Enforcing Good Feline Citizenship:
One Community's Purely Voluntary
Approach that Didn't Work

Tweener's Few Wacky Cat Feeders Keep Having Things Their Own Way: Strays and Kittens Galore

Welcome to Tweener, a dusty little byway on the Oregon Trail where dwell approximately 5,000 halfway honest souls. (Or maybe it would be more accurate to state that about half of the souls are fully honest while the other are fully dishonest. Whatever.)

Tweener isn't the town's real name, of course. I just call it that because I'm basically a chicken who doesn't want to field calls from residents who have become irate over unfavorable publicity posted on the Web.

For our purposes, though, "Tweener" fits as a pseudonym because, about three years ago, the people here backed off when they were about to institute some controls, via city ordinance, over an out-of-control cat population. The city council and the town's most feline-afflicted citizens were dissuaded at the last possible moment by a group of highly vocal, self-proclaimed cat-lovers who assured all concerned parties that a more viable alternative was to allow these vocal ones to step in wherever cats were causing problems around town. They proposed immediate formation of a volunteer organization that would start and maintain a community shelter for cats, mediate any disputes between neighbors concerning cats, and, almost as an afterthought, work to promote more responsible cat ownership, i.e., a spay/neuter ethic.

The city council bought in, the cat ordinance was scrapped, and the Tweener community embarked on this newly mapped course, one which steered somewhere between doing nothing about the cat problem and codifying at least a few guidelines for dealing with at-large cats in areas where the outdoor feline population has swelled beyond the nuisance threshold.

Initially, the volunteer organization pursued its worthwhile mission with considerable enthusiasm. It struck a one-dollar-per-year lease with the city for a small storage building, which the group cleaned and painted inside and out. The volunteers brought in double-decker rows of spacious, stainless steel cages, obtained an old but serviceable refrigerator for storing medicines, and purchased litter boxes and bowls and all the other accoutrements normally required for cleanly housing cats indoors.

The group elected officers, began collecting dues and holding regular membership meetings, and periodically held community fund-raisers to boost its coffers. During its first half-year of existence, this new organization appeared, to outsiders at least, to be adequately manned and adequately motivated to serve the role it had voluntarily assumed in the community.

Closer to the ground, however, there was trouble in this organizational paradise. It turned out that most of the group's initial members weren't really all that interested in performing all the thankless grunt-work that comes with running a shelter -- namely, cleaning the insides of the cats' cages several times per week, scooping out litter boxes, giving food and water every day, and periodically transporting cats to an out-of-town veterinarian who offered low-cost spays and neuters. Why weren't they interested in performing the work? -- because their own motivation for joining had nothing to do with solving the community's cat overpopulation problem, that's why.

In truth, a number of the group's initial supporters had only gotten involved to prevent passage of the proposed city ordinance. Reason: It threatened to moderate these people's own habit of harboring an excessive number of cats. So these would-be volunteers, who didn't actually care at all about reducing the pooping, spraying, fighting and other nuisance behaviors residents had complained about in connection with the cat population explosion, quickly vanished into the woodwork once the ordinance threat was removed. Selfishly, they resumed their inconsiderate, unneighborly ways, putting out food (but providing little or no other care) for semi-owned strays which continued to breed in unreasonable numbers, perpetuating the cycle by which nuisance stench and noise are the inevitable results.

Once all its insincere riff-raff had been peeled away, what remained of our intrepid little community group was little indeed, but this committed core tried to proceed with its mission anyway. What this meant was a significantly increased workload for those who had remained. Instead of having half a dozen or more reliable people to split a seven-day-per-week work schedule at the shelter, you now would only see two, maybe three different vehicles making stops there during the course of a week. Fewer members meant decreased collections of dues, of course, and since the remaining members were already devoting so much of their free time simply to maintaining the shelter, who had any time or gumption left over for planning and carrying out fund-raisers?

The committed few plugged along as best they could. We can't forget that a big part of the job the group took on involved cleaning up trouble spots in the town. If there were unwanted feral cats, the group's stated policy was to trap them. If some household considered itself to have ownership of a colony of ferals or semi-socialized cats that were undertended (read that, "unvaccinated, unspayed/ unneutered"), the group would seek that household's cooperation in reducing the locality's problem, asking these cat "owners" to identify any animals they were willing to permanently part with while beginning a process of gradually spaying and neutering the rest.

The organization addressed a few different hot spots around town during its first year. In most cases the group was able to simply trap problem cats that no one was laying claim to, and in these situations the operation was a relative success.

Unfortunately, however, the city's two most severe problem spots involved cat colonies of the household-hosted variety and in its dealings with this category, the volunteer group's limitations quickly grew apparent. At one of these hot spots, the cat colony's host declined to even discuss spaying and neutering with a group representative. At the second location, the hosting household decided to break off the population control effort and resume its old habits after initially cooperating with a few spays and neuters.

Now, more than two years later, neighboring residents at both problem locations report that colony-hosting households continue to proceed along their merry old courses, putting out food for whatever cat shows up (and one of the hosts even bangs a cat food can outdoors twice a day to attract the maximum number of strays at feeding time), and, worst of all practices, harboring multiple new litters of kittens each year while making no attempt to find homes for these offspring, exacerbating the neighborhood's overpopulated condition all the more. And it goes without saying that colony hosts aren't assuming responsibility for spaying or neutering the significant number of virtually unowned felines that are thus added to the mix.

One colony site is primarily hosted by one irresponsible household. The other site, located about three city blocks away, constitutes what shelter volunteers consider the most severe problem breeding ground in town. This latter colony is more or less jointly hosted by three households, two of which are adjacent to each other.

It certainly bears noting that one of the three hosts of the colony is none other than the household headed by the city's second-ranking non-elected official, giving some idea of how little progress has been made in convincing local citizens of the importance of spaying and neutering ALL of their pets. (In the case of this city official's family, a few favorite cats are altered, but most of the offspring from multiple semi-stray litters born on the premises each year are fed and played with but are otherwise deemed free agents as they grow to adulthood, allowed to roam and breed unchecked).

As of this writing, in the early fall of 1999, the volunteer group's efforts to apply the brakes to the rampant cat breeding occurring at the two principal hot spots mentioned above are largely a failure. During the past two years, households which aren't hosts have trapped and turned over literally dozens of stray cats and kittens, but a population control strategy which relies so completely on trapping while lacking any significant spay/neuter component at the source can only offer temporary relief. In this situation, the best efforts of volunteers are doomed to frustration in the long run as an unabated influx of cats at the shelter swamps the supply of local adopters, drains monetary resources (including city-supplied funds for euthanasias) to tend to the constant full house of felines in the volunteer group's care, and in time even reduces the supply of volunteers themselves as some grow so discouraged at the lack of any meaningful progress, they reach a point of burnout and quit.

Meanwhile, the people who have always enjoyed blithely feeding the community's strays as if the town's neighborhoods possessed an infinite carrying capacity for felines continue to have things all their own way: unspayed and unneutered cats and kittens galore.

--Pepper Larkham

Postscript: Here are a couple of additional notes on the state of affairs in Tweener:

(1) In recent months word has been received of a third hot spot, located on the opposite end of town from chronic problem sites one and two. Reportedly, chronic area number three is being hosted by a man who ACTIVELY ENCOURAGES strays to breed. Whenever he notices that a female has come into heat, he places the female together with unneutered tomcats inside a closed shed to increase the likelihood the female will become impregnated. (This measure would seem to be overkill for achieving litters. Toms will find and mount in-heat females, whose nature is to fully oblige, without any assistance in the matter from humans.)

(2) One of the volunteer group's principal founders, who has continually served as a leader in the organization, has set up a de facto satellite shelter at home. While this takes some of the pressure off of the recognized shelter, which, as mentioned, is often filled to capacity, the residential neighborhood where the volunteer leader lives is now beset by an unreasonably high number of cats. The leader's home doesn't actually have the cages and other equipment needed to keep the cats housed continually indoors, you see, so many of the cats are allowed to run at large in the neighborhood. The cats are, for the most part, spayed and neutered, but the sheer number of them creates a nuisance for neighbors. (It's typical for the leader to shelter 20 or more cats at one time).