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MONTH: MAY 2006

Beyond “Sylvester & Tweety”

Project Bay Cat found ways to accommodate both Sylvester and Tweety. (Robert Barbutti)

FOSTER CITY, Calif.––Tired of playing stereotypical opposing roles in endless political re-runs of the “Sylvester & Tweety” cats-vs.-birds battle, Homeless Cat Network “cat manager” Cimeron Morrissey, Sequoia Audubon Society conservation committee chair Robin Winslow Smith, and Foster City management analyst Andra Lorenz in 2004 quit competing for TV sound bites and formed Project Bay Cat instead.

They all knew what the problem was: more than 170 feral cats lived along the Bay Trail, a popular scenic hiking route that follows a long abandoned shoreline railway. Mostly the cats hunted small rodents. Like other predators, they caught mostly the old, the young, the sick, and the injured.

But the cats were near various threatened and endangered species, including the California clapper rail, a bird whose last habitats include a marsh at the northern end of the Bay Trail, where Foster City meets San Mateo.

Efforts to protect the clapper rail from feral cats, coyotes, and foxes had included more than fifteen years of confrontations among animal advocates and government agencies. Especially bitterly fought were proposals to use leghold traps to capture and kill potential clapper rail predators. Although leghold traps are banned in California, the ban exempts use to protect endangered species.

While lawyers battled, Morrissey, Smith, Lorenz and friends realized that none of them really wanted feral cats to be on the Bay Trail, none of them wanted to fight, and much could be done to reduce the feline presence if they brokered their own peace and worked together.

“The homeless cat population started as a result of illegal abandonment by irresponsible people,” recounted Morrissey on March 27, 2006, formally the first anniversary of Project Bay Cat––but by the time they announced that it existed, in March 2005, the participants had already sterilized 77% of the Bay Trail cat population.

“Volunteers have diligently trapped the cats to have them neutered, tested for disease, and vaccinated,” Morissey told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “Thanks to the San Mateo Animal Hospital and Crystal Springs Pet Hospital veterinarians, 92% of the cats who live along the levee pedway (footpath) have now been altered. This has stabilized the population. The Homeless Cat Network also created an aggressive fostering and adoption program, and found homes for more than 60 kittens and friendly adult cats. This has already reduced the number of cats living along the levee pedway by 30%, thereby exceeding our initial goals.”

Added Smith, “There are fewer cats on the Bay Trail now. Those who remain appear to be healthier. Thanks to the feeding stations and the spay/neuter effort, the cats seem to have settled into the program, and don’t need to hunt.”

Though sterilized and fed cats may still hunt, few hunt with the urgency of a pregnant or nursing cat mother.

“To protect birds and their habitat, and reduce debris along the levee pedway,” where hikers often left food for cats, “10 cat feeding stations were built by the Homeless Cat Network and installed along the trail,” recounted Morissey.

“Appropriate locations for the stations were jointly identified by our three groups, with special consideration given by Sequoia Audubon Society to insure that the stations were placed away from bird habitats. The program’s effectiveness is a result of keeping the cats well-fed and concentrated away from avian nesting sites.

“Evidence of the program’s effectiveness,” Morrissey said, “is that the Sequoia Audubon Society recently found that the endangered California clapper rail is thriving and is not impacted by the cats. Rails are quite easily seen and heard at high tide,” along the northern end of the Bay Trail.”

Neuter/return stabilized the Bay Trail feral cat population. Adopting out cats who could be handled reduced the cats’ numbers and their environmental impact. The key to success, however, is “educating the community while enlisting help,” assessed Morrissey.

“To educate the public and encourage community involvement, Foster City erected four Project Bay Cat signs along the levee pedway,” Morrissey explained. “Because the homeless cat problem is a result of animal abandonment, which is an illegal and inhumane act, the signs discourage abandonment and ask the public to call the police if they see suspicious or malicious activity. The signs also ask the public not to feed the cats unless they are registered through the Homeless Cat Network as official feeders.

“As a result of positive press coverage,” Morrissey continued, “we have been able to educate thousands of people about feral cats and how to humanely manage them, and have changed how people perceive feral cats. Now people know that feral cats can be healthy, happy, sometimes friendly, and that they deserve to live out their lives. We have many more volunteers helping them now, trail users have become vigilant and have prevented animal abandonment, and many more people are protecting our furry outcasts. They aren’t really outcasts any more––they’re celebrities,” Morrissey said.

Morrissey noted that, “The Homeless Cat Network is seeking additional volunteers, to help feed the cats, foster and socialize kittens, and humanely trap cats.” as there are still a few to be caught and sterilized, and some abandonment of intact cats may yet occur.

But Morrissey believes Project Bay Cat has passed “the transition from active program development to ongoing maintenance. Volunteers will continue to provide food and water to the homeless cats,” for the duration of their lives or until all are tamed and adopted, “while also working to trap the remaining unaltered felines.”

“The results speak for themselves,” commented Foster City parks and recreation director Kevin Miller. “Most impressively, we have achieved success without expense to taxpayers, since the program is implemented by volunteers, and by veterinarians who have donated their services.”

The Project Bay Cat step-by-step “tool kit” is offered free of charge to others who might like to start similar collaborations among cat people and bird people, c/o <info@homelesscatnetwork.com>.

“Others around the country have requested it,” Morrissey said. “The State of New York is looking to our example as they consider what to do with the feral cats in their state parks.”

Long Island

Originally made for theatre showing, adapted for broadcast in the early years of network television, the “Sylvester & Tweety ” cat-versus-bird cartoons were variously set in apartment blocks resembling New York City and suburban areas resembling Long Island.

Tweety, a canary, was more often a pet than a wild bird, but took turns as both. Sylvester, however, was always an alley cat, stray or feral, who got into Granny’s house to hunt Tweety only by skulking past Spike the bulldog, and often ended up in the pound. Long-time personnel at the no-kill North Shore Animal League joke that the pound must have been theirs, as North Shore held several pound contracts between 1944 and 1960, and tried to avoid taking in cats.

Much of Long Island is now served by low-kill animal control agencies, but not all of the island––and Long Island is now more than ever a battleground of cat and bird rescuers. Some of the oldest and most successful neighborhood neuter/return programs in the U.S. operate on Long Island, along with some of the most bitterly anticat wildlife rehabilitators and conservationists.

There are two flashpoints for conflict.

One is the visceral reaction that bird people have at seeing cats kill animals they have watched, fed, nursed, and created habitat for. Cat people often have the same response when coyotes, foxes, hawks, owls, or eagles carry off cats or kittens.

The other flashpoint is habitat.

Since the “Sylvester & Tweety” cartoons were made, Long Island has gained protected wetlands and shorelines. The pollution that then fouled streams, beaches, and bays, inspiring the start of the Environmental Defense Fund, is markedly reduced. Decades of donations, public investment, and volunteer labor have gone into restoring habitat. Maturing suburban tree canopies have also helped birds.

Overall, Long Island today probably has far more birds than 50-60 years ago, and has tens of thousands more people who watch, feed, and otherwise care about birds. Yet the island may not have more bird species. Meadow birds, thriving when much of Long Island was still open field, are often barely holding on, their feeding habitat reduced to heavily sprayed yard lawns and golf courses.

Deer, no longer able to browse the edge habitat where fields met woodlots, now eat the remaining brush understory beneath yard and park trees, where meadow species nest. Neotropical migratory songbirds are in particular trouble, losing nesting and feeding habitat at the northern end of their range while rainforest logging followed by beef ranching devastates their Central and South American winter habitat.

Sylvester and his descendants had little or nothing to do with the decline of the bird species of most concern to Long Island birders––but a cat seen stalking, carrying, or eating a bird is an easy scapegoat for the frustrations of birders who may not realize that the bird was typically caught only after being crippled by diseases spread at feeders, by injury from colliding with cars, windows, or microwave towers, or by ingesting lawn chemicals along with a dinner of bugs. Usually a bird caught by a cat had little chance of contributing to the survival of the species. Yet the visible role of the cat in dispatching sick and injured birds can seem to symbolize everything bad for birds about concentrated civilization.

West Islip bird rehabilitator Richard DeSantis, 56, was on April 16, 2006 charged with fourth degree criminal mischief, fifth degree criminal possession of stolen property, and making a false written statement for allegedly trapping a Russian blue cat named Coal in his yard on April 3, and taking the cat to the Town of Islip Animal Shelter to be killed, saying Coal was his. Coal actually belonged to neighbors Jesse and Regina Fagone and their two children. Arraign-ment was set for June 5.

The Fagone family told Wil Cruz of Long Island Newsday that shelter records they obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed that DeSantis in December 1998 had two cats killed, whom they believe were two previous cats of theirs who went missing at about the same time. Another Fagone cat disappeared in 2002, they said, and a cat kept by across-the-street neighbor Tom Blaser, brother-in-law of Jesse Fagone, was shot dead with a pellet gun by an unknown attacker.

“The shelter’s records confirm that since 1995, this gentleman has brought in five cats to be euthanized,” a Town of Islip Animal Shelter spokesperson told New York Daily News writer Michael White.

Dat dwatted cat!

Birder antipathy toward cats has been whetted since the neuter/return method of feral cat control caught on in the U.S. during the early 1990s by grossly exaggerated estimates of feral cat numbers circulated by some humane groups, including Alley Cat Allies, amplified by the American Bird Conservancy.

Excessive estimates of cat predation, based on dubious estimates of the feral cat population, further inflame birders’ anxiety. A recent example would be Cats & Wildlife: A Conservation Dilemma, by John S. Cole-man, Stanley A. Temple, and Scott R. Craven, distributed since March 2005 by the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management at the University of Nebraska.

Temple, a University of Wisconsin-Madison wildlife biology professor, in 1996 projected that there are two to three times more cats in Wisconsin than any standard animal control or pet industry estimating method indicates, and that they kill up to 100 million birds per year in Wisconsin alone.

Credible estimates of bird predation by cats nationwide range from 100 million per year, projected in 2003 by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Management Office biologist Al Manville, to 134 million per year, projected in 2000 by Carol Fiore of the Wichita State University Department of Biological Sciences––and Fiore estimated that approximately twice as many pet cats are allowed to roam as other studies showed.

Yet the Temple claims were influential enough within Wisconsin to motivate 57% of the participants in the April 2005 state Conservation Congress caucuses to vote in favor of allowing hunters to shoot feral cats.

How many cats?

ANIMAL PEOPLE in November 1992, March 1996, June 2003, and November 2003 extensively reviewed the evolution of feral cat population estimates, each time incorporating new data from multiple sources. The findings of researchers other than Temple and colleagues have been easily reconciled, pointing consistently toward the conclusion summarized in the November 2003 headline “Roadkills of cats fall 90% in 10 years––are feral cats on their way out?”

Outdoor and feral cat numbers have been in free fall since the introduction of neuter/return, while urbanized coyotes, foxes, hawks, and owls are now rapidly reclaiming former feral cat habitat including even Central Park in the center of New York City.

The U.S. pet cat population has increased during the past five years from about 74 million to 90 million, according to the Pet Product Manufacturers Association––but fewer cats roam than ever. The biggest factor in the increase is not rising births or acquisitions, but rather decreased mortality among the elder half of the ever-growing percentage of pet cats, now more than two-thirds of all pet cats, who are kept indoors.

The most distant ancestor of the Pet Product Manufacturers Association data was compiled in 1953 by the National Family Opinion Survey, funded by the American Can Company, summarized by study director John Marbanks in early 1954 for the National Humane Review, the long-defunct general audience humane magazine that once helped to support the American Humane Association.

Marbanks projected that the total U.S. cat population then, when Sylvester was in his prime, was about 50 million, including about 13.2 million barn cats, 6.5 million other rural cats, 7.0 million cats in urban homes, and 23 million ferals. Up to 80% of the cats, at least, had opportunity to hunt birds. About 42 million cats––or more––were at large.

The numbers of barn cats, other rural cats, and ferals appear to have remained relatively steady for about 40 years, even as the numbers of cats in urban homes increased tenfold. But, as about half of all cat-keepers allowed their cats to roam, the numbers of cats at large soared, especially after dog-keepers began keeping their pets confined in the 1970s and 1980s, giving free-roaming pet cats more opportunity to hunt, scavenge, and interbreed with the barn cats, rural cats, and ferals.

Neuter/return arrived coincidental with cat-keepers attitudes toward keeping pets indoors catching up with the practices of dog-keepers. The numbers of free-roaming pet cats and feral cats plummeted.

“Birth and Death Rate Estimates of Cats and Dogs in U.S. Households and Related Factors,” published in 2005 in volume 7.4 of the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, established from a 1996 survey of 7,399 U.S. households that the cat birth rate was then not more than about 11.2 kittens per 100 cats in households.

Attrition included a death rate of 8.3% among cats, plus a disappearance rate of 3%. In short, cat births in households equaled attrition.

The study authors included John C. New Jr. and William Kelch of the University of Tennessee, Jennifer Hutchison of the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry, Mo Salman and Mike King of Colorado State University, Janet Scarlett of Cornell University, and Philip Kass of the University of California at Davis.

Their findings confirmed that movement of feral cats into homes and shelters was just about equal to net growth in the household population plus cat killing in shelters, exactly as long projected by ANIMAL PEOPLE.

Therefore the number of feral cats can be estimated by adding net cat acquisition to shelter killing and multiplying by three, to account for the numbers of queens, toms, and siblings not entering homes or shelters who must exist to produce the numbers of ferals who are either adopted or killed.

U.S. pet cat acquisitions appear to exceed attrition by about 1.5% per year: 1.1 million, about half of net population growth, with decreased mortality among older cats accounting for the rest. Nationally, animal shelters kill about two million cats per year, according to ongoing shelter data collection & analysis conducted by ANIMAL PEOPLE since 1993.

Thus the U.S. feral cat population appears to be about 9.3 million on a year-round average, rising in spring and summer, but contracting in fall and winter.

This number is most meaningful when compared to the national carrying capacity, estimated relative to the volume of food that would be available to dogs and cats if humans did not artificially elevate the carrying capacity by deliberately feeding them.

In poor nations where most dogs are street dogs, and few people deliberately feed them, dog populations tend to peak at about one dog per 10 humans, as in India, and run far lower in harsher climates. When street dogs are sterilized or killed, feral cats gradually replace dogs at a ratio of approximately three cats taking the niche of one dog. This is close to their relative average biomass.

Thus the U.S. national feral cat carrying capacity might be as high as 100 million, higher even than the pet cat population––if coyotes, foxes, hawks, owls, eagles, fishers, ferrets, snakes, and many other predators of small rodents were not absorbing most of the carrying capacity wherever they can.

––Merritt Clifton

“Sylvester & Tweety” go global

Robben Island Museum, responsible for managing Robben Island, South Africa, is again trying to eradicate feral cats. Sharpshooters killed cats on the island in 1999 and 2005, when 58 cats were shot, but as many as 70 cats remain, environmental coordinator Shaun Davis recently told Cape Argus reporter John Yeld. The shooting was suspended for a time to allow animal advocacy groups including Beauty Without Cruelty/South Africa to trap the surviving cats and take them to mainland sanctuaries. BWC/ South Africa spokesperson Beryl Scott told Yeld that the initial effort was “not that successful,” partly through lack of official cooperation, but on April 24 Davis announced that the number of traps set for cats would be expanded from 10 to 50, and that no cats would be shot before June. The cats are blamed by University of Cape Town avian demographer Les Underhill for killing all but three of the fledgling population of about 60 endangered African black oystercatchers during the past breeding season. Allan Perrins, chief executive officer of Cape of Good Hope branch of the South African National SPCA, suggested that the actual culprits might have been some of the feral rabbits on the island, who might have turned carnivorous and become nest predators. Seals are also blamed by some observers. Seals have been kept from re-establishing haulouts on Robben Island in recent years to protect seabird colonies, but on April 21, 2006 “Both Robben Island and the department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism agreed to allow the return of Cape fur seals,” e-mailed Seal Alert/South Africa founder Francois Hugo. Robben Island, designated a World Heritage site by the United Nations Environmental Program, provides habitat to 132 bird species in all.

Responding to concerns voiced by English Nature and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, builder George Wimpey has offered to include a ban on keeping cats among the covenants to which home buyers must agree within a proposed development at Crowthorne, Berkshire, England. The Bracknell Forest borough council earlier refused to allow Wimpey to build on the site. Wimpey is among Britain’s biggest developers, and is a leading member of the Thames Valley New Homes Coalition, formed to help open habitat to housing construction, in a nation with an increasingly acute housing shortage.

The cities of Fukuoka and Kitakyushu, Japan, are taking opposite approaches to feral cat control, Yomiuri Shimbun reported on March 7, 2006. Both cities are within Fukuoka Prefecture. Fukuoka will pay cat caretakers a subsidy per cat of about 10% of the sterilization cost, and is drafting regulations for cat colony care, to be published in July 2006. Kitakyushu is meanwhile reportedly close to adding feeding feral cats to a list of offenses covered by the city nuisance ordinance, for which violators may be fined.