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Should feral cats be euthanized?

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Are feral cats such a menace to birds and other wildlife that they should be captured and euthanized?

That’s largely the debate spinning within conservation circles since the American Bird Conservancy, along with 200 other conservation groups including the San Diego Audubon Society, recently sent a petition to the Department of the Interior.

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The conservancy asked the agency to develop a policy for how to deal with the nation’s tens of millions of feral cats — the wild offspring of domestic cats.

It’s seeking an alternative to the popular practice of trapping such cats, spaying or neutering them and then releasing them back into the wild. Members of the coalition said that approach doesn’t reduce feral cat populations and might even encourage people to let their unwanted feline pets become strays.

The conservancy doesn’t spell out an answer to the problem, and instead asks the federal agency to come up with a plan.

But feral cat advocates say the underlying message of the campaign is to kill more cats. They argue that claims about the cats’ harm to wildlife are exaggerated.

Free-roaming cats kill about 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals each year, the conservation groups said, citing a 2013 study by the Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Most of those are the prey of feral cats, which can also carry rabies or parasites, the coalition argued in its January letter to the Interior Department.

“The only sure way to simultaneously protect wildlife and people is to remove feral cats from the landscape,” the coalition wrote.

The idea has been gaining traction internationally. In 2011, the Wildlife Society issued a position paper proposing to remove or euthanize feral cats in North America, and make feeding them illegal. New Zealand economist Gareth Morgan has proposed banning cats from the island, stating on his website that “That little ball of fluff you own is a natural born killer.”

Defenders of feral cats said the felines get a bad rap for problems caused by people, and note that habitat loss, not cats, is the No. 1 threat to wildlife.

“We just don’t think that killing is the answer to the problem,” said Laura Zapico, a board member for the San Diego-based Feral Cat Coalition, which sterilizes and returns wild felines. “We should be ensuring that wildlife is protected, but focusing just on cats and not on human impacts won’t solve the problem.”

Few topics stir protective passions like animal welfare. But the cat versus bird battle is turning fellow animal lovers into adversaries.

“It’s definitely a hot topic,” said Dan DeSousa, deputy director of the San Diego County Department of Animal Services.

With keen night vision, spring like haunches and unparalleled agility, cats are some of nature’s most exquisitely adapted predators.

It’s what makes them valuable as mousers, and also amusing to watch with a ball of string. But the hunting prowess that brought the first cats into the fold of farmers 12,000 years ago is getting them in hot water today.

They’re also prolific breeders, despite their meager resources and short life expectancy in the wild. An estimated 30 million to 80 million feral cats prowl the United States, according to the same study from the Smithsonian and Fish and Wildlife Service, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.

In San Diego, home to threatened or endangered species including the light-footed clapper rail, California least tern, Western snowy plover, Coastal California gnatcatcher, Southwestern Willow fly catcher, least Bell’s vireo and Pacific pocket mouse, they’re a persistent problem.

“San Diego is home to more threatened and endangered species than any other county in the United States,” said Chris Redfern, executive director of the San Diego Audubon Society. “Some specific species of birds that are endangered here in San Diego County, we think are probably suffering predation from free roaming cats.”

Those include endangered light-footed clapper rails, found in San Diego lagoons and marshes. Although local and federal agencies have labored to restore the hen-sized shorebirds, they may be falling prey to cats in nearby marshes, Redfern said.

They’re not alone in that peril. In the Florida Keys, feral cats devoured so many endangered Key Largo Wood rats that a captive breeding program to save the rats, “was essentially a failure,” said Grant Sizemore, the “Cats Indoors” program officer for the American Bird Conservancy. Other research found that the mere presence of a cat near a nest was enough to disrupt birds’ feeding and reproduction, Sizemore said.

“Here we are spending money on recovering an endangered species, and feral cats are hindering that effort,” Redfern said.

But Zapico pointed out the National Audubon Society lists human activity and development as the worst threats to the top 10 endangered birds in the country. Predation by cats is the consequence of our presence, she said.

Conservationists acknowledge that habitat fragmentation leaves many creatures clinging to existence, but say cats compound problem.

“These natural habitats in our urban setting are effectively islands, so they suffer from the edge effect of urban areas,” Redfern said. “Predation by feral cats is one of those edge effects.”

While no one disagrees that cats kill birds, few agree on what to do about it. Proposed solutions include public education, sterilization of feral cats and euthanasia.

Animal welfare groups advocate a process called trap-neuter-return, in hopes of reducing feral cat numbers through natural attrition. Each month the Feral Cat Coalition traps, sterilizes and vaccinates about 300 cats, then releases them back to their colonies. Over time, they say, the colonies stabilize and eventually dwindle.

But the American Bird Conservancy and other wildlife organizations point to studies that found the process doesn’t reduce cat numbers or predation. Worse, they add, feeding of feral colonies encourages pet dumping and attracts new strays.

Shelter managers said they already euthanize way more cats of all types than they save — 242,000 statewide in 2010, or an average of 663 per day. That same year, only 66,000 were adopted.

No one group in San Diego County provides a total number of all cats put down each year in the region.

The San Diego Humane Society releases alive 89 percent of all animals it receives, and works with East County Animal Rescue on its trap-neuter-return program, said spokeswoman Kelli Schry.

San Diego County Animal Control works closely with the Feral Cat Coalition and won’t euthanize any friendly, healthy cat, DeSousa said. While it seeks homes for feral cats, though, many are averse to people. So the shelter euthanized 1,000 of them last year, he said.

“There’s no one answer that will work in every situation,” DeSousa said. “Each community will have to look at their own situation. We don’t, at this time, have a feeling for what San Diego County would like us to do.”

Despite the call to action from conservation groups, the Department of the Interior also takes feral cats on a case by case basis.

“We recognize that there are many threats facing birds - whether it’s feral cats, windows, pesticides or climate change,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said in a statement. “We must take all of that into consideration as we work to ensure that these species will be around and thriving for the next generation.”

Although removal of the millions of feral cats prowling public lands isn’t possible, land managers cite some successful examples. Last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it had moved all feral cats from San Nicolas Island to a sanctuary in Ramona, paving the way for moving the island night lizard off the endangered species list. Spokeswoman Jane Hendron acknowledged, however, that the operation was better suited to an island than a mainland environment, where new cats could easily move in.

Although conservation groups and animal welfare societies urge pet owners to keep cats indoors, many owners don’t. Some shelters, including those in San Diego, adopt out “barn cats,” which live outdoors and fulfill the traditional duties of mousers. In a positive spin on the Smithsonian study statistics, one website,

Mybarncats.com, promises that “a healthy hunting cat can catch up to 1,000 rodents each year.” Even the Los Angeles Police Department this year adopted two cats to patrol the barn for its mounted platoon.

Redfern, however, cautioned that cats “kill indiscriminately, so they will kill both the problem animals that we don’t want around our farms and homes, and everything else.”

If there’s common ground on the rocky divide over feral cats, it’s on pet sterilization, which advocates say will protect both cats and wildlife.

“You’ll never, never get a handle on the feral cat population, as long as people are letting their pets give birth,” Zapico said.

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