WASHINGTON, April 4 (UPI) -- Hunter Mark Smith has proposed an open season on a whole new kind of game -- feral cats.
On April 11, the Wisconsin Conservation Congress will have hearings in the state's 72 counties allowing voters to decide whether to classify free-roaming domestic cats as an "unprotected species." This would allow anyone with a small-game license to shoot any cat without a collar or not under its owner's direct control.
In response to outcries from cat owners and lovers who worry that their pets will be killed if allowed to roam outside, Smith has replied: "Domestic cats are under the ownership of an individual. If you open the door and kick your cat out at night, you've changed its status."
Smith, a 48-year-old firefighter from La Crosse, Wis., said his proposal was designed to protect songbirds and other small wildlife -- "whether it's baby ducks, baby turkeys, smaller rabbits, small squirrels, or a whole host of other wildlife," he told KSTP-TV in Minneapolis.
Smith said he doesn't mind birds in his backyard, but called feral cats an "invasive species, plain and simple."
The debate in Wisconsin has brought to the fore a problem that is often overlooked -- free-roaming cats and the perceptions people hold of them.
Smith's concern for the bird population stems from a common belief that feral cats are a main cause of the declining U.S. bird population. A University of Wisconsin-Madison wildlife ecology professor seemed to confirm that belief when he trapped more than 100 cats, analyzed their stomach contents and concluded that feral cats kill between 7.8 million and 219 million birds every year in Wisconsin.
According to the National Audubon Society, bird populations are, indeed, declining throughout the nation, but the cause is not feral cats. A State of the Birds report in the September/October 2004 issue of Audubon Magazine found that the most serious threats to birds are "the outright loss of habitat due to poor land use, the clear-cutting of forests, the draining of wetlands, and sprawl." Other threats include climate change, air and water pollution, pesticides, and collisions with buildings, towers, and wind turbines.
In other words, humans -- not feral cats -- are the biggest bird killers.
According to a San Francisco SPCA report, biologist Robert Berg found that cats in Golden Gate Park had much more success in hunting rats than birds, making the quail population in the park stronger since there were fewer rats to raid bird nests.
Another myth is that feral cats are a major source of rabies. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cats account for 2 percent to 4 percent of reported rabies cases in the United States. According to the CDC's Web site, 36 people died from rabies in the United States between 1990 and 2001. Of those cases, nine sources of the rabies could be confirmed and none of them was from cats.
Rabies remains largely a wildlife problem, affecting less than 9 percent of domestic animals. The CDC reported that in 2003, 321 cases of rabies were found in cats nationwide. Raccoons, skunks, bats and foxes were the most commonly infected animals, and of the 7,173 rabies cases reported in the United States in 2003, 6,556 were in wildlife.
Many people assume that feral cats are diseased, mangy animals that scavenge garbage piles in a state of perpetual starvation.
"They think cats that live on the streets are inherently diseased and live a terrible life and that's just not the case," said Jessica Frohman, program manager for Alley Cat Allies, a national non-profit clearinghouse for information on feral and stray cats based in Bethesda, Md.
In fact, Frohman said, most feral cats are healthy and well-fed.
"There's this myth that it's better for us to kill the cats rather than them suffer on the streets," Frohman said.
Certainly some feral cats are sick or starving, but Frohman said the public need not fear that it's inhumane to let cats live out on the streets.
Nor should the public worry that by allowing feral cats to roam free their population will grow exponentially to an enormous size. One statistic cited on many feral cat advocacy Web sites claims that a pair of cats producing two litters annually can lead to 420,000 cats in seven years. Frohman called that number "ridiculous."
Frohman said a more reasonable scenario is cited on Auburn University's Operation Cat Nap Web site, which theorizes that a female cat producing two litters a year would likely lead to 59,049 more cats over the course of five years.
Even so, that's still a lot of cats. But simply killing them won't keep the population in check.
"You can't go out and kill a bunch of cats and just assume that they're not going to come back," Frohman said.
When an area is cleared of a colony of cats, neighboring cats will move in and rapidly re-colonize the territory, a phenomenon known as the "vacuum effect." According to the Messybeast Cat Resource Archive, a not-for-profit collection of feline information based in Britain, each generation of cats that repopulates an area will be smarter and faster than the last, making them even more of a threat to local wildlife.
Frohman cited a case in Newburyport, Mass., where 200 cats were removed from the area. Two years later, there were 200 cats.
The feral cat population "is a serious problem that needs to be fixed and it's a serious problem that was purely man-made," Frohman said.
Many veterinarians and feral cat advocacy organizations, including Alley Cat Allies, endorse "trap-neuter-return," in which cats are humanely trapped, then evaluated, vaccinated, and sterilized by veterinarians. Tame cats can be adopted, and cats too wild to be domesticated are returned to their colonies. Cats that are too ill or injured to recover are euthanized.
TNR costs less than trapping and killing stray cats, and case studies have shown that where TNR is implemented, complaints about stray cats decreased.
Frohman did not think an open season on cats was an effective form of population control.
"They're still a species, and they need to stick around," she said.
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