(05-05-2024, 07:48 PM)MarkP Wrote: The engineering nerd in me demands to know what environment this data applies to because if it is true for the north slope of Alaska then it is definitely not true for Florida and if it is true for Florida then it is not true for Alaska.
I also don't know anything about the graph but can speak from experience that harsh winters are what limit feral cat populations when people aren't feeding them. The young, the weak/sick, and the old will perish directly from the cold, the lack of food in the winter can make healthy cats weak enough the cold can kill them. However, it is the winters that also kill off many of the parasites in the environment that affect cats. How this relates to the tropics, I do not know. There isn't the winter cold killing cats but also nothing to diminish the parasite and disease loads in the environment. Almost all the stray/feral cats we've seen here on the farm were suffering from some kind or multiple ailments including varying degrees of blindness from LFA stings. In Alaska the strays/ferals generally looked healthy until they were found frozen. TNR programs usually include vaccinations, but they are limited in efficacy because many of them are required to be given in a series to be effective and they only get one in a TNR situation. Also many of the vaccines only work if the animals haven't acquired the disease yet and in many cases they already have them before they are caught. TNR might be effective if people stop feeding them, but I'm only aware of it being implemented in areas where people are feeding them. At this point I view TNR as a public relations effort by people who support feeding stray and feral cats and not a viable solution. The environment is already self limiting in how many cats it can support, it is the feeding that artificially changes this. Sterilizing some of them might put downward pressure on the population, but it isn't going to restore the balance of what the environment would do naturally if people weren't feeding them. TNR exists because people are feeding cats, and they want something to point to that falsely demonstrates they aren't part of the problem. TNR doesn't exist because people want a solution to the cat problem, it exists so they can justify continuing to feed them, and it drains limited resources that could otherwise be implemented towards effective animal welfare programs.