Finally, the City of Lincoln gets a clue!Plan to control strays likely to raise hairs
By MARK ANDERSEN / Lincoln Journal Star
For many Lincoln cats, it’s a jungle out there — a cycle of frequent breeding, intense hunger and early death. Animal advocates say society’s costly attempts to eliminate the problem have failed. But managing feral cats within their colonies saves money and reduces complaints, they suggest. Animal Control and the Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department will give the alternative a try, working to eliminate population growth in one Lincoln colony of feral cats.
If it works, they’ll expand the program.
Tentatively, the department hopes to begin its experiment this fall at 48th and Leighton streets. Under the $3,000 program, The Cat House will work with All Feline Veterinary Hospital to treat one colony.
After being captured, the cats will be spayed or neutered, treated for parasites, inoculated for rabies and distemper, checked for other diseases, microchipped and ear-clipped for identification, and then released back to their environment.
“You want that one nasty male cat that beats everybody up,” said Beth Boal, vice president of The Cat House. “He manages the other cats.”
With the sex drive and reproduction curbed, there are fewer 3 a.m. disturbances, fewer starving kittens, fewer brawls over scarce territory.
Similar programs have been used in Washington, D.C., Atlantic City and Salt Lake City. At Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., a trap-neuter-release program achieved feline zero population growth almost immediately, according to the San Francisco SPCA, a nonprofit animal rescue organization.
The Lincoln department needs inexpensive methods of dealing with strays because of its impending divorce from the Capital Humane Society.
The society announced in June that this will be its last year of providing services for city strays.
For Lincoln, the no-kill program isn’t about the ethics of killing cats.
If not killing cats hadn’t saved other communities money, reduced cat numbers and reduced complaints, Director Bruce Dart told the Health Department advisory board Tuesday, it wouldn’t be considered here.
But if this works, he said, “We can quit wasting our time running around herding cats.”
When it comes to Lincoln’s strays, the numbers show a real problem howling for attention.
Each year, Animal Control picks up roughly 2,400 dogs and 2,000 cats. Each year it ends up killing 400 dogs and 1,300 cats.
Most of the dogs killed have a disposition that would prevent them from being adopted. With cats, it’s a matter of dealing with the numbers.
From two cats can spring 30 in two years, Boal said. Cats can go wild in one generation.
Killing cats, she said, doesn’t eliminate the problem.
Wild or semi-wild domestic cats — feral cats — breed to fill the available food supply. Killing cats creates a temporary vacuum, a situation of feline reproductive chaos, with all of the noise and competition that implies.
The pilot program would fill that vacuum with a stable cat colony — one with sterilized, healthy cats.
Used widely in Australia and South Africa, the trap-neuter-release movement got started in the United States in the early 1990s.
Becky Robinson, national director and founder of Alley Cat Allies, said she was cutting through an alley in Washington, D.C., when she stumbled into 10 to 20 beautiful, healthy cats — a feral colony that somebody was feeding.
Robinson said her goal initially was to stop the breeding in that one colony. The local humane society could only suggest that neighbors stop feeding them, she said.
Since her initial efforts, there have always been more communities trying to deal with their cat problem, she said. Alley Cat Allies estimates as many as 60 million feral cats live in the country.
They’re opportunists, she said. Extremely adaptable, cats find any niche.
In most cases, feral cats are easily distinguished from pet cats by their sociability. In Lincoln, cats with collars will be considered pet cats, Boal said.
Already, city ordinance requires that roaming pet cats be licensed and sterilized.
In some communities that have adopted the program, according to Alley Cat Allies, complaints about wild cats have fallen by 20 to 30 percent.
Reach Mark Andersen at 473-7238
posted by decemberx 11:10 AM[edit]
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