Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: on pet cats / feral cats

[Naomi Anderegg (naomi_anderegg]

Richard wrote:
"Before we moved in, our tentative pet policy said that cats could not run 
free.  

Then we were told that if our cats weren't out, the neighborhood cats would 
take 

over the territory (does anyone know if this is true?).

So then we modified the policy so that cats could run free."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you have rodents, like the rest of the world, then you'll have predators. 
Probably not wolves, which presumably kept the rodent population in North 
America in check at least through the early 1900s. We've decimated their 
population, along with native feline species like the Florida Panther, in most 
parts of country. You could have bobcats or coyotes or foxes, I suppose, but 
they really don't like to be around people by my understanding, whereas rodent 
populations flourish close to human populations. So, you're looking at domestic 
cats, feral domestic cats, snakes, or possibly hawks & owls filling that niche 
in the ecosystem. Domestic cats (feral or not) are well suited for it--with all 
the cat bashing I've done a little reading and they're much more suited towards 
hunting rodents than birds. They're also relatively comfortable around human 
populations in comparison to the other predators. And the statistic that I 
found 
was that 80% of cat kills were rodents, but I don't really know how accurate 
that is. I suppose I can see cats being a concern if you have a threatened 
population of ground-nesting birds in your part of the country. (My area is 
mostly wooded and with a significant density of large trees, and there just 
aren't any ground-nesters small enough to be significantly threatened by 
domestic cats that I know of.) I'd rather have cats (feral or pet) than 
snakes--but perhaps I'm just prejudiced against snakes. 


There are some interesting articles about this at www.alleycat.org--an national 
organization that advocates managing feral cat populations through "trap neuter 
return" programs. They have research quoted on their website that would 
indicate 
that there will be a cat population if there are adequate prey species to 
support them. 


A few articles addressing bird species loss / effect on wildlife of outdoor cat 
populations: http://www.alleycat.org/Page.aspx?pid=324
And there are some documented cases of attempts at eradicating feral cat 
populations in relatively small areas than indicate that the "vaccuum effect" 
(on feral cat populations) does, in fact, exist--removing feral cats is 
ineffective because new cats just move in to take their place. (See Richard's 
quoted "neighborhood cat" theory.) 


So. . . whether you allow outdoor pet cats in your community or not, you're 
likely to have some cat population. But, the cat population that can be 
supported by the wild rodent population in your community would presumably be 
lower/less dense than a domesticated pet cat population, since more people feed 
their pet cats than would feed "strays" and this food helps to sustain what 
would otherwise be an unsustainable density of cats. 


Naomi