Читать книгу Cats For Dummies - Gina Spadafori - Страница 58

If you accept the idea that community cats will always be around, then wouldn’t it be better to make dealing with them easier on the environment, the animal control budget, and the cats themselves? Enter the idea of managed care for feral cats — Trap, Neuter, and Release.

Trap, neuter, and release (often just called TNR) has become the favored way of humanely dealing with wild cats. Millions of people feed community cats — from the person who sets out some tuna for the cat who hangs around the back door, to those dedicated souls you can find at any pet-supply store, stocking up on large bags of whatever food’s on sale. What if these caretakers went one step further and slowed down the rate of reproduction? Captured, socialized, and found homes for kittens? Could a cat colony be managed in place? Some tried it, and the answer soon became obvious: Yes, there was a better way.

The people who hauled 20-pound bags of cat food to the cats they wouldn’t let starve, who named the adults, and who tried to find homes for the kittens decided to try an extraordinary idea: Alter the cats and let them go again. (We talk about how to manage free-ranging cats with this humane strategy later in this chapter.)

Spaying or neutering a wild cat never seemed to be worth the effort, at least as far as officials in many communities were concerned. If you trapped a wild cat, the reasoning went, killing him seemed to make more sense than altering him. With so many more docile cats and kittens around, a wild-born cat is a poor prospect as a pet. So why not just do him in?

Perhaps they were just trying to end the heartbreak of seeing litter after litter of kittens born into a very hard life. But before too long, some community cat caretakers started realizing that their efforts to control the population were working out better than they had imagined possible. They discovered that a policy of “trap, neuter, and release” goes a long way toward taming the problems of cats gone wild.

If you’re one of those people with a soft spot for ferals, you’re certainly in good company. One national group has estimated that there are more than 50 million community cats, and every community has people who feed them.