Cats For Dummies. Gina Spadafori
could be better or more convenient?
The exception: A growing number of U.S. pet supply stores refuse to sell kittens (or puppies) because of concerns over commercial breeders and pet overpopulation. Instead, they offer space in their stores to local shelters or rescue groups to reach out to prospective adopters. If you see these groups in your pet-store, you can consider them and the cats/kittens they’re placing just as desirable as other pets looking for new homes.
Your Neighbor’s (Or Coworker’s) Kittens
So what about that litter of kittens a coworker or neighbor is offering up for free? You have no real reason not to consider them if they meet your requirements and they’re healthy and well socialized.
Those are pretty big “ifs,” however. Take a kitten from a “free-to-a-good-home” source and you may end up with more problems than you imagined. If the kitten turns up positive for feline leukemia or a treatable health problem, do you have any recourse against the person from whom you got the kitten? Hardly. The chances are high the mother was never tested for disease and the father was unknown.
Consider such a litter if you want; many people have done just fine by adopting from such a source. But make sure that your kitten is healthy and socialized and try as best as you can to suggest that your pet and her littermates be the very last that the mother cat produces.
Chapter 4
The Wild Ones: Special Cats, Special Considerations
IN THIS CHAPTER
If you’ve ever put a saucer of milk out for a hard-luck kitty, or if you’re spending your lunch hour sharing sandwiches with the free-roaming cats near your office, this is the chapter for you. And we know you’re not alone: There are millions of cats in the United States who live a wild life — they’re typically called feral cats, or just ferals — and lots of people out there are helping them to survive.
Perhaps because the cat of all our animal companions chose their own path to domestication, it’s only natural that many cats should live still in the shadowed zone between tame and wild. In the alleyways of our largest cities, the parks of our ubiquitous suburbs, and the rural spaces in between, millions of cats spend their lives living just out of our reach.
The wild life is not an easy one, to be sure. Domestic cats living a wild life breed constantly, with each young mother producing two or even three litters a year. Of those kittens, relatively few may live to maturity. Those cats who do live to see their first or second birthdays struggle to live much beyond them. Starvation, disease, predators, and traffic take a heavy toll.
There are plenty of controversies around the idea of free-range cats, but we feel there are ways to mitigate many of the issues without mass slaughter. As such, we’re going to use a newer term for these cats that truly reflects their lives on the margins of human existence. Advocates for humane treatment of these cats call them community cats, and we’re choosing to do so, as well.
Cats become free-ranging when people don’t care for them, or don’t care about what happens to them. For example, people move and leave their cats behind. Or people let their cats breed and don’t pay attention to the fate of the kittens. Or people figure that their cat can do just fine on his own, and they drop the hapless kitty along a country road or in a city park because they don’t want the responsibility of caring for him anymore.
On top of everything else, these cats must contend with people who believe them to be pests and who therefore decide that the best way to deal with them is to exterminate them. Until recently, these beliefs were nearly universal. Communities dealt with the problems caused by community cats — real or imagined — by trapping and killing them.
More than a few cat lovers knew there just had to be a better way to deal with these homeless cats. These cat lovers were determined to find a better way and they did. In a little more than a decade, the future has brightened considerably, with programs designed both to lessen the numbers of cats on the street and to help the cats who remain live more comfortably.
Help for the Wild Ones
It’s only fair that community cats have human help to make their way in life easier, because humans were largely responsible for the problem in the first place. Because cats are so adaptable to their environment, and because they can manage pretty well on both sides of the line dividing “wild” from “tame,” many people let their pet cats cross that line — or throw them across it by abandoning them. And when some cats go wild, they … well, go wild. They pick up the natural wariness of all wild creatures. And they breed, and breed, and breed.
Finding the solution that isn’t
We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that any plan for dealing with community cats that includes rounding them up and killing them is based on an idea that needs updating. These catch-and-kill plans don’t work (at least not for long) because they ignore the fact that as long as people keep allowing their cats to breed, and keep dumping their unwanted cats, cat colonies will keep re-establishing themselves, year after year after year. A couple of cats, then a couple dozen, then more — and it’s time for the great round-up again.
Because we’re faced with a never-ending supply of cats, the old idea of mass killings cries out for an alternative, one that lessens the impact of these cats on neighborhoods and on their prey while