate" is an exaggeration:

"... decades of studies prove that when cats do hunt—which is not nearly as often as they scavenge—they much prefer a diet of rodents. ... Birds are consumed only incidentally and not according to a regular feeding pattern."

And as dilettante alludes to above, how many "exotic" bird or other cat-killable wildlife species are there in NYC?
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:42 PM on October 19, 2016 [5 favorites]

You don't? There are no street dogs in NYC?

Well, we have one, but he thinks he's about to move to D.C.
posted by Mchelly at 3:43 PM on October 19, 2016 [11 favorites]

The feral cat colony on my block (in Chicago) has done an excellent job of limiting the rats who exist on the the bounty of the Chipotle dumpster and the brewpub dumpster in my alley. They do a much better job than the city manages with poison and than my neighbor managed with traps.

Occasionally, I see one of the predatory birds from the migratory bird sanctuary (about 1/2 a mile away) swoop in and get the juvenile rat before the cat does. But generally, when I see the predatory birds make a kill, it's one of the pretty little song birds flirting around that horrible berry tree in the yard.
posted by crush-onastick at 3:44 PM on October 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Then again I live in Manhattan and have never seen feral cats either so maybe they exist way out in the boroughs

there are feral cat colonies all over the place in manhattan once you get above the park.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:45 PM on October 19, 2016

Sure those cats kill birds, but killing any group of cats won't reduce the overall number of cats who will keep killing birds. And, if you succeeded against all odds, the rats would probably start eating the birds.

That reminds me of Gary Johnson's statement that we shouldn't do anything about global warming because the sun will explode someday anyways.
posted by jpe at 3:47 PM on October 19, 2016 [7 favorites]

Uh, here's an idea: make it mandatory for people to spay and neuter their pets. Capture, spay/neuter, and release ferals. Introduce pet licensing and have people prove their ability to care for an animal. Ban breeders. Ban sales of animals from pet stores and turn them into adoption centres.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:48 PM on October 19, 2016 [10 favorites]

That reminds me of Gary Johnson's statement that we shouldn't do anything about global warming because the sun will explode someday anyways.

At UT-Austin, they used to have a regular feral cat killings. What they discovered, after a long time, was that all they were doing was freeing up room for cats from the surrounding areas to move onto campus, and these cats were more likely to have diseases, and so you had a fluctuating population of disease-carrying cats. I'm not a huge fan of feral cats, and I think people with pet cats should get them fixed and keep them inside. However, the idea that we should "kill all the feral cats" makes as much sense as "we should kill all the rats" or "we should kill all the pigeons" which are also invasive species. Unless you have a very constrained geographic area (like an island), you are going to get new animals moving into the area that you have thoughtfully cleared for them. Cats (along with rats, pigeons, and, a little oddly coyotes and turkeys) are pretty well adapted to living in urban areas. So management is the best you are going to do.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:02 PM on October 19, 2016 [19 favorites]

Solution: Buy me an island. Send me and all feral cats in NY to said island along with 50 years worth of food and supplies and a decent internet connection. We live happily ever after, NYC stops whining.

Problem solved.

no, seriously, please send me and all the kitties far away from my new neighbors who, in addition to being chain-smokers, are unaware that hiding their toddler grandchildren in trash cans and then banging on the covers to scare said grandchildren = not cute
posted by Hermione Granger at 4:16 PM on October 19, 2016 [7 favorites]

Here's a bunch of invective from Nathan Winograd about nativism and the futility of trying to eliminate one invasive species at a time, with some very informative links. Normally, I'd skip the invective and go right to the source, but I decided nah.
posted by ernielundquist at 4:23 PM on October 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Humans condemning another species for "obliterating wildlife."

Should I laugh or cry...

It may shock and alarm you to learn where the cats came from in the forst place. IT'S PEOPLE! FERAL CATS IS PEOPLE!!! Seriously, though: Feral cats are a problem humans are 100% the sole cause of and the sole solution to. (With occasional assistance from coyotes in the latter.) Eliminating the problem is taking responsibility for our crimes against nature.

Also, hey, more room for condos! Can never have too many of those! Habitat loss, shmabitat shmoss! Endangered species can sign a lease just like the rest of us! No more handouts for the special interests!

(We're shitty in lots of ways, is my point.)
posted by Sys Rq at 4:28 PM on October 19, 2016 [6 favorites]

The damage done by feral cats is much much smaller than that done by feral dogs, for the most part. Feral cats aren't killing people either.

When humans create a problem of invasive species we are historically really really bad at fixing this. Can you tell I am from Australia? But even here, cats are only hugely damaging in certain areas - the ones with ground dwelling mammals, islands, that sort of thing. In urban environments they replace the predators no longer there and control the prey population that humans have very little hope of controlling. That we also introduced. Sadly the cats and dingos haven't been able to wipe out the foxes, another introduced predator that does a lot of damage and is not primarily confined to urban environments.

My neighbour likes to whine and complain about everything - she prevented us from getting pest control to remove the invasive bird species in the common areas because they have a similar name to a native species (which, for the record, is ALSO a pest species thanks to fuck ups in the food chain). Cats are obviously evil, even though the ones in our block are either ancient or indoor cats with anxiety issues*, and there are literally NO ground dwelling mammals other than pests here in the urban environment, and most of the birds are pests too. The birds that aren't - magpies, crows, etc - aren't in danger from cats. Dogs though, dogs are fine.

I don't know if the people complaining about cats being treated differently to dogs have seen what a pack of feral dogs will do, compared to a colony of cats. I lived on an island, lots of feral animals around the place. The dog pack would destroy, not hunt. It was only after they killed every chicken in my mother's coop, twice, that she was able (with photos) to get people to do anything about it. Note I said killed - they didn't eat the chickens, they just tore parts off the little hens and decorative crested bantams. They also did nothing to keep rodent numbers down. But nobody wanted to be responsible for killing the dogs, so nobody did anything. My mother figured that if they were bold enough to go for chickens next to a house, it wasn't going to be long before they went for bigger prey.

The big problem with cats is when those prey species include the protected/endangered animals - ground dwelling mammals like rodents and ground nesting birds, as it does in lots of parts of Australia. Not the urban environments though, humans did a better job of wiping those species out than cats.

*My cat will catch lizards to bring to my husband, who she sees as a defective kitten of some sort, but also runs away from ants.
posted by geek anachronism at 4:45 PM on October 19, 2016 [6 favorites]

I went to the University of Memphis in the 1990s. The school was going through a phase of trying to become more photogenic and welcoming. When it was noticed that campus was curiously devoid of squirrels, it was decided to import some, from nearby Arkansas. The squirrels reproduced at fantastic rates, until it got to the point where standing on the quad, a person might see sixty or eighty within their line of vision. They seized on every bit of garbage and abandoned food. They were hostile and aggressive. The university was this close to approving a plan to import hawks to hunt the squirrels. Finally, the biology department managed to convince the school that food scarcity in winter would do a better job of thinning out the squirrel population than hawks.

I realize this story is only vaguely related to the very periphery of this thread, but it does involve the mental image of a school cheerfully planning to turn their quad into a Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom predator murder zone. So there is that.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:53 PM on October 19, 2016 [13 favorites]

It seems a little weird to worry about the "natural" animal population of NYC. The huge human presence there distorts the original environment so much that it would be weird if it didn't create an alternate ecosystem (one example being the rats, who would not have the food supply they do were it not for a city of millions of people. Possibly the roaches and bedbugs too). Cats just seem another one of these.

It would be different to me if we were talking about Yellowstone or something.
posted by thefoxgod at 4:53 PM on October 19, 2016 [7 favorites]

We have a great TNR program here in Kingston, which has more feral cat colonies than I had realized. However, I didn't realize that heartless assholes will take their cats over to nearby Wolfe Island on the ferry and dump them there, so now that small community is suffering from a boom of feral cats from resident jerkfaces over on the mainland.
posted by Kitteh at 5:00 PM on October 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

I lived in Roxbury Mass in 1972. There were packs of dogs running wild in the streets at night. Don't know if they were feral or not--I never went out to check their licenses.

I guess nobody cared 'cause it was the ghetto.

True story.
posted by adam hominem at 5:13 PM on October 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

There are packs of feral dogs in some major American cities, but they don't tend to be in the parts that get a lot of attention. When I was in college in St. Louis, they had a significant feral dog population. A pack of feral dogs, in fact, killed a young boy playing in a playground in 2001. But, like many of the other problems in St. Louis, it happened in North St. Louis, and to a young black male. And so it's another problem that doesn't get the attention and resources necessary to fix.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:16 PM on October 19, 2016 [16 favorites]

Without trap/neuter/release programs, much of Atlanta would be over-run by rats and mice. I'm a big fan of making pet cats indoors only and euthanizing ferals that can't find homes or territories. But good lord, we need to keep the trap and release.

When I moved into our rail yard adjacent home 12 years ago, we had a nice older lady neighbor who was dedicated to trap/spay/release. I didn't realize how crucial she was to the block's ecology until she left. Within two years of her selling her home to move closer to her son, we had a major feral cat colony living in the brownlot next door.

It took a neighborhood committee to clean up the mess created by just two years of one woman being gone. Traps, kitten distribution, and actually throwing a goddamn net sometimes. The kittens have stopped popping out of that one lot, and I sometimes see the killer we know taking anoles or mice out. I feel bad about the lizards, but he keeps other breeding strays away.

We keep our kitten, a sweet little domestic thing who was dumped in that same lot by assholes, inside at all times. I wish everyone else would do the same.

I'll never understand dumping. I think our state and county does a decent job of offering low cost spay and neuter clinics. But those calling for the eradication of all ferals don't have a good grasp on the problem.
posted by EinAtlanta at 5:44 PM on October 19, 2016 [7 favorites]

JFC, how cold-hearted and unfeeling do you have to be to want to murder a bunch of cats (who are helping control vermin populations) that are only there in the first place because humans are terrible and don't spay/neuter? There are much better ways of dealing with this problem than sentencing to death kitties who have done nothing wrong.

It's like wanting to fix a broken bone by sawing your arm off. Maybe instead of killing them all, you should take fucking responsibility and stop doing the thing that's creating them.
posted by a strong female character at 6:36 PM on October 19, 2016 [10 favorites]

Wat the trap, neuter, shots, release programs do is to set up stable populations of cats who are fairly healthy, don't spread disease, and won't breed. It's a much more resource-effective to deal with the problem. Sure those cats kill birds, but killing any group of cats won't reduce the overall number of cats who will keep killing birds. And, if you succeeded against all odds, the rats would probably start eating the birds. And you won't get rid of the rats until you get rid of the humans.

As far as I can tell this is just something people write on the internet and has no scientific basis at all. I've looked for studies before and found not a one.

If people wanted to wipe out feral cats it could be done easily enough. We are good at wiping things out and feral cats are easy to find because they hang around people.

It's not a matter of being "cold hearted" it's a matter of being realistic that you can't save everything and you have to make some choices. I'd rather have functioning ecosystems than disease carrying feral animals. Oh, and so would the legal system.
posted by fshgrl at 8:14 PM on October 19, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think it would be a bad idea to turn away from thousands of years of successful human-cat cooperation without considering the potential downsides.
posted by humanfont at 8:17 PM on October 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

If people wanted to wipe out feral cats it could be done easily enough. We are good at wiping things out and feral cats are easy to find because they hang around people.

Feral cats only hang around people in the same sense that rats do. In a context where a feral cat colony is being fed and cared for by people, feral cats are relatively visible and accessible. But cats are pretty damn good at being invisible when they have a reason to be. See for instance:

Then again I live in Manhattan and have never seen feral cats either so maybe they exist way out in the boroughs.

I'll promise you that there's no shortage of feral cats in Manhattan. As long as they, and their feeders keep a low profile, nobody notices. And as long as there are exterminationists out there, their feeders will take care to keep a very low profile too.
posted by wotsac at 9:02 PM on October 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

And since feral cats are on topic, there's Slim the (no longer feral and after much patience as sweet as they come) alley cat, and Karl (who came inside early, and lurves people) who was born in a in a barn. here.
posted by wotsac at 9:12 PM on October 19, 2016 [5 favorites]

fshgrl: If people wanted to wipe out feral cats it could be done easily enough. We are good at wiping things out and feral cats are easy to find because they hang around people.

Part of the problem is that cats are actually really hard to wipe out. There are a number of studies done on islands with no new cats being introduced and killing off the cat population still takes years of work and different methods. On Marion Island, the eradication efforts went from 1977 - 1991 before seeing success.

Another part of the problem is that cats are part of an ecosystem wherever they are. When cats were removed from Marion Island, mice flourished and killed albatross chicks. On MacQuarie Island, the rabbit population exploded and destroyed native plants that had provided nesting sites for local seabirds. It doesn't seem to be possible to remove one animal from an ecosystem without upsetting the balance in often unexpected ways. I'd rather have cats than a population boom in rats.

A third part of the problem is that people keep adding cats to the population of homeless (stray and feral) animals, as Sys Rq said. People dump their (almost always unaltered) pet cats out onto the streets at an astonishing rate. Don't want the cat anymore? Put it outside and forget it or drive it away from home and push it out of the car. The shelter where I volunteer takes in friendly strays, neuters them, and adopts them out (as well as TNR for ferals), but we can't keep up with the number of abandoned animals.

As long as people keep dumping cats, there will be homeless cats. I don't see a viable alternative to humane management.
posted by swerve at 9:15 AM on October 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

Even if people stop dumping cats and we work hard at TNR programs it only takes a few fertile cats to see population grow to match the food supply. For an extreme example if you start with a single reproducing pair and allow for natural fertility and mortality rates after ten years the population of cats would be close to 50,000.
posted by humanfont at 10:19 AM on October 20, 2016

Alleycat Allies has some links to research done on TNR and And the vacuum effect. Tiny Kittens Just finished a two year TNR program on one site and did an intensive two day TBR which caught about 25 cats and returned most to a nearby site (where they had been was being demolished). They've been showing you can give medical care to and rehabilitate strays to be indoor cats, though a lot depends on the personalities of the cats. I love their live streams of kittens, too, and all of the record keeping so other people can learn from their work.
posted by Deoridhe at 12:08 PM on October 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

a bunch of invective from Nathan Winograd

Man there is a lot of rhetoric in this I do not find convincing. Humans being concerned with overpopulation of human-propagated species isn't hypocrisy, it's actually taking responsibility for an effect of our own invasiveness. And bringing in the explicit comparison to genocide is way more potentially offensive than it is helpful.

Whether attempts to remove "invasive species" actually work in most cases though I'm not sure of.
posted by atoxyl at 12:38 PM on October 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

Yes, my point was that his rhetoric is over the top, but the articles at the links provide some answers. I'm not just going to gank all his links without crediting him.

Also, I don't want to do the work of ganking all his links when I know nobody's going to read them.
posted by ernielundquist at 7:55 PM on October 20, 2016

My (Mexican*) neighborhood has a larger population of free-roaming cats than the majority of Chicago and far far fewer rats. Fewer rats than poor neighborhoods, fewer rats than rich neighborhoods, far far fewer rats than "up-and-coming" neighborhoods where the constant development and construction leaves plenty of safe, empty structures for rats to nest and camp out all night.

One of my neighbors, a sweet toothless lady, takes care of four Trap Neuter Release cats who can sense her car coming before she even opens up the door, and bound up happily onto her porch where she sings to them and pours out some food. Three of them are named Pinky and one is named Mamacita Bonita. I've never heard them scrapping. They're obviously not rutting. I see less than 10 rats a year while biking through the alleys of my neighborhood, which like I said has a higher-than-normal not-at-any-kind-of-nuisance-levels, strays, TNR's, and indoor-outdoor cats. I cannot see any kind of a problem.

*do urban white people not do indoor-outdoor cats? I grew up in a different part of Chicago with cats that were born under our porch. We took them in as kittens and let them go outside when they wanted to go out. Whenever I tell white friends this they act like I'm insane.
posted by elr at 12:21 PM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Addendum: my neighborhood with all its cats *seems* to have the same number and variety of birds, raccoons, squirrels, and opposum as any other similar neighborhood in Chicago (not close to the lake, not close to any wooded areas) but this is just an observation, not in any way scientific.
posted by elr at 12:31 PM on October 21, 2016

*do urban white people not do indoor-outdoor cats? I grew up in a different part of Chicago with cats that were born under our porch. We took them in as kittens and let them go outside when they wanted to go out. Whenever I tell white friends this they act like I'm insane.

We had indoor/outdoor cats in the semi-country (houses less than a mile apart) and one in a suburb (houses a few feet apart) but by the time I adopted my cats ~20 years ago one came with a requirement she be indoor only, and the stories about cats being hit by cars was rising. The cat who I didn't agree to keep indoors was a total scaredy cat, and in my last place the landlord wasn't comfortable with even a very limited (he mostly stayed in my front yard) roaming cat. Where I live now they have to be indoors only.

I think it's a function of changes in laws driven by a desire to protect animals named as pets and restrict their roaming. One could see it as a side effect of increases in density and vehicles as well - I'm surrounded by roads covered in cars now, and I wouldn't let him be an outdoor cat for his own safety, whereas where I started was on a much quieter road and my cat there had a whole routine where she visited people and buses.

It could also be a question of class distinctions as well; my mom was solidly country and imparted a bunch of that to me even though I mostly lived in the suburbs, so animals were much more likely to be viewed as "working". My experience with people who had more money and/or were more distanced from the country is that they tend to view animals as more decorative or members of the family and apply more human-like ethics to them, which comes with it's own slew of problems.
posted by Deoridhe at 3:44 PM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

Indoor/outdoor cats have much shorter lifespans than indoor only cats.
posted by humanfont at 2:48 AM on October 22, 2016