Feral cat

A dutch practical book about Trap-Neuter-Return or Relocate-care for feral and stray cats in the Netherlands. The book contains information for setting up an NGO with the current laws and regulations, the practice of trapping and caring for trapped feral & stray cats and kittens and a veterinary section with all the specific feral & stray cat veterinary issues.

Feral cats have had negative effects on native biodiversity on many islands worldwide. Eradicating feral cats from islands is often feasible, and can yield great benefits to native biodiversity, especially for seabirds. Corvo Island (Azores) is an important island where feral cats limit the distribution and abundance of breeding seabirds. To assess whether the eradication of feral cats on Corvo would be feasible we used camera traps to estimate the density of feral cats. We deployed 24 camera traps at 253 locations around the island for 14 months, and identified cats detected by camera traps individually based on the coat colour. We then used spatially-explicit capture recapture models to estimate cat density for Corvo. Cat density in the uninhabited upland part of Corvo, which is dominated by cow pastures, was 0.036 (95% CI 0.025 – 0.054) cats/ha. The lowland part of Corvo, which is inhabited by humans and contains domestic cats, had an estimated cat density of 0.734 (0.581 – 0.927)  cats/ha. Overall, we estimated that the cat population on Corvo during our study period included 163 (123 - 228) individuals. The estimated cat densities are within the range of cat densities from other islands where cats have been successfully eradicated, and we conclude that feral cat eradication on Corvo would be technically feasible. However, the co-existence of feral and domestic cats would create operational challenges, and the current lack of a legal framework to ensure that all domestic cats are sterilised would increase the risk of a feral cat population becoming re-established after eradication.

Domestic cats (Felis catus) are a common household pet in the United States, with an estimated 25.4% of households owning cats (American Veterinary Medical Association 2018). While an increasing number of cat owners keep their pet cats exclusively indoors, a portion of society maintains that domestic cats are entitled to a free-ranging lifestyle and may even consider unowned domestic cats to be wildlife. Although wildlife managers recognize the beliefs of many concerned
stakeholders, including advocates who use strong emotional appeals on behalf of cats, it remains that free-ranging and feral domestic cats are an invasive species spread by humans.

Populations of feral (not owned by humans) and domestic cats Felis catus coexist in most inhabited islands, and they have similar impacts on native species. Feral cats are generally believed to vary their diet according to prey availability; however, no previous studies of diet have tested this hypothesis on insular ecosystems with a limited range of available prey. Because domestic cats kill prey independently of hunger, the spatial extent of their impact on wildlife will be influenced by home-range size. In this study, we combined dietary information with cat movements to assess the impacts of feral and domestic cats on island biodiversity. We quantified the diet of cats from scat samples collected across one year and tested whether diet varies by season. The abundance of main prey categories was also estimated to document seasonal variation in prey availability for cats. Finally, we tracked domestic cats by global positioning system units in all four seasons to examine whether home-range patterns varied seasonally. The diet of cats constituted three prey groups (rodents, birds and invertebrates), and the seasonal variation in consumption of each taxon matched the seasonal variation in prey availability, thus supporting the generalist behaviour of cats on oceanic islands. Roaming behaviour varied among individuals and across seasons, but could not be explained by availability of prey. Unconfined cats had larger home-ranges than confined cats, but most domestic cats strayed <1 km from home. Thus, confinement of domestic cats might reduce the spatial extent of cat impact on native prey populations on oceanic islands.

In September 2015, I gave a talk at Siteworks, an arts festival that takes place at Bundanon (see Bundanon Trust https://bundanon.com.au/) on the South Coast of New South Wales about two hours south of Sydney, Australia. The theme for the festival was " The Feral Amongst Us. " In my talk, I started off by asking the audience about their relationships with companion animals; the response indicated that most had companion animals in their lives and cared about the quality of their relationships with animals. Asking an audience about their own relationships with animals is a common and useful strategy in Animal Studies talks (especially those for a general public) because it can help resituate (re-home?) the abstract " animal " into more relatable terms. It also makes the effects of categorical thinking palpable: relatability wears thin and often falls apart across categorical divisions and between them, such as those animals named " feral. " The text of my talk follows from this first engagement with the audience about their own companions and then describes five propositions on ferals. Animal Studies scholars tend to argue that the relationships that we form with our " pets " are a foundation for positive relationships and attitudes towards animals in general. Those who form attachments with pets and appreciate their pets as individuals with personalities (and all that that implies) are also more likely to feel uncomfortable with the thought of animal cruelty. That is why you'll often see animal advocacy groups refer to pets as a benchmark for better relations with animals. The comparison with pets is supposed to elevate and enhance our moral perception of the cruelty around us. And yet there is a persistent and profound disconnect between how much we respect and value the animals that are our companions and those that are treated as mere animal machines, kept in appalling conditions, often in factory farms for the purpose of making cheap meat. This disconnect between how we love our pets and how we mistreat animals in agriculture (who are just as likely to be persons like our pets) is puzzling and yet it is partly explained by the powerful role that categories play in how we relate to animals. Categorised as a " pet, " an animal has legal protection against cruelty. Classified as " livestock, " an animal is subject to the cruelties that comes with being seen as edible. Classified as " feral, " an animal is subject to even greater cruelties associated with being exterminable. This brings me to my first proposition regarding feral animals, which is that: Australian feral animals live and die between categories (neither wild, pet, nor livestock), in an ethical vacuum bordered by extraordinary violence AND a romance of the escapee. Feral animals no longer fit into any of the usual categories of wild, pet, or livestock; they have exceeded the usual categories and so they exist in a sort of ethical vacuum, which licenses extraordinary violence against them. They have exceeded and escaped from the domesticated sphere of humans. They have gone from best friend to traitor, enemy, meeting the full brunt of a human sense of rejection. Feral pigs, donkeys, horses, rabbits, camels have also gone beyond the category of livestock, defying human control and use. All ferals show resilience, intelligence, self-organization, and a capacity to evade human captivity—all of the things that contradict a

Our current understandings of hospitality are largely informed by the Western European philosophical tradition. This tradition, however, restricts accommodation to the proprietary space of the human house, or to its equivalent, the nation state. Both can only offer a constrained, exclusive, and temporary welcome. This has significantly limited the possibilities for imagining and practicing hospitality.  In order to challenge the perceived scarcity at the heart of hospitality’s spatial imaginary, this essay turns to Kedi, Ceyda Torun’s 2016 documentary about Turkish street cats. Using the film as a guide, it explores what hospitality can look like outside the house. By tending to the relationships between cats and the people of Istanbul, the film offers a glimpse of a more capacious, creaturely, and cosmopolitan alternative I call, “feral Hospitality.” This is an itinerant and performative hospitality that produces rather than consumes space.

Owing to its mathematical ability to explain social interaction and the decision-making process, the science of game theory pioneered by the mathematician John Nash in the 1950s has been successfully used in fields such as economics and political science to biology, military tactics, and psychology. In game theory, there are basically two types of strategic interaction: cooperation and competition. Both are based on Nash equilibrium, which constitutes the best set of decisions made by the participants in either cooperative or competitive games regardless of what the other participants might choose to do. In other words, each player's gains or losses are influenced by other players' choices and decisions. The stag-hunt game, first described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is one such game wherein the players can either hunt a stag together or each hunt a hare separately. Hence, it yields two Nash equilibria: cooperation (Stag) and non-cooperation, also called defection (Hare, Hare).

Note: All photographs by Klaus J. Gerken unless otherwise stated. Comments are always welcome: Please send any comments to kgerken@synapse.net (We reserve the right to publish any comments on this blog). Invitation I would like to invite anyone who has recollections or photographs of the colony before the present condos were built; especially any recollections or photographs of Irene Desormeaux before Rene Chartrand took over caring for the cats, or even prior to that, to send them to kgerken@synapse.net. We are trying to establish a definitive history of the cat colony for a book to be published in the next year or so.

There’s been a lot of talk about killing feral cats, with the government’s recently announced war on cats setting the goal of killing two million by 2020. But we would like to offer a different idea: let’s embrace cats as part of Australia’s environment. We could even rename them “Australian wildcats”. Let us explain...  https://theconversation.com/lets-give-feral-cats-their-citizenship-45165

1. Invasive non-native species are one of the greatest drivers of the loss of biodiversity worldwide. Consequently, removing or controlling invasive predators should generally benefit vulnerable native species. However, especially on islands, where most mammalian predators are introduced, these predators may also prey on other invasive mammals. Removing only apex predators may lead to increases of meso-predators that may in turn increase predation pressure on native wildlife.
2. We examined the benefits of a feral cat Felis catus control programme on nest survival of a critically endangered ground-nesting bird, the St Helena Plover Charadrius sanctaehelenae in two habitat types, harbouring ~30% of the global population of this species. We monitored nest success and the activity of introduced mammals (cats, rabbits Oryctolagus cuniculus, rats Rattus rattus and R. norvegicus, and mice Mus musculus) over two years, before and after controlling feral cats.
3. Live trapping removed 56 feral cats from our study areas. In the semi-desert, rabbit and mouse activity increased, but rat activity remained low after feral cat control. In pastures, rat and mouse activity increased after feral cat control, while rabbit activity remained constant.
4. Nest survival of plovers increased more than threefold in the semi-desert, but increased only marginally in pastures. This difference may be due to an increase in rat activity and potentially rat predation following cat control in pastures, whereas no increase in rat activity was observed in the semi-desert.
5. Synthesis and applications:. Our study shows habitat-specific consequences of feral cat control on ground-nesting bird productivity after one year, probably mediated by differences in the availability of alternative prey. The results highlight the importance of experimental trials and a thorough understanding of the interactions between multiple invasive species before predator-control operations are implemented over larger scales. On islands with multiple invasive species, there may not be a simple generic approach to predator management (other than removing all invasive species simultaneously).