Nēnē Gosling Death Points To Disease Carried By Feral Cats

[MarkP]

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.

That ceiling got reached in the 1800s as confirmed by Samuel Clemens and the population has been bumping up against the upper limit ever since. That limit changes as food availability changes. At present armies of true believers wage a guerilla war against native species using cats, rats, and mongooses as surrogates or proxies, some people making it their life's work to spend their retirement funds purchasing bags of cat chow to dump in the park. How this is possible I don't know but in previous generations poor people tended to be thin. Today poor people tend to be obese and have diabetes through the magic of the MacDonalds Dollar Value menu. I assume that something similar is going on with cat food. Where it comes from I don't even know but if humans are willing to eat hot dogs I shudder to think what goes into cheap cat food. There now exists an entire market for a product, cheap cat food, that gets bought only to be dumped on the ground in a manner such that the demand always increases. If I were a cat food manufacturer I would definitely encourage rampant and indiscriminate feeding of feral cats. It's job security.

There have always been cats and there always will be but we don't have to make the problem worse. Intense concentrations of cats in colonies is not normal or healthy. Of course there will be disease under such conditions. If you dumped 100 bobcats in a single parking lot they would tear each other apart as they headed for the hills because millennia of evolution has made them that way, because 100 such predators in such a small area naturally creates a disease hotspot as well as a population crash of prey. When I see a bunch of feral cats at a feeding site I think of human refugee camps. Sure their existence is on some level "natural" but so is death and disease.

These days the food source is mostly cat chow.

Yes, we want the population ceiling height lower.

The idea that neutering a pair of cats means 11,000,000 fewer cats every 9 years is bogus. We never got to 11,000,000 even without neutering. The population level is primarily determined by food availability. The present day practice of FFFtnr (Feed, Feed, Feed) means more cats now than ever.

As long as I can remember the wolves of Isle Royal in Lake Superior have been held up as an example of how predators and prey exist in a rough balance. Prior to the arrival of the wolves over an ice bridge in the 40s the predominant prey base, moose, suffered excessively large boom and bust cycles due to overpopulation and starvation. When the wolves arrived these booms and crashes were reduced. The moose were not eliminated because when their population got low the wolf population was also forced to decline so there was some rough balance. It's not a perfect balance because the populations are so small that inbreeding is a problem but the point is that the wolves were never able to kill off the moose.

Here is another interesting example of wolves and prey on a small island, this time in Alaska:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/...opulation/

This time the wolves have basically driven the deer to extinction because they had another food source, sea otters, that while perhaps not unlimited nevertheless was stable despite wolf predation.