Domestication is a characteristic of a species that has been selectively bred for generations. All housecats (Felis Catus) alive today are domesticated. It does not make sense to talk of individual cats being domesticated or not. They all are. The only exceptions would be truly isolated populations that have existed for many generations.
Individual domesticated animals can be feral or not depending on whether they were socialized to humans during a critical couple week long period in late infancy. The difference in behavior is reported to be dramatic. If someone says "My buddy Felix used to be feral but now he snuggles on my lap at night" in truth he was never feral, just stray and abused. If he was truly feral he would be clawing you to get away.
Those who support maintaining cat colonies always quote the same cherry-picked numbers for how quickly unsterilized cats reproduce. They do indeed reproduce quickly but the numbers could not be the same for the Gulf states vs the Yukon. Furthermore the implication is that if you sterilize a pair of cats today then you have reduced the number of future cats by XYZ. Nobody ever goes back and does the math from a point in the past to see whether such simply models make sense. Well, they don't. In 1866 Samuel Clemens visited Hawaii and reported: “In Honolulu, I saw cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep.”
So let us consider that there have been cats in Hawaii for at least 150 years and for the majority of that time nobody was spaying or neutering them. If the simple models used to bamboozle the faithful were true then every square foot of Hawaii would by now be buried many feet deep in cats, literally.
The missing ingredient is the degree to which the availability of food and control of disease or lack thereof has controlled the population. Reducing feeding would reset the sustainable population of cats back.
Yes, cats would starve but they were starving before. Also the Trap, Neuter, Return paradigm is absolutely founded on the premise of maintaining TNR cats who have adequate food while they slowly die of other causes but that these TNR cats must be in place to "keep other cats out". So those other cats must starve. The Roman Colosseum style struggle over food is apparently part of the fun for somebody (obviously not the cats) otherwise why leave the cats in place? We have not even discussed the collateral damage on native species yet.
Cats pooping outside is a huge problem. Sea mammals having toxoplasmosis is like finding gramma, bedridden in a nursing home for years, cut in half with a Katana. There is a huge element of WTF that ought to be followed up on. Something is grossly out of place. There are also questions of when schizophrenia really became prevalent among humans and an argument could be made that it was in relatively modern times when population densities of both humans and cats increased and we began keeping cats inside with us.
Individual domesticated animals can be feral or not depending on whether they were socialized to humans during a critical couple week long period in late infancy. The difference in behavior is reported to be dramatic. If someone says "My buddy Felix used to be feral but now he snuggles on my lap at night" in truth he was never feral, just stray and abused. If he was truly feral he would be clawing you to get away.
Those who support maintaining cat colonies always quote the same cherry-picked numbers for how quickly unsterilized cats reproduce. They do indeed reproduce quickly but the numbers could not be the same for the Gulf states vs the Yukon. Furthermore the implication is that if you sterilize a pair of cats today then you have reduced the number of future cats by XYZ. Nobody ever goes back and does the math from a point in the past to see whether such simply models make sense. Well, they don't. In 1866 Samuel Clemens visited Hawaii and reported: “In Honolulu, I saw cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep.”
So let us consider that there have been cats in Hawaii for at least 150 years and for the majority of that time nobody was spaying or neutering them. If the simple models used to bamboozle the faithful were true then every square foot of Hawaii would by now be buried many feet deep in cats, literally.
The missing ingredient is the degree to which the availability of food and control of disease or lack thereof has controlled the population. Reducing feeding would reset the sustainable population of cats back.
Yes, cats would starve but they were starving before. Also the Trap, Neuter, Return paradigm is absolutely founded on the premise of maintaining TNR cats who have adequate food while they slowly die of other causes but that these TNR cats must be in place to "keep other cats out". So those other cats must starve. The Roman Colosseum style struggle over food is apparently part of the fun for somebody (obviously not the cats) otherwise why leave the cats in place? We have not even discussed the collateral damage on native species yet.
Cats pooping outside is a huge problem. Sea mammals having toxoplasmosis is like finding gramma, bedridden in a nursing home for years, cut in half with a Katana. There is a huge element of WTF that ought to be followed up on. Something is grossly out of place. There are also questions of when schizophrenia really became prevalent among humans and an argument could be made that it was in relatively modern times when population densities of both humans and cats increased and we began keeping cats inside with us.