Trap. Neuter. Return.
Crusading cat lovers want to make the city safe for strays—and make feral cats safe for the city. But it’s a dog-eat-cat-eat-bird world out there.
View Slideshow »
A crusader preparing to catch feral cats.
View Slideshow »Unwanted cats at the Feral Cat Spay/Neuter Project’s clinic.
View Slideshow »Unwanted felines treated at the Feral Cat Spay/Neuter Project’s old Lake City clinic. Its new quarters are less crowded.
View Slideshow »VICKI FARRETTA SITS silently in her gear-cluttered Jeep Liberty, her senses tingling. Like a cat stalking a sparrow, she scans the territory—the bushes, the parking lot, the steps to the back door. “Did you see that?” she whispers, reaching for her binoculars.
Farretta is on a stakeout. Papers litter the Jeep’s floor, and the hardware of her vocation—cages, tarps, tin bowls—fills the truck bed behind her. Two jumbo fountain drinks perch half-drunk on the hump behind the hand brake. Through the windshield, she watches for signs of movement around the backside of the Lynnwood Elks Lodge, an anonymous low-slung building on Southwest 196th Street. An aged red Miata rolls past between Farretta and the building. The driver, with slicked-back hair and a dark mustache, looks nothing like an Elk. If he notices her, he gives no sign.
Farretta looks like she can take care of herself. She’s a stocky 50-ish woman with iron-straight dun-colored hair, a husky voice, and a lot of patience. Suddenly her patience is rewarded: “There’s the little black one I’m trying to get!” Farretta exclaims under her breath. “He’s walking kind of stiffly. I wonder if he’s got an upper respiratory condition.” She lifts her binoculars and smiles. “Well, the kitty’s pooping. That means he’s eating.” A half-grown black cat slinks from the bushes, edges warily toward a metal cage trap placed beneath the lodge’s rear steps, cranes forward to sniff the food inside, then pulls back and glances around the lot.
The bushes rustle again; another small cat peers out—and then a large male tiger shoulders it aside and strides toward the cage. “I don’t want you!” Farretta hisses. Too late. The little black cat has already scrambled back into the thicket, as though warned off by his elder.
Such are the vicissitudes of trapping. Male cats are easiest to catch, Farretta explains, swinging her shoulders in a mock macho swagger: “They just wander in.” Females are wary, especially after they’ve seen others trapped. “It’s so much like fishing. You do a lot of waiting and anticipating. You prepare for it like a crazy fisherman, dress warmly, and spend a lot of quality time. I love it. It relaxes me. That and hunting for agates are my best destressers from work.”
For years, “work” meant “animals” for Vicki Farretta; she was a veterinarian technician until the lousy pay and physical and emotional strain got to be too much. She retrained (for half as long as she’d trained to become a vet’s helper) and now makes twice as much money managing the billing for a gastroenterology clinic. Animals—cats—remain her passion; she loves them in a way that other cat lovers immediately understand and that makes the rest of us marvel, and maybe squirm.
Some cat people love their cats to death with fussing and fattening. They take in every plaintive, unfixed stray they see, abetting the breeding of new generations of strays. Or, at the sociopathic end of the spectrum, they cut their children off and leave millions to their little fur balls. Vicki Farretta is not one of those cat people. She’s a mensch, someone determined to be part of the solution, not the problem. Stalking cats is more than just a sport or therapy. She is a trapper on a mission.
Farretta and about 15 other women—they are all women, all middle-aged, all fired with a youthlike zeal—form a local cell in a loose-knit nationwide network of cat trappers. Or, to use their preferred term, rescuers. They devote weekends, evenings, retirements, and disposable incomes to unending rounds of visits to feral cat colonies. They’ve undertaken a controversial mission, one they hope will relieve the misery of millions of abandoned cats—and save billions more unborn animals from the same fate.
TNR, they all call it, short for Trap, Neuter, Return. They trap feral and homeless cats, get them neutered and vaccinated and treated for whatever may ail them, and, if possible, find loving homes for them. When that’s not an option (i.e., in the vast majority of cases), the rescuers ear-tip the cats (clipping their left ears, the international sign of a neutered, unhoused cat) and return them to the wild, there to live out their natural lives, with aid from their human helpers, in celibate dignity.
Published: May 2009
Here’s how TNR-MATH works:
“In NYC there are currently 465 registered TNR colonies. When TNR began in these colonies, 6047 cats were present – today, there are 4523 cats present, a decline of approximately 25 percent.” (Quoted from an Alley Cnt Allies member who was SO proud of this.)
Apparently, if you TNR 4 cats and 3 die from being flattened by cars this is a 75% decline of feral-cats statewide.
Of those 6,047 cats they’ve only REDUCED the total by 1,524 cats, about 127 PER YEAR. That’s only 0.08% of the 1,806,310 feral-cats within the city’s limits. (data taken direct from TNR-advocates’ own resources)
Guess how many have been born IN JUST THE LAST 6 MONTHS (hoping like hell that they’re not breeding every 4 months). Let’s do the math…
(1/2 total = females) 903,155 X 5 (avg. number in a litter) = 4,515,775 NEW CATS. Which lowers the number of them that have been reduced by TNR idiots to only 0.024%. THEY ARE GOING BACKWARD.
Guess how many will be born in another 6 months? (4,515,775 / 2) X 5 = 11,289,438.
Remember. the first 903,155 females are still breeding. For another 4,515,775. Add in the pre-existing 1,806,310, bringing the grand total in just ONE YEAR to 17,611,523 CATS. Which means that TNR groups have only reduced the cat-population by 0.008% of them. That’s not even 1/100th of 1%.
Alley-Cat-ALL-LIES can’t even reduce cats in their own city, yet they promote it as a worldwide solution. Then even bigger fools fall for it and promote it.
[Note: this recursive calculation population-growth problem actually requires advanced calculus with many more variables and will result in differing numbers; some higher, some lower, depending on how many years you do the population-growth projection when using both methods; but the results are just as astoundingly large no matter which method you use. I only include the dumbed-down version here so those of you with at least half a brain can comprehend and do the math yourself. Besides, it doesn’t matter how many feral-cats are roaming free. If even ONE invasive-species cat is roaming free and has destroyed even ONE native animal, then that invasive-species cat must be destroyed. These numbers are only important to alert all others to how many cats must be destroyed and if they’ll ever have the financial resources to do so by using their preferred method. In most cases, every municipality must allocate anywhere from 1/10th to 1/2 $BILLION PER YEAR if employing TNR costs just to catch-up to their breeding rates — sustaining that expense YEARLY into perpetuity. Whereas shooting them results in costs substantially lower, in the range of $2,000 to $75,000 for 1 year. Which ends up being a ONE-TIME-EXPENSE. Something that is attainable by the tax-base in most every area.]
Woodsman HAS BEEN POSTING ON 100’s OF SITES the same exact wording. He’s obviously a landowner with a financial interest in being able to shoot cats on his property. Most of his arguments are distortions of statistics or irrelevant if you check them. Such as links to studies showing that fleas cause disease, etc. So what?
TNR does help reduce cat populations. Those who promote it have the same goal as the landowners like this guy. Cats are just wild animals. The reason they are multiplying on your land is because you upset the ecosystem by killing all the coyotes, wolves, owls, etc. Certain groups are heavily propagandizing to advocate killing of all wild animals in favor of expanding human expansion, profits, etc…Successful TNR threatens their goals.
Shooting cats is not the answer. Some of them are already friendly and have been set free by ignorant people… There’s a lot of youtube videos of happy endings with for feral cats. An example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V0c3shTi-A . If the goal is to eliminate suffering, TNR helps. Also, these programs must be allowed to continue because eventually science can find a more effective way to mass sterilze cats via biotech and perhaps some sort of dna-altering substances which can be put in their food. (and which would only sterilize cats, not other species). Something like that. This would also solve the problem for landowners like the one who’s posting all this over-puffed comments.
TNR-Advocates and their programs are making absolute fools out of each and every one of you that they con with their lies and highly deceptive nonsense — while also violating all invasive-species laws in existence. (Cats being listed in the TOP 100 WORST invasive-species OF THE WORLD in the “Global Invasive-Species Database”.)
If you do the research, as I did using data from the most “successful” TNR programs, you’ll easily find that no TNR program has EVER trapped more than 0.4% of existing cats in any one area for over a decade now. (Even Oregon’s amazing 50,000 TNR’ed cats, at the end of this year will have only trapped 0.35% of them in Oregon.) They simply cannot trap them faster than they breed out of control, no matter what they do. And those cats that learn to evade traps go on to produce offspring that now also know how to evade any trapping method used. So not only are >99.6% still and ALWAYS breeding out of control, and spreading their diseases everywhere, and still destroying ALL wildlife (native prey becomes tortured play-toys, native predators starve to death from cats destroying their ONLY food), but TNR fools are also ensuring that any future generations of these devastating invasive-species won’t even be able to be trapped. This is why, due to TNR-Advocates’ insistence that they have “the answer”, that their feral-cat population has now climbed to an ecologically-deadly 150 MILLION feral-cats across the USA. Soon to turn into 1.5 BILLION cats within the year if you apply cats’ breeding rates to previous population numbers. (That’s actually a low low estimate. The real number from calculations spit out by their reproduction rates is closer to 2.4 BILLION.)
Find whatever way that you can to destroy all feral and stray cats on-site. If you don’t destroy stray-cats as well, the source of all feral-cats, then you’ll never be rid of feral-cats either. Avoid using traps if at all possible because trapping is what slowed everything down to where cat populations have now sky-rocketed out of control. TNR advocates are at least right about one thing (and ONE THING ONLY); trap and kill doesn’t work either because it is based on the very same flawed method that they use — slow, random-chance, inefficient, easily outfoxed traps. There’s a reason the phrase “hunted to extinction” is so well-known in all cultures across all lands. It is the ONLY method that is faster than a species can out-breed and out-adapt to. The following link (of a study done by the University of Nebraska) is some good documentation on the most humane ways to confront a feral-cat problem where you live; including the best firearms, air-rifles, and ammo required. Though avoid using their suggested slow and inefficient trapping methods that got us into the ecological disaster that we have now. http://deenawinter.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/ec1781.pdf
On advice of the local sheriff where I live I used a .22 equipped with a good illuminated-reticle scope and a laser-sight for use when they are most active, dusk to dawn; as well as to afford precision aim for a humane kill. I shot every last one of them on my property, hundreds of them, to restore all the native wildlife to proper balance. Mission accomplished! 100% total success! This is even a more humane method than terrorizing trapping and animal-shelter methods; and why it is the preferred feral-cat management policy in so many areas today. One moment the cats are happily stalking defenseless animals to cruelly torture again, the next they are dead and don’t even know what happened, they don’t even have time to make a sound. Making your land 100% cat-free is something that cat advocates haven’t been able to solve nation-wide for 30-40 years. On my land only 1 person in only 2 seasons was able to accomplish what they couldn’t attain in decades. Why is that? The cost per cat was also only 0.3 CENT, 3 cats PER PENNY, a ONE-TIME expense (5000 rounds on sale for only $15). All cats gone for the price of a few cups of coffee. And contrary to another famous TNR-Advocate’s bald-faced “vacuum effect” LIE … NO CATS REPLACED THEM. The NATIVE predators and their required NATIVE prey that WAS here and BELONGS here is what replaced their lousy invasive-species cats that had destroyed the entire native food-chain. This year I’m even enjoying birds I’ve never seen in my life before. Two of the warblers listed in the top 10 songbirds of the world for their song. What an amazing sound to awake to each morning. You have no idea what you’re missing if you have cats by you. I now feel sorry for anyone who has cats. Their lives and world are dismally empty and they don’t even know it.
May you have as much success as I did, and so quickly and inexpensively too.
Woodsman is not a real person. He has posted THIS COMMENT HUNDREDS OF TIMES AROUND THE NET. Who expends that kind of time? An organization with a large interest in allowing land-owners to shoot feral cats. Gun lobby? Farm special interest group?
All of his research is distorted or irrelevant. For example, he posts a link to research showing that fleas spread plague. So what?! Then he states having neutered cats attracts more cats. From where?!? They come from somewhere because your neighbor didn’t fix them. Idiots. The Texas A&M study, in fact showed a 25% reduction in cat population. So it works. This is a group that basically advocates killing all wild animals in favor of livestock or other financial interests. Kill the wolves. Kill foxes. Etc. Etc. How about reducing rampant breeding of the most invasive species of all, just a little bit?
For most normal people, animals are independent beings that deserve to live their lives. You should NOT be allowed to just shoot them for fun, convenience or profit.
Anyway, many of these cats do end up domesticated and make great pets and bring a lot of happiness to their owners. There’s a lot of youtube videos of happy endings with for feral cats (an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V0c3shTi-A )
If the goal is to eliminate suffering, TNR helps. If the goal is for redneck farmers to be able to legally shoot cats on their property, sorry ‘Woodsman’
Be cautious about using any cats rounded-up from outdoors for adoption or you could be held criminally responsible for destroying families and their pets. There’s no way to know a wild-harvested cats’ vaccination history, if any, nor their exposure to all the deadly diseases cats carry. If a cat has contracted rabies then a vaccination against it later will do no good. It’s already too late. There’s also no reliable known test for rabies while keeping the animal alive. They really need to be destroyed after they are trapped. It’s the only sane and sensible solution. This is precisely why all wild-harvested animals in the world, of any type intended for the pet-industry, must undergo an extended quarantine period of up to 6 months before transfer or sale of those animals to prevent just these things. Cats are no different than any other animal when harvested from the wild. You’re just risking this following story happening in every shelter across the land.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/09/23/2631106/rabid-cat-adopted-from-wake-county.html
Adopting any cat that’s been taken from outdoors is just playing Russian Roulette.
These are just the diseases cats spread to humans, not counting the ones they spread to all wildlife and even other cat species. THERE ARE NO VACCINES against many of these, and are in-fact listed as bio-terrorism agents. They include: Campylobacter Infection, Cat Scratch Disease, Coxiella burnetti Infection (Q fever), Cryptosporidium Infection, Dipylidium Infection (tapeworm), Hookworm Infection, Leptospira Infection, Giardia, Plague, Rabies, Ringworm, Salmonella Infection, Toxocara Infection, Toxoplasma. [Centers for Disease Control, July 2010] Flea-borne Typhus and Tularemia can now also be added to that list.
The plague:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8059908
http://www.pagosasun.com/archives/2011/07July/072811/webplague.html
Tularemia (rabbit-fever, transmissible to humans):
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/health/miscellaneous/2011-09-14/cats-savoy-test-positive-rabbit-fever.html
http://www.westyellowstonenews.com/news/article_02fceec6-f695-11e0-b752-001cc4c002e0.html
Flea-borne Typhus:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/county-317133-animals-cases.html
Hookworm — ruined Miami Businesses:
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2010-11-24/news/fl-miami-beach-hookworms-20101123_1_hookworm-infections-feral-miami-beach
And perhaps the most insidious one of all, the common Toxoplasma gondii parasite that they spread through their feces into all other animals and even livestock. This is how it gets into meats and humans get it from undercooked meats, from cats roaming around stockyards and farms. This is why they are ROUTINELY destroyed around any gestating livestock or important wildlife by shooting or drowning them. So those animals won’t suffer from the same things that can happen to the unborn fetus of any pregnant woman. (Miscarriages, still-births, hydrocephaly, and microcephaly.) It can even kill you at any time during your life once you’ve been infected by it. It becomes a permanent lifetime parasite in your mind, killing you at any time that your immune system becomes compromised. It’s now being linked to the cause of autism, schizophrenia, and brain cancers. This parasite is now also killing off rare and endangered marine-mammals (otters, seals, dolphins, etc.) along all coastal areas from cats’ T. gondii oocysts in run-off from the land.
Its strange life cycle is meant to infect rodents. Any rodents infected with it lose their fear of cats and are actually attracted to cat urine.
http://scitizen.com/neuroscience/parasite-hijacks-the-mind-of-its-host_a-23-509.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070403-cats-rats.html
So even the often proclaimed use for cats to control rodents is now false. Cats actually attract rodents to your home, with their whole slew of flea-borne and other diseases. If you want rodents in your home keep cats outside of it to attract them to your area.
The time has come to destroy them all whenever spotted away from quarantined confinement. There’s no other solution. We have nobody but cat-lovers to thank for this disaster.
TNR-Advocates “Vacuum Effect” is an absolute 100% LIE (OR “The Deadly Cat-Attractor Equation”)
There’s an interesting study done by the Texas A&M University on TNR practices. They started out with about 12 sterilized cats. At the end of 9 months they had over 30. An increase of more than 200%, all moved in of their own volition. This isn’t due to any mythical “vacuum effect” that cat-advocates spread and lie about so often. For that to have happened you would have had to remove cats to create a vacuum for others to replace them. The exact opposite happened in this study.
Simple reason being: CATS ATTRACT CATS
Cat scents attract cats. This is why they spray everything, to attract mates and rivals and mark territory. Cat sounds attract cats. Mewing kittens will even attract stray toms who will kill the kittens if they are not their own (basic feline behavior of any cat species).
If you want more cats, keep some around. More will find you. Get rid of them all and there’s no reason for other cats to come to that area. I proved this myself by getting rid of every last cat on my own land. ZERO cats moved in to replace them.
Another interesting finding, sterilized cats do not defend their territory. Any new cats see this as easy-pickings and move in to take over. If that cat-colony is being fed then non-sterilized cats will actually overtake the sterilized colony’s food-source because the non-sterilized cats are not as docile and complacent.
The DEADLY Cat-Attractor Equation
Another fun kicker. Cats’ Toxoplasma gondii parasite they spread through their feces is meant to infect rodents. This cat-parasite alters the mind of any animal it infests (even humans). Any rodents infected lose their fear of cats and are attracted to cat urine. Not only do cats attract more cats, but they also attract more rodents to the area with their slew of flea-borne and other rodent diseases. If cats eat rodents then they contract those rodent diseases to spread those diseases to humans. The attractor-equation is not just CATS = CATS + CATS, it’s actually CATS = CATS + CATS + RODENTS + DISEASES.
TNR IS 100% FAILURE — no matter which way you try to spin that sorry hole-filled story.
ANY cat — stray, feral, sterilized, or fertile — is just a magnetic “seed cat”. No matter how they are there or in what state of reproductive-viability that they are in, you’ll attract and grow more of them. Even worse — then you attract cat-advocates that want to turn your life into a living hell too. They’re all part of the same life-destroying equation.
The FULL cat-attractor equation is actually: CATS = CATS + CATS + RODENTS + DISEASES + LIFE-DESTROYING CAT-ADVOCATES.
This is why you MUST destroy all cats on your land. So cat-advocates will never be able to control or rule your life ever again. It’s THAT simple.
I did it on my land. Now it’s YOUR turn.
WOODSMAN posting same lies on over 150 websites. None of your “math” is correct. Stating that cats spread disease means all animals spread disease. Deers have ticks. Racoons, possums, coyotes. Let’s kill all of them so you can clear your land and make some $$$. Owls are predators. We must shoot them.
Cats are no more invasive than any other animal out there. They breed because YOU destroyed the ecosystem by killing all the wolves and coyotes. Now you must be allowed to shoot cats too. I don’t think so. Stop spamming the same lies all over the web.
Be cautious about using any cats rounded-up from outdoors for adoption or you could be held criminally responsible for destroying families and their pets. There’s no way to know a wild-harvested cats’ vaccination history, if any, nor their exposure to all the deadly diseases cats carry. If a cat has contracted rabies then a vaccination against it later will do no good. It’s already too late. There’s also no reliable known test for rabies while keeping the animal alive. They really need to be destroyed after they are trapped. It’s the only sane and sensible solution. This is precisely why all wild-harvested animals in the world, of any type intended for the pet-industry, must undergo an extended quarantine period of up to 6 months before transfer or sale of those animals to prevent just these things. Cats are no different than any other animal when harvested from the wild. You’re just risking this following story happening in every shelter across the land.
www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/09/23/2631106/rabid-cat-adopted-from-wake-county.html
Adopting any cat that’s been taken from outdoors is just playing Russian Roulette.
These are just the diseases cats spread to humans, not counting the ones they spread to all wildlife and even other cat species. THERE ARE NO VACCINES against many of these, and are in-fact listed as bio-terrorism agents. They include: Campylobacter Infection, Cat Scratch Disease, Coxiella burnetti Infection (Q fever), Cryptosporidium Infection, Dipylidium Infection (tapeworm), Hookworm Infection, Leptospira Infection, Giardia, Plague, Rabies, Ringworm, Salmonella Infection, Toxocara Infection, Toxoplasma. [Centers for Disease Control, July 2010] Flea-borne Typhus and Tularemia can now also be added to that list.
The plague:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8059908
www.pagosasun.com/archives/2011/07July/072811/webplague.html
Tularemia (rabbit-fever, transmissible to humans):
www.news-gazette.com/news/health/miscellaneous/2011-09-14/cats-savoy-test-positive-rabbit-fever.html
www.westyellowstonenews.com/news/article_02fceec6-f695-11e0-b752-001cc4c002e0.html
Flea-borne Typhus:
www.ocregister.com/articles/county-317133-animals-cases.html
Hookworm — ruined Miami Businesses:
articles.sun-sentinel.com/2010-11-24/news/fl-miami-beach-hookworms-20101123_1_hookworm-infections-feral-miami-beach
And perhaps the most insidious one of all, the common Toxoplasma gondii parasite that they spread through their feces into all other animals and even livestock. This is how it gets into meats and humans get it from undercooked meats, from cats roaming around stockyards and farms. This is why they are ROUTINELY destroyed around any gestating livestock or important wildlife by shooting or drowning them. So those animals won’t suffer from the same things that can happen to the unborn fetus of any pregnant woman. (Miscarriages, still-births, hydrocephaly, and microcephaly.) It can even kill you at any time during your life once you’ve been infected by it. It becomes a permanent lifetime parasite in your mind, killing you at any time that your immune system becomes compromised. It’s now being linked to the cause of autism, schizophrenia, and brain cancers. This parasite is now also killing off rare and endangered marine-mammals (otters, seals, dolphins, etc.) along all coastal areas from cats’ T. gondii oocysts in run-off from the land.
Its strange life cycle is meant to infect rodents. Any rodents infected with it lose their fear of cats and are actually attracted to cat urine.
scitizen.com/neuroscience/parasite-hijacks-the-mind-of-its-host_a-23-509.html
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070403-cats-rats.html
So even the often proclaimed use for cats to control rodents is now false. Cats actually attract rodents to your home, with their whole slew of flea-borne and other diseases. If you want rodents in your home keep cats outside of it to attract them to your area.
The time has come to destroy them all whenever spotted away from quarantined confinement. There’s no other solution. We have nobody but cat-lovers to thank for this disaster.