News
Feral Cats: keep furry garden adversaries at bay!
August 22, 2007, 5:52PM MT
By erin
A pilot program for relocating feral cats
A pilot program for relocating feral cats
By Kelli Ohrtman: Best Friends Network
It’s not often that people walk into a shelter and ask for a feral cat. For obvious reasons, adopters tend to gravitate toward the sweetest kitties, the ones rolling over on their backs for tummy rubs and poking their paws through the cage bars, begging to become someone’s pet. But there are thousands—maybe even millions of feral cats dropped off at shelters every year that have no chance of being adopted.
Shelly Kotter, Best Friends’ feral cat coordinator said, “According to statistics, about 60% of the animals that end up in shelters are feral cats. Which, the majority are euthanized. I’d say 99% of them, nation-wide.” This fact is one of the biggest challenges in animal welfare today. If only there was a better option for feral cats—to either keep them out of shelters altogether or to effectively place them in new locations. So Best Friends decided to give it a shot.
Shelly had been mulling over the problem for some time; not surprising when she gets calls nearly every week from people who have feral cats they want removed from their property. Sometimes people are moving, or get an order from a landlord or business owner, but no matter the reason, those are tough calls to take. But one day several months ago, she got a very different kind of call.
Natural Pest Control
Kristi Allen found out about Best Friends and the feral cat program, and called with a very different kind of problem than too many cats. Shelly said, “They have quite a large piece of property and they have a lot of rabbits and things like that that eat their produce.” Kristi and her husband already had three cats, but were hoping to find more—both because they enjoy having cats, but also because they hoped that more cats would help keep animals from mowing down their garden in the desert. They hope to start an organic farmers’ market in Page, Arizona, and have planted potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, okra, cucumbers, eggplant and more—all organic with no pesticides. But last year when they trapped five dozen chipmunks in one week, they knew they had to do something more proactive or they would have another year with no crop. So, Shelly said, “Kristi asked if we had any feral cats that needed a new home.”
It took some planning to make it happen, but after a few months, Shelly had gathered everything necessary to deliver new feral cats to Kristi’s property near Paria, Arizona. This took a lot more than simply picking up cats from one place and dropping them off at Kristi’s; it’s no small task to relocate feral cats.
Relocation isn’t done very often simply because it is difficult to do it successfully. If cats are picked up at one location and dropped off somewhere new, they’ll almost immediately try to go back to where they last had food (hence the many “Homeward Bound” stories). Unfortunately, when feral cats are placed at a new site they usually leave and either make it back to where they came from, die trying, or they’ll shack up at a new, unplanned location.
Kristi’s farm is a cat’s paradise, with a garden to attract all kinds of kitty prey, free roam of the desert with all kinds of nooks to explore, plus a cozy barn where they could curl up whenever they want. But even so, the instinct to return to the last food source would be strong.
Building a Feral-Friendly Home
Chances of successfully getting feral cats to stay at the intended site can be increased if the relocation is done a certain way. So, Shelly and a few other Best Friends staff loaded up a large, secure dog run with a roof, plus an igloo house and other shelters to hide in, litter boxes, food bowls, 20 bags of cat litter 100 pounds of dry cat food and 25 cases of wet food, and went out to Kristi’s property. The plan was to put up the enclosure and keep the cats in it for six weeks, allowing them plenty of time to decide that it was a great place to hang around, even when given the choice to leave. Shelly said, “Every day that Kristi goes out there—and she’s really good about this, she goes out and feeds her cats twice: in the morning and evening. Every day that a big yummy bowl of food shows up, they’re going to be more inclined to stay.”
Choosing the first cats also had to be done in a particular way for the greatest chance that they would stay with Kristi and not try to leave. “It’s natural instinct for a cat to start acclimating immediately to its surroundings,” Shelly said. That’s both good and bad for feral cats. If they’ve been kept at a shelter or sanctuary for a long time, they don’t do well if suddenly put back out in a colony. “It’s much better for cats to go from one colony to another with as little time in between as possible,” Shelly added.
For the relocation project, Shelly found two feral cats that needed a place to go: one had been held at a shelter instead of immediately being euthanized, in a stroke of good luck, and the other had come in through Best Friends’ feral cat program. Both had been spayed and had their ears tipped, so no matter what happens it will be clear that they’ve had the surgery. After waiting a few months for everything to fall into place, Kristi said, “I was so excited when I heard from Shelly; I called my husband and said ‘the kitties are coming!’”
Once the enclosure was put up in a stand of juniper trees for shelter and shade, the igloo placed just so, and food and water bowls set out, it was time to put the cats in. Both went immediately into hiding in the little shelters within the enclosure, and everyone crossed their fingers that the test would work.
Three weeks later…
Shelly checked in with Kristi after the first night, hearing the words she dreaded, “The tortie kitty got out of the enclosure.” Kristi said. But then she assured, “She’s still hanging around though!” Ideally, both cats would stay in the enclosure for as long as possible to really start to call the area “home.” But either way, as long as they stick around, it can be considered a success.
With the new arrivals, the chipmunks and bunnies that plagued Kristi’s farm last year have probably already beat a hasty retreat to a neighbor’s less feral-friendly property.
Photos by Marc Brown
Click here to learn more about taking care of feral cats in the Resource section of this community.