- Hello Jeff -
-
- This is an important article even though
it is two years old. People are going to panic here, like they are in
Europe, when the bird flu arrives. Rather than euthanize their cats,
they'll think release to the wild is a good thing. It is not. More cats
mean more bird flu cases in cats. And more mammalian cases mean the virus
learns how to more easily transmit from mammal-to-mammal.
-
- People do NOT have to euthanize or release
cats to the wild. All they have to do to make bird flu risk a zero is
keep pets INDOORS. Simple.
-
- Patricia Doyle
-
- First, let's take a look at world cat
populations at of 2005 -
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- World Top 10 Countries With Most Pet
Cat Population
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- USA 76,430,000
- China 53,100,000
- Russia 12,700,000
- Brazil 12,466,000
- France 9,600,000
- Italy 9,400,000
- UK 7,700,000
- Ukraine 7,350,000
- Japan 7,300,000
- Germany 7,700,000
-
- http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/
countries-with-most-pet-cat-population.html
-
-
- A Tale Of Too Many Kitties
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- By Jennifer Smith
- Staff Writer
- 12-14-3
-
- The feral peril: Ecologists worry about
cats in the wild
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- Fickle pet owners have dumped ferrets,
newborn chickens, and even a boa constrictor in the woods at the Science
Museum of Long Island in Plandome. But the exotic interloper that troubles
museum director John Loret the most is a small carnivore of North African
extraction: Felis catus, the domestic cat.
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- Loret bears no inherent ill toward his
handful of feline squatters. But the scientist in him bemoans the effect
the cats have on other creatures dwelling in the museum's 10-acre woodlot,
which functions as a nature preserve and, less happily, as a live game
market for strays like the burly gray tabby that prowls around the archaeology
lab. "They're killing the wildlife, they're killing birds," he
said. "If I could move them someplace else, I'd be happy."
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- The problem plagues wildlife managers
and cat lovers all over Long Island, where shelter workers estimate there
are thousands of unwanted cats and few places to put them.
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- In Hempstead, strays sun themselves on
the roof of the town hall.
-
- In Brookville, they skulk in the woods
at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University.
-
- And from Jones Beach to Westhampton Dunes,
colonies of hungry felines wander barrier beaches where endangered piping
plovers and terns come to nest.
-
- Animal shelters in Nassau and Suffolk
counties already overflow with adult cats and kittens; many face euthanasia
if no homes are found for them. So cats cluster around Dumpsters and garbage
cans and, increasingly, around feeding stations set up by cat lovers. Many
of them have lived outside of human contact for so long that they've become
feral - and virtually unadoptable.
-
- Few people want to kill Fluffy. But cats
living outside of domesticity have wedged themselves into the local animal
pantheon, half-wild creatures that rely to some degree on human handouts
but still compete with other small carnivores such as weasels, skunks,
and foxes for their share of small mammal and bird prey.
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- Ecologists fear the impact free-ranging
cats may have on native wildlife. "All along the shorelines, the piping
plovers, the least terns, they have no choice," says Linda Winter,
director of the Cats Indoors campaign for the American Bird Conservancy
in Washington D.C. "They've got no where else to go. And when you
have cats in and around the habitat it doesn't become a wildlife preserve,
it becomes a death trap."
-
- The volunteers who run the outdoor feline
soup kitchens say they are doing their best to humanely handle the problem
without punishing the cats. Ruth Weiss, the late vice president of Little
Shelter in Huntington, was a passionate defender of cats. In an interview
before her death this year, she said that humans are responsible for their
being here in the first place. "We've created a dependency and then
abdicated our responsibilities."
-
- The feral cats living behind a Copiague
shopping center snake out from the scrub in twos and threes as Joan Cording's
red minivan bounces up the rutted, dead-end dirt road toward them.
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- "Hello, you gorgeous, gorgeous angels,"
she says. Cording, of Amity Harbor, is one of the many, predominantly female,
cat lovers who feed, neuter and worry over large groups of strays in Nassau
and Suffolk counties. Her vehicle is a cat rescue center on wheels, piled
high with cages and carriers, sacks of dry food, tuna cans, bags of cat
litter, and an assortment of rolled-up rugs and blankets.
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- As she pulls out her supplies, more feline
faces - gray, ginger, tabby, calico - peek out shyly from a tumbledown
shed of gray, weathered boards and an old boat fixed up with pet beds inside
the hold.
-
- Cording parks about 20 feet from the
end of the lane and pulls two boxy wire traps from the back of the van.
Setting the traps down by a fence, she baits each one with a can of tuna
and carefully dribbles an alluring trail of fishy water near the front
entrance of the trap. About 20 of the 40-odd cats in this colony already
have been trapped and neutered. She intends to get two more today.
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- Groups of fuzzy kittens romp in the clear
fall sunshine. A few dozen adults drawn by the scent of food pad warily
through the yellow leaves to investigate. They look like typical housecats,
but they act as skittish as wild animals. In truth they are a bit of both.
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- Some of Long Island's outcast felines
are simply lost or abandoned pets forced to fend for themselves outdoors.
Others might be second-generation ferals, the offspring of free-roaming
cats who know no other way of life. Regardless of their origins, cats living
in the wild are able to scratch out a living at the edges of suburbia where
other pets - say, a Bichon Frise or dwarf hamster - might perish.
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- Despite thousands of years of living
with humans, domestic cats have a singular ability to shift from the hearth
to the wild and back again in just a few generations. Even the most pampered
lap cat can act like a feline double agent, trotting outside after a sedate
dinner of wet food to stalk birds and rodents, or conducting yowling, unsupervised
courtships in backyards and alleys under the cover of night.
-
- Feral cats are the other side of the
coin, hiding in culverts and sheltering in bushes and trees on public parklands.
In rural pockets of Long Island they take over abandoned farm buildings
and prowl fields for mice and voles.
-
- Consummate hunters, cats inherited their
survival skills from their wild ancestor: Felis silvestris. This spotted
and solitary African wildcat still roams Kenya, occasionally mating with
its domestic descendants, which are considered a separate species. Felis
silvestris' first brush with Homo sapiens came relatively early - archaeological
evidence indicates humans may have raised wildcat foundlings as pets as
far back as 6000 BC. Early agricultural societies also used them as working
animals to patrol granaries and fields for rodents.
-
- Revered by the ancient Egyptians as gods,
cats eventually spread through the Mediterranean along trade routes. The
Romans preferred ferrets and polecats for rodent control but enjoyed feline
companionship; by the time the Roman Empire collapsed, cats could be found
across Europe and the British Isles.
-
- The domestic cat first set paw in the
New World centuries ago, brought to North America by European settlers.
Since then, cats have settled into a curious place in Long Island's ecology.
-
- As far as transplants go, "they're
a very successful animal," John Loret said ruefully. Housecats and
feral cats both exist outside the normal parameters of natural supply and
demand. Free-living cat populations fed by humans far exceed the carrying
capacity of local ecosystems, even in lean years.
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- "They're incredibly stealthy, and
very efficient killers," said Steven Mars, a former supervisor at
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Islip field office who is now stationed
in New Jersey. "Think about the moles and the voles they eat. These
are prey for owls and hawks and eagles, all of whom are now competing with
the cats for food sources."
-
- That's not to say feral cats have it
easy. The lot of a cat exposed to the elements and lacking veterinary care
tends to be nasty, brutish and short. With a life span of four to five
years, a free-ranging feline lives only one-third as long as its housecat
brethren.
-
- Ferals make up in fertility what they
lack in longevity. The bobcats that once prowled Long Island each produced
one litter of three kittens once a year. An unspayed domestic cat can have
three or four litters of six to eight kittens in the same period. According
to the Suffolk County SPCA, in six years a pair of cats with offspring
can produce 420,000 kittens.
-
- Strays have been fixtures in North America
ever since their introduction to the continent. But the concern over the
ecological impact of free-ranging cats is fairly recent.
-
- In the late 1980s and in the '90s, American
and British scientists began to examine how the hunting practices of domestic
cats might affect native fauna, particularly birds. Because most studies
focused on specific regional ecosystems - one English village, or a small
island off the coast of New Zealand - it is difficult to apply the results
more generally. What did become clear was that in certain situations, feral
and free-roaming cats could pose a threat to species already in danger
of extinction.
-
- A few years ago, at Gateway National
Recreation Area in Breezy Point, Queens, workers came across a feral cat
den containing 17 dead terns slain by a mother and her five kittens.The
den was near a tern breeding site that had been used by as many as 800
birds. None breed there now.
-
- "Cats preying on birds probably
don't amount to much more than 4 percent of the bird fatalities over a
year," said John Bianchi, director of communications for the Audubon
Society. "But it's a controllable number."
-
- Free-ranging cats are what biologists
call mesopredators: bantamweight carnivores such as raccoons, foxes and
skunks that prey on small mammals and birds. In a normally functioning
habitat, these small meat-eaters are kept in check by the availability
of prey and the pressure exerted by larger carnivores.
-
- But Long Island today is not a normally
functioning habitat. Local heavyweights such as wolves and bobcats have
long since been killed off. Free-ranging cats may skirmish with raccoons
or large dogs, but the most they have to fear are malicious humans or oncoming
cars. Although raccoon or skunk populations tend to decline when prey is
scarce, cats supported by human food sources remain numerous and continue
to hunt.
-
- Cunning carnivores that can kill as many
as eight small animals in a day, cats continue to hunt, regardless of how
recently they have eaten. At the Science Museum of Long Island, the ferals
fed by volunteers have left a trail of broken rodents and birds in their
wake. "They don't eat them," Loret said, "they just kill
them."
-
- Around the same time that feral cats
began to concern the scientific community, animal lovers began to experiment
with a new technique aimed at keeping feral populations down while letting
healthy cats live out their lives.
-
- The system is called "trap, neuter,
release" - TNR to its practitioners. They trap feral cats, euthanize
the very sick, neuter the healthy ones, and then return them to the outdoors.
Volunteers provide the neutered cats with food and makeshift shelters and
remove kittens so they can be socialized and adopted.
-
- There is disagreement over whether TNR
helps cut down on feral population or actually encourages cat colonies
to grow, but there is little hard data to back either claim.
-
- What some see as a community service,
others regard as subsidizing a non-native species at the expense of native
birds and mammals.
-
- The problem becomes even knottier when
irresponsible pet owners - perhaps laboring under the misconception that
setting an animal loose outside is the same thing as returning it to its
natural habitat - drop cats off at public parks and nature preserves.
-
- "Nobody wants cats killing endangered
species," said Donna Wilcox, executive director for Alley Cat Allies,
a national feral cat advocacy group that supports TNR. Still, she and others
insist that habitat erosion threatens native species far more than predation
by feral cats.
-
- The juxtaposition of cat colonies and
endangered species makes wildlife managers anxious, to say the least.
-
- Jonathan Cohen, a researcher who has
worked with piping plovers at Westhampton Dunes for the past few years,
said although the exact impact can be hard to quantify, the presence of
cats often coincides with declines in nesting bird populations. He once
saw a cat batting a plover egg around like a soccer ball. "We did
have one adult female piping plover that we're 95 percent sure was killed
by a cat," he add. "Just the head and wings were sitting on the
nest, the eggs were all crushed and there were cat tracks all over it."
-
- Controversy flared in 2002 over a feral
colony at Cedar Beach near Mount Sinai that workers for the New York State
Department of Environmental Conservation say frightened off a formerly
thriving population of nesting plovers.
-
- A 2002 survey by the New York State parks
department found that Long Island has more parks reporting feral cats than
other regions in the state, with Bethpage, Jones Beach and Captree state
parks hosting between 10 to 20 felines. This summer, workers at Captree
State Park dismantled shelters that volunteers had built for the feral
colony.
-
- Tom Lyons, the director of the state
parks' environmental management bureau, says that the opposing sides are
trying to work out a compromise to humanely remove the cats from sensitive
areas. He did not specify where that new home might be.
-
- A muscular gray tabby with a head like
a football steps into one of the traps at the Copiague colony and picks
at the tuna, careful not to step on the strip of metal that will trip the
door closed. Startled by a noise, he triggers it anyway a few minutes later.
-
- The door slams shut. Hissing with fear,
he rockets frantically from one end of the two-foot long box to the other.
Cording clucks sympathetically and lowers a blanket over the cage to calm
him down; sometimes, she says, the cats bash their noses bloody against
the wire in their frenzy to escape. He will be neutered by a veterinarian
the following day. But he is too wild to be put up for adoption. After
a week of recovery in one of the many blanket-lined cages that fill Cording's
garage, he will return to the outdoor colony.
-
- Those who work with ferals say the majority
of adult cats in colonies are too fearful to make suitable pets - they
howl and fret, shrinking from human touch and dashing back outside at the
first opportunity. "There's something desperate about them, they're
tense," said Michelle Coffaro, a sign-language interpreter who feeds
colonies and rehabilitates feral kittens as a volunteer for the Nassau
County SPCA. "It's almost like they have a primitive place in them
that they can reach into if they have to."
-
- But feralness is by no means a permanent
state. Some adult cats come to know, if not fully trust their caretakers,
and can be coaxed, with patience that may take years, into passable approximations
of pets. Wild-living kittens are less trouble to socialize, provided they
are exposed to people before they're 8 or 9 weeks old.
-
- The passage from feral cat to housecat
is a labor of love on the part of volunteers, who take the kittens to the
vet for checkups and shots, then foster them until they are ready for a
new home. About 15 kittens from the Copiague colony are adopted each year.
Last Christmas, two of them found new homes after being displayed at a
Bay Shore Petco.
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- At the Science Museum overlooking Manhasset
Bay, John Loret has forged a compromise of sorts with the five or six cats
on the grounds.
-
- Three have been corralled by volunteers
into relatively luxurious captivity in a concrete-floored enclosure that
once housed the museum's red-tailed hawk.
-
- The cat house has a roof, wire fencing
on three sides and a long, narrow back room to shelter its feline inhabitants
from the elements. At about 70 feet by 12 feet, it is larger than some
Manhattan apartments and, from a feline perspective, perhaps better appointed.
There are a number of large, fairly clean litter boxes, a scattering of
dog beds with cozy blankets, and no end of carpeted shelves and the multi-tiered
structures known in the pet trade as "cat condos."
-
- >From these vantage points the three
inmates perch and gaze at their free-ranging counterparts, including a
shy black and white cat and the aforementioned gray tabby who continue
to outwit their human guardians.
-
- Loret would rather see them roam free
than face euthanasia in a county shelter. "They won't go into the
traps, they're too smart," he said with a sigh and a shrug, both laced
with the universal frustration of someone who has tried to make a cat do
something it does not want to do.
-
- Copyright © 2006, Newsday, Inc.
- http://www.newsday.com/other/special/naturalworld/ny-nw10feral1
43576067dec14,0,4830202.story?coll=ny-nw-nav-promo
-
- Patricia A. Doyle, DVM, PhD- Bus Admin,
Tropical Agricultural Economics Univ of West Indies
- Please visit my "Emerging Diseases"
message board at:
-
- http://www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/index.php
-
- Also my new website:
- http://drpdoyle.tripod.com/
- Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
- Go with God and in Good Health
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