SAN DIEGOCan population control euthanasias be halted? Do homeless cats breed in the woods?
New studies by the National Pet Alliance and ANIMAL PEOPLE say yes to both questionsand confirm that the keys to success are first, going where the homeless cats are to do neutering, and second, working to enable renters to adopt cats.
Political conflicts erupting in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Montgomery County, Maryland, demonstrate meanwhile that harassing ordinary pet keepers with regulations and extra fees may lower euthanasia numbers at cost of creating an eventually self-defeating backlash against enforcement of any animal control or animal protection laws. In both cities, animal advocates are digging in to protect nationally noted breeding control ordinances, acclaimed when passed, but easy targets for newly elected fiscal conservatives, who recently took over both civic administrations with a pledge to cut bureaucracy. The Fort Wayne city council is contemplating closing the public animal control agency and contracting services out to the lowest bidder, while Montgomery County has been without an animal control director for more than a year, and is expected to move the animal control agency to be under the not particularly enthused supervision of the police department.
San Diego, equally politically conservative, cut dog and cat animal control intakes 26% between fiscal year 1991-1992 and fiscal year 1993-1994and cut euthanasias by 36%. As in San Francisco, where the goal of zero population control euthanasias was reached in 1994 after 18 years of aggressive San Francisco SPCA support of low-cost neutering and renter adoption, the San Diego progress was achieved without the introduction of major new laws, without tax funding, without public rancor, and indeed with so little public attention that it was well underway almost before anyone realized anything was changing.
Moreover, while the SF/SPCA perfected a program from scratch by trial and error, in San Diego results are coming fast just from using already known techniques.
NPA founder Karen Johnson and colleague Laura Lewellen set out to discover just what is happening in San Diego, along with what else will be necessary to bring San Diego to zero population control euthanasias. Modeling their study on an influential 1992 study of the cat population of the Santa Clara Valley, in northern California, they hired Nichols Research, of Sunnyvale, California, to do a telephone survey of 1,031 households, randomly selected within representative telephone prefixes.
"The number of survey calls made within each prefix was based on the number of households in each prefix, in relation to the number of households in the county," Johnson and Lewellen explain.
The findings amount to a resounding endorsement of the work of the nonprofit Feral Cat Coalition, which has neutered more than 4,000 homeless cats since 1992.
"Prior to this project," Johnson and Lewellen write, "the San Diego County Animal Management Information System reported an increase of roughly 10% per year in the number of cats handled by San Diego Animal Control shelters from 1988 to 1992. The increase peaked at 13% from fiscal year 1991 to fiscal year 1992, with 19,077 cats handled. After just two years, with no other explanation of the drop, only 12,446 cats were handled. Cat euthanasias plunged 40% from 1991-1992 to 1993-1994."
The Feral Cat Coalition found that 54% of the cats they captured for neutering were female and 46% male. Of the 1,639 females, 42% were in heat, 13% were pregnant (3.5 times the rate of pregnancies Johnson and Lewellen found in owned cats), 13% were lactating, and 4% had recently ceased lactating: a combined total of 72% in various reproductive phases. Just three percent had already been neutered.
Cost-effective
"For a cost of $163,956 (3,153 cats at $52 per cat), San Diego shelter numbers have dropped by at least 6,500 cats [per year]," say Johnson and Lewellen. "The average three-day stay for a cat in a California shelter is estimated at $70. San Diego saved $455,000 over two years. This success shows that in actuality no additional funds need be raised," for a city to move from high-volume euthanasia to high-volume neutering. "The program will pay for itself through less shelter costs. Additional funding for altering could be taken from the shelter budget."
Realizing the savings to be obtained through neutering instead of killing is only half of what policymakers must absorb to halt population control euthanasias, Johnson and Lewellen point out. The rest is the dimensions of the dog and cat population itself. In San Diego County, 54% of households keep no pets; 30% keep dogs; 25% keep cats; and an overlapping 9% keep both. These figures are below the national averages; nationally , 38% keep dogs, 32% keep cats, and 15% keep both. The difference probably reflects the tendency of San Diegoans to rent rather than own their housing: 71% of cat keepers and 85% of dog keepers are also homeowners.
However, 8.9% of all San Diego County households, renters included, feed homeless catsan average of 2.6 apiece.
The owned dog population of San Diego County comes to 374,732; the owned cat population comes to 371,928; and the number of unowned cats who are known to be fed by someone is 205,345.
"Roaming cats make up at least 35.6% of the entire known cat population in the county," Johnson and Lewellen emphasize. "It is important to stress the word 'known' here. This percentage can be considered the minimum number of roaming cats, as many cats are not actively fed by humans. Many more live wild in the countryside or forage in alleys."
As in the Santa Clara Valley, and as Carter Luke of the Massachusetts SPCA and Andrew Rowan of the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy found, within a few percentage points, in parallel 1991 studies of pet ownership in greater Boston, in San Diego 67% of owned dogs and 84% of owned cats are neutered. Most of the intact cats at any given time are too young to reproduce. The owned dog population is breeding at approximately replacement level, while the owned cat population is breeding at less than 75% of replacement level.
Neither pet reproduction nor stray animals account for much of the present San Diego dog and cat surplus, Johnson and Lewellen discovered. While pets do go astray, "The number of permanently missing dogs, with no hint at to their fate, accounts for only 0.2% of the dog population. Less than one percent either were, or could have been, handled by Animal Control. The number of permanently missing owned cats accounts for less than one percent (0.9%) of the entire owned cat population. Calculating from these figures, roughly 3,500 of the cats handled by San Diego County Animal Control and other shelters are owned, stray, or dead pet cats." This would be about one animal control cat intake in four.
In other words, 75% of the San Diego County surplus cat population comes from breeding by homeless cats, many of whom might be adopted by feedersand neuteredif more landlords were willing to rent to people who keep pets.
Interestingly enough, people who adopt cats as strays are far less likely to let them have a litter before neutering than those who get cats from any other source, Johnson and Lewellen found. Of the 19% of San Diego owned female cats who had litters prior to neutering, just 5.6% were ex-strays, compared with 10.7% bought from pet stores, 11.8% bought from breeders, 14.3% adopted from humane societies and animal control shelters, 15.2% received as giveaways from previous owners, and 20.9% from litters born to other cats in the household. In all, Johnson and Lewellan learned, 58.3% of owned feline pregnancies in San Diego County are accidental.
[Copies of the complete San Diego County Survey and analysis of the pet population are available for $10.00 from the National Pet Alliance, POB 53385, San Jose, CA 95153.]
Our study
Johnson and Lewellen didn't do a detailed survey and analysis of the interaction of cat feeders and rescuers with the homeless cat populationbut, simultaneously, ANIMAL PEOPLE did, following up on previous work.
In July 1992, after incorporating Animal People Inc. to do humane research projects, and just prior to founding the ANIMAL PEOPLE newspaper, editor Merritt Clifton and publisher Kim Bartlett commenced an unprecedented national survey of the methods and sociology of cat rescuers, with financial support from Carter Luke of the Massachusetts SPCA. The survey questionaire was published as a full-page paid advertisement in the July/August 1992 edition of Animals' Agenda magazine. Respondants were asked to return the completed form to freelance writer Cathy Young Czapla, a founding member of the ANIMAL PEOPLE board of directors, who was not identified by any organizational affiliation. The authorship and sponsorship of the survey was not revealed until the data was tabulated by Czapla, analyzed by Clifton and Bartlett, and published in the November 1992 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE. The published data was based on 169 completed questionaires; more questionaires were received later, bringing the total number of respondants up to 190.
In July 1995, with financial support from the Summerlee Foundation, ANIMAL PEOPLE mailed similar questionaires to all 190 of the 1992 respondents to find out how their experience with feral cats and cat rescue might have changed in the interim. In particular, we wanted to know whether the rescuers were handling either more or fewer cats, and to find out if their practices had changed in any manner that might account for differences.
Of the 190 questionaires distributed, 44 were returned and matched with the 1992 responses of the same individuals, for an excellent verifiable response rate of 23%. The 44 questionaires in each instance reflected the experience of 51 individuals: four males, 47 females. Thirty lived with a spouse or companion throughout 1992-1995, 16 lived alone, and one who lived alone in 1993 was married by 1995. Questions about living situations found only one important change: in 1992, just three respondants, barely 8%, had children under age 18 living at home. By 1995, eight had children under age 18 living at home. Births accounted for all of the difference.
Cat adoption
In 1992, 37 respondants kept a total of 263 companion cats, an average of seven apiece, with the median circa five. Three respondants kept more than 20. The same three respondants kept more than 20 in 1995. Overall, by 1995, 45 respondants kept 314 companion cats, an increase of 22% in the number of cat-keepers among the rescuers, and of 19% in the total number of cats kept, as the average number of cats per household remained steady at seven and the median at five.
The increase directly reflects the frequency of personally adopting homeless cats, by far the most popular rescue method. Both Carter Luke in a 1992 study of households in greater Boston and Karen Johnson of the National Pet Alliance in a 1992 study of pet ownership in the Santa Clara Valley of California, as well as Johnson and Lewellen in their San Diego County study, have established that just over a fourth of all owned cats are adopted as uninvited strays. As of 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE survey respondants had personally adopted 559 homeless cats, among whom 225, or 40%, were adult males; 190, or 34%, were kittens; and just 144, or 26%, were adult females. During the next three years, 30 of the 44 respondants (68%) adopted a combined total of 138 more homeless cats, including 37 adult males (27%); 56 kittens (41%); and 45 adult females (33%).
The 138 adoptions from the homeless population accounted for 87 replacements of companion cats already in homes, who presumably died during the survey period, and 51 cats added to the respondants' cumulative owned cat population, an average of one cat per respondant. Over the three-year period, the known attrition-and-replacement rate was 33%, or 11% per year. Although the question wasn't specifically asked, in written comments none of the respondants indicated adding cats to their household from any other source.
The rate of neutering among cats adopted from the homeless population accelerated from 76% among those adopted before 1992, to 96% of those cats old enough to be neutered who were adopted between 1992 and 1995. Both surveys found that about 2% of adopted homeless cats turned out to have already been neutered. Specific questions about reasons for neutering or not neutering were not asked, but written comments indicate that greater access to low-cost neutering is the most important reason for the increase.
The frequency with which adopted adult females turned out to be pregnant was consistent: 34% prior to 1992, 33% between 1992 and 1995.
Cat-feeding
Cat-feeding remained the second most popular rescue activity, a finding tending to validate the universality of Johnson and Lewellen's findings in the Santa Clara Valley and San Diego County that as many as nine to ten percent of all households include someone who feeds homeless cats. In 1992, 89% of ANIMAL PEOPLE survey respondants (39) had fed homeless cats at one time, at a total of 65 different sites, and 35 (80%) were actively feeding. In 1995, 28 (72%) of the onetime feeders were still actively feeding; those who indicated a reason for stopping mostly said there were no longer homeless cats at their feeding sites. One person had relocated away from a feeding site, for work-related rather than cat-related reasons. The number of feeding sites dipped 10% between the surveys, to 59.
At the time of the 1992 survey, active feeders reported feeding 393 homeless cats, including 43 kittens (11%), for an average of 11.2 homeless cats fed per person. At the time of the 1995 survey, active feeders reported feeding 435 cats, including 51 kittens (12%), for an average of 15.5 cats fed per person. The 11% increase in the number of cats fed and the 38% increase in the number of cats fed per person seem to indicate that the homeless cat population may be growing by as much as 4% per year.
But the situation is more complicated than that. For instance, the numbers also indicate that "kitten season," among homeless cat colonies, comes later than is generally supposed. Three months prior to the 1992 survey, at the often presumed peak of "kitten season," the respondants remembered feeding only 361 homeless cats, including 23 kittens (5.8%), for an average of 13.9 cats fed per person. In 1995, they fed 357 at the same time of year, indicating virtually no change, but including 29 kittens, or half again as many (9%). The data from each year suggests that while kitten births peak in late spring, resulting in more litter turn-ins at animal shelters, homeless kittens stay hidden longer, and don't become part of a feeder's count until weaned and mobile, circa eight weeks of age. The increase from 1992 to 1995 in the number of kittens discovered during the traditional "kitten season" could either be a fluke, a reflection of the growing trust of homeless mothers in feeders who have shown themselves reliable over three years or more, an indication of increased skill at finding kittens on the part of rescuers, or a reflection of increased abandonments at feeding sites of kittens born in homes.
Both the 1992 and 1995 cat feeders' kitten counts are almost certainly low relative to births. A variety of veterinary studies summarized by Ellen Perry Berkeley in her groundbreaking 1980 book Maverick Cats indicate that 50% mortality among kittens before weaning is normal, even among owned cats. Kittens who die this young usually won't be found by rescuers.
Further data on homeless cats collected during a 1991-1992 neuter/release demonstration project that Bartlett and Clifton coordinated in northern Fairfield County, Connecticut, involving 320 cats in all, essentially confirmed the estimates of 50% pre-weaning mortality: 32% mortality in kittens rescued during their first 12 weeks of life, plus a strong likelihood that many kittens died before their litters were found.
At the midwinter low end of the homeless cat population cycle, in January 1992, 32 respondants fed 357 cats, an average of 15.7 apiece. By January 1995, 30 respondents fed 339 cats, an average of just 11.3 apiece, a drop that seems best explained by the adoption data.
As of August 1991, 29 people people reported feeding 381 cats, or 13.1 apiece; by August 1994, the same people were feeding 435 cats, the same as in August 1995, for an average of 15 cats apiece. This would suggest that the homeless cat population actually peaked in 1993 or 1994, and has subsequently leveled off, possibly due to the growing popularity of neuter/release.
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