| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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habitats The Rights
(and Wrongs) Biophilia: The love of life. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson says it's an innate human attribute. But when it comes to loving animals, one person's steak and potatoes may be another's stuffed quail. Helen loves cats. For ten years she has been coming to Golden Gate Park's Stow Lake every morning with fancy food for her "children." She is Saint Francis-like in her efforts to ease their suffering, but relations with humans are more complex. Emerging from her cat feeding station in the bushes, she eyes me warily as I approach, and she declines to tell me her last name. ("Helen is enough.") She does let me tag along as she walks around the lake, chasing off gulls and feeding geese and ducks from a big bag of white bread. All the dogs here know her, it seems, and she dotes on and teases each one before feeding it a treat, studiously ignoring the owners on the distant ends of the leashes. In Golden Gate Park alone there are dozens of "cat people" like Helen. They are part of a large and growing army of animal lovers constituting what is known as the "feral cat protection movement." These animal activists are militant in defense of what they claim as their right to care for stray and homeless cats living on streets and in parks across the country, and for the rights of those cats to live unmolested by land managers and animal control agents. The oldest and highest profile national feral cat rights organization, Alley Cat Allies (ACA), based in Mount Rainier, Maryland, has become a political force to reckon with. Last year, San Francisco produced a long-term "Sustainability Plan," that recommended removing the growing populations of stray cats from the city's parks. Cat feeders and their sympathizers created such an uproar that the City Supervisors instead removed the cat provisions from the plan. Similarly, when the East Bay Regional Parks District began killing cats that were preying on wildlife in the parks last year, an overwhelming public outcry moved the Park District to put the policy on hold for a year and a half while it studied alternatives. Meanwhile, endangered Alameda whipsnakes (See "Habitats," Spring 1998) and other animals native to the East Bay Parks remain easy targets for the felines. The City of Berkeley recently passed a resolution, based on its Humane Commission's recommendation, to embrace the feeding of stray cats in the city's parks and alleyways. This move was motivated by stray cat advocates who want to protect their feline friends from being caught or killed by animal control officers.These are just a few local examples of a widespread phenomenon, says Marilyn Davis, co-founder of the Bodega Bay-based Native Species Network, which tracks the feral cat protection movement nationwide. Cities, counties, and park districts all over the country are shifting their land management priorities to accommodate cat feeding at the expense of local wildlife, she says. While ACA considers this trend evidence that we are beginning to take our responsibility for non-human creatures more seriously, Davis and others, more concerned about protecting biological diversity, believe protecting cats at the expense of wild creatures is misguided affection, and a catastrophe for native wildlife. At the center of the debate is a concept that is, like Felis catus, an exotic creature. The idea, called "managed feral cat colonies," was imported from England in the late 1980s and most visibly promoted by British wildlife biologist Roger Tabor, author of Understanding Cats and The Wild Life of the Domestic Cat. Feral cats in both urban and wild places are a fact of modern life, Tabor's followers say. Maintaining feeding colonies of homeless cats, the theory goes, is both the humane thing to do and the best way to keep the cats relatively healthy, to spay or neuter them, and to minimize the damage they inflict on native birds, small mammals, and reptiles. Alley Cat Allies' program is known as Trap-Test-Vaccinate-Alter-Release or TTVAR. Volunteer cat colony "managers" trap free ranging cats and take them to a participating veterinarian, who checks them for diseases. If healthy, they are vaccinated, and--if still reproductively intact--spayed or neutered. If they are socialized (or socializable) and otherwise adoptable, the volunteer would try to find someone to adopt them. As stated so far, ACA's agenda is uncontroversial and, simply put, necessary. But if the cats can't be adopted, they are returned to the colony, where they will continue to be fed and "managed." This last part, the "R" in TTVAR, and the feeding that follows it, are the rub. According to the Humane Society of the United States, "neuter and release programs amount to nothing more than subsidized abandonment." Davis agrees. "Protecting the wildlife under our stewardship is a public responsibility. Protecting abandoned house cats in the wild is not," says Davis. Furthermore, "promoting the mortality of protected native wildlife [by supporting cats in their midst] is not in the public interest." A recent report cites the number of free-ranging cats in North America at about 40 million. The report, written by John Coleman, a biologist with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, and University of Wisconsin at Madison wildlife ecology professor Stanley Temple, suggests that free-ranging rural cats kill over a billion small mammals and hundreds of millions of birds each year. "Many are native songbirds and mammals whose populations are already stressed by other factors," the report says. Temple also points out that that in recent times "cats may have been involved in the [worldwide] extinction of more bird species than any other cause except habitat destruction."No one has ever argued that cats are the main threat to beleaguered wildlife," Temple writes, "but they are a significant part of the problem for some species." Alley Cat Allies contests Coleman's and Temple's figures and resents their implications. "Those who want to discredit cats are grasping at straws in order to do so," writes Becky Robinson, co-director and co-founder of the organization. The real sources of native wildlife decline, she points out, are habitat loss and fragmentation as well as use of pesticides and other toxins. ACA suggests perhaps it is time to include cats in our definition of local "wildlife," and even to consider them North American natives. After all, says an ACA document, "cats have been here nearly 500 years."Davis views the introduction of cats into wild lands as yet another human-caused form of habitat destruction. She calls the argument that cats are nativized "ACA's own tortured version of wise-use arguments." Douglas Bell, a California Academy of Sciences ornithologist participating in a long-term study of white-crowned sparrow dialects in Golden Gate Park, says cats have had a devastating impact on the park's songbird population. In 1970, when the study was begun by Luis Baptista, chair of the Academy's Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy, cats were relatively rare in the park. Then Baptista could identify 30 different white-crowns on Strawberry Hill. Now Bell is lucky if he can find one. Females are especially rare. "Presumably," Bell says, "because cats are nailing the females while they are on the nest.... There wasn't a day that I went out into the study areas that I didn't see a cat around.""It's the near-ground-nesting birds like white-crowns, song sparrows, juncos, and quail that are hit the hardest by the influx of cats," says Bell. "Quail used to nest in abundance all over Golden Gate Park," he says. "Now they are virtually gone." Feeding is what makes a "colony" out of a bunch of strays. First, it brings the cats together, and defines the nexus of their territory, which, the theory suggests, they will defend against new cats. This is supposed to limit the colony's population to "manageable" numbers. Limiting populations is better than eliminating them, according to some cat activists, both because it is more humane, and because it doesn't create a "vacuum" into which new, uncontrolled strays are sucked. Alley Cat Allies's stated policy is to reduce the number of cats in a colony through altering, adopting, and attrition, ACA's Robinson says. But in practice, critics say, many colonies remain stable or grow. Ronald Jurek, wildlife biologist with the Bird and Mammal Conservation Program at the California Department of Fish and Game, says that a "vacuum effect" is created by the feeding itself. Food left in the name of "management" attracts more cats, attracts people looking for a place to abandon their own cats, and attracts other animals like raccoons, says Jurek. Left on their own, cats don't congregate in high densities and do much less damage.Protecting a wild area by supporting a colony of cat "guardians" may be like hiring a fox to defend the henhouse, but TTVAR advocates insist it is the best and most economical available option.Cat-feeding advocates also suggest that feeding diminishes a homeless cat's appetite for hunting. (Why kill birds or rabbits when you can eat ground horse meat and pig snouts?) This question has been answered by numerous studies, showing that cats hunt because they are hunters, not because they are hungry. In fact, beefing a cat up with supplemental food just makes it a stronger, more efficient predator. Feeding cats also gives them a competitive edge over local wildlife, sustaining them when drought or other pressures depress wild populations. The healthy, human-fed cats will continue to hunt the remaining, but increasingly rare, native prey. Cole Hawkins, a Texas A&M researcher, examined the abundance of rodent and bird populations in both cat-occupied and cat-free areas of the East Bay Regional Parks. "There were significantly more birds in the no-cat areas," Hawkins says. "I never saw any California quail in the cat area. There were lots in the no-cat area. Same with thrashers. Same with juncos." Though Hawkins's research does not show an overall decline in rodent populations, it does show a shift in the ratio of native to exotic species. The native harvest mice and deer mice declined in the cat area, while exotic house mice, which have co-evolved with cats for thousands of years and may be better equipped to avoid them, actually increased. According to Fish and Game, stray cat populations threaten a litany of endangered species: California clapper rail, San Clemente Island loggerhead shrike, Pacific pocket mouse, riparian brush rabbit, salt marsh harvest mouse, Alameda whipsnake, and California least tern. But "it is the diminishment of local diversity that may be the biggest cost of allowing cat colonies," says Jurek. Gordy Slack is an associate editor at California Wild and the editor of this website. |
Summer 1998
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