There are lots of reasons why I don’t support Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) programs in Australia, and neither does our RSPCA.
TNR programs aim to stop a cat population from growing, in the hopes that it will shrink over time as the cats die a ‘natural’ death. Firstly, a ‘stable feral cat population’ isn’t an appropriate goal for most of Australia’s ecosystems, eradication of feral and roaming cats is, as much as that’s harsh to say. Secondly, a ‘natural’ death is without human intervention, and that’s not as pleasant as it sounds, especially in a country full of venomous things and very large birds of prey.
TNR programs can only work, to the degree that they do in the first place, if you couple it with public education about responsible pet ownership and low cost desexing of owned pets. It can never work on its own because the cat population will be continuously topped up from the owned cat population.
Given we have limited resources, we generally put most of those resources towards public education, desexing vouchers for those on low income, and trap and euthanise or shoot feral cats.
Sounds harsh. But our feral cats are often outright dangerous to humans, and if released they continue to eat wildlife. A desexed cat needs to eat less and will occupy territory that a younger, non-desexed cat now can’t have, potentially reducing their reproductive ability which is why some places still do it. But these animals are generally not just housecats that are ‘lost’. They’ve been adapted to our environment for multiple generations and we shouldn’t have any of them, especially with their ability to spread toxoplasma through our wildlife.
In suburban scenarios, for example where we have lots of factories, there are local council incentives for factories and businesses to take ownership of local cats they’d been feeding, whether for company or rodent control. These cats get desexed and microchipped, with the understanding that the business is responsible if it’s sick or injured and needs vet care. They often don’t get much care, but coming in for euthanasia beats dying slowly in a corner somewhere.
For the amount of time, money, professional services and effort we would need to apply to run TNRs successfully, we could better allocate that to targeting the owned cat population and removing the feral cats as much as possible. It’s tempting to think ‘all cats must be saved because they’re cats’ but the scale of the problem is just too big for that sort of one on one solution.
People also like to feed ‘stray’ cats because it makes them feel good inside, even though they never take responsibility for the rest of the cat’s health and welfare. Just giving an animal food is not enough to be caring for it, in my opinion. I find it really quite foreign that TNR seems to be such a big thing in the USA, but I guess you already have native feline predators. We don’t.
‘Feral’ cats in my experience are either semi-adapted wild things which will continue wreaking damage on the environment, or they’re really housecats out of their depth that desperately need a human custodian. It’s not fair in either situation to just release them back to the ‘wild’ to fend for themselves. Either they will do badly and suffer, or they will do well and cause our wildlife to suffer.
So our current solution is just to attempt to remove them from the wild. Rehome what you can, but don’t release anything back.
@ephuyrie
Can’t tag you because you’ve blocked me over this post. Thanks for doing that any trying to prevent me seeing the atrocious language in your reply. I had hoped you mistakenly thought you were being funny with that, but I guess not.
I have not done the research, I have read the research. Seen it presented at conferences. You’d probably be interested in them.
Sure, Australia has large predators that can eat cats, but not terribly many do.
Our birds of prey are geared towards herbivores, and will go for a rabbit before a cat. Cats prefer forested areas where the larger raptor species have a harder time hunting anyway.
Dingos are not everywhere or ubiquitous. They will hunt cats, but interestingly the cat population changes its behavior to only hunt when the dingoes are less active. There are still cats there hunting, it’s just at different times of the day and subsequently different things.
In fact, research suggests and basically proves that for improving biodiversity in Australian ecosystems and protecting our endangered mammals, removing the cats is the single best thing you can do, followed by introducing real dingoes. (Dingoes affect the larger grazers which eat the habitat of the smaller herbivores)
Most ‘dingoes’ running around Australia are really feral dog hybrids, which is a whole other problem. While they can kill a cat, cats are not their preferred prey.
Our crocodiles are only in a tiny portion of our continent. Also ambush predators, they hunt whatever comes to the water edge and given the choice, a larger thing is easier to grab and hold.
Areas of Australia, Tasmania for example, don’t have any predator bigger than a Tasmanian Devil, and their population is struggling enough as it is, so cats have a completely free reign there.
Just because a predator is capable of killing a cat, doesn’t mean they do so at a significant rate to suppress the population. If they did, maybe we wouldn’t have such a massive problem in the first place.
The spread of Toxoplasma is also a significant issue because Australian native animals have not co-evolved alongside that parasite. Cats can have impacts on our mammal populations beyond just predation.
And I did specify in Australia in the very first sentence of the post.
There have been some good points and questions raised in the reblogs that are certainly worth discussing, but I didn’t wish to reblog a particular comment chain with some choice words.
In a perfect world we wouldn’t have feral cats roaming wild. I don’t think anyone disagrees with this, but we are affording these animals extra rights just because they’re cats and we like them. Nobody wants to kill them as a first choice, but when it comes down to feral, introduced cats versus their native or endangered prey, something has to give. And as much as I found euthanising all those ferals in Tasmania unpleasant, it was the better solution at the time. It’s not the cats’ faults, I have no malice against them, it’s human society’s systemic failures that put them there, and we’re just trying to clean up.
There is an alternative to both TNR programs and culling. It’s just extremely labor intensive.
As an example, the Big Ears Animal Sanctuary has cat enclosures for feral cats. Some cats are just unwanted, but many are feral, and are contained within a series of enclosures that have both an ‘inside’ house replica and an ‘outside’ area. They cannot hunt wildlife. They have food and shelter. The occasional one becomes more tolerant of people over time. They get care for the duration of their lives to a certain extent (anything that requires twice daily medication for life is a significant challenge in an untouchable cat).
So the cats aren’t hunting wildlife or spreading disease but still get to live out their lives. So what’s the problem?
Money.
You could do this with every feral cat if you wanted to, but the space, time and money to do it with just isn’t currently available. Animal management unfortunately often comes down to what resources you have available to fix the problem, and usually it’s not quite enough.
TNR prioritises cats over native wildlife. At the end of the day native wildlife and ecosystems are infinitely more important than feral cats, regardless of peoples emotional attachment to cats.
When discussing Palestine/Israel,
“It’s an extremely complicated situation” is always code for one of two things:
“I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing trying to obfuscate the reality that Israel is a settler-colonial entity engaged in daily terrorism and ethnic cleansing by confusing you and reducing your confidence to speak openly about this topic”
or
“I have no idea wtf I’m talking about”
There is absolutely no in-between
“…because the situation is crystal clear. One of the main successes of Israel propaganda is to convince the world that the situation is complicated. But it’s far from being complicated. It’s probably the least complicated conflict in the world today. And it’s all about, basically, those who have the power, those who oppress and subjugate and tread over the indigenous people of the land, who have been oppressed and subjugated and expelled from the land. And this is what it’s about. The situation here is not very different, other than the way it is perceived in the world and among Israeli society themselves.”
![amazinglybeautifulphotography:
“Foggy Skies Over the Icelandic Wilderness in the Mountains Near Kirkjubæjarklaustur [OC] [4086 × 5449] - Author: HinniHil on reddit
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