Nēnē Gosling Death Points To Disease Carried By Feral Cats

[My 2 cents]

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.

I agree with this.  While a slow reduction might be possible under ideal conditions, those conditions never exist and you would not choose TNR if eliminating the cats were your primary goal.

If I could be convinced that the “don’t feed” policy was the solution I would get behind it, but so far there are too many things that don’t add up.  It has been stated several times in this thread and with supporting links that the best we can expect is a natural ceiling to the number of cats that the environment can support.  Nobody knows what that ceiling is until it reaches equilibrium, but it’s way more than zero.  This means that

1.  There will still be cats and the diseases that they carry.
2.  The cats will be less healthy and therefore a higher percentage will carry those diseases.
3.  The part of the environment that controls the ceiling height is mostly the food source, which consists mostly of rodents and birds.  How do we get the cats to eat only the rodents and not the birds?
4.  The ceiling height will become gradually lower as the food source diminishes and/or the diseases take over.  Is that what we want?

I don’t know how this all maths out but I’m skeptical because it looks like it has the potential, or at least the possibility of doing more harm than good.

I could suggest that every meal that is fed to a cat represents an animal in the wild that doesn’t get eaten.  OK, I made that up.  But there is a reasonable point in there.

As long as I’m making things up, how about we look at the graph again that shows 1 pair of cats being responsible for 11,000,000 kitty births.  Does this  also mean that for every pair of neuterings 11,000,000 potential kitty births are avoided?  You can’t have it just one way.

And Terracore, your statement above surprises me.  These people are contributing time and money to a cause they believe in.  They get no funding from the government, so I’m not sure what “limited resources” you are talking about.  For the record, as part of their program they also relocate as many animals as possible.  If the government was to contribute some money to this, I'd like to see it used for research into a preventative drug for Toxoplasmosis.

I think the wild card in this is the number of native and endangered species here that we are trying to protect.  This “don’t feed” policy might have fewer negative impacts in other states.