Image: John Keatley

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.

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Farretta finally gives up on catching the elusive little black cat, packs up her traps and blankets and bait, and heads back to Highway 99. Cruising the strip, she sees a different landscape than you or I do—a second, feline city, parallel to our own—secretly teeming but invisible to the ordinary eye, like a dark jungle through night-vision goggles. Here, she points, and there, and there again, where cat colonies shelter in the scrubby back lots, vacant storage shacks, and neglected thickets beside modest businesses or, sometimes, in the businesses themselves. “At that car wash, the doors don’t close all the way. When they open them up in the morning three or four cats walk out…. The guy at the Texaco store is very nice, he fills a water dish for the cats there…. I got 28 cats near the Toyota dealership in 1999. That was the biggest colony I ever did.”

Since beginning Trap, Neuter, Return 10 years ago, Farretta has caught, fixed, clipped, and released hundreds, maybe thousands of cats. But they’re just crumbs in the kibble against the total count of stray, abandoned, and feral cats. By various estimates, 30 to 100 million lurk in the margins of America’s towns and cities—perhaps as many as there are house cats living in American homes. Don Jordan, the City of Seattle’s animal control director, says a quarter million may live in this town. Other wildlife managers put the number in the Puget Sound region at 750,000.

Numbers like that make Felis catus, the domestic cat, one of evolution’s great success stories, one of the planet’s most pervasive invasive species—and almost as vexing a challenge to conservationists and would-be population managers as, well, people themselves. Humans’ other favorite animal companion, the domesticated wolf, aka dog, generally doesn’t fare so well on the loose; even negligent owners rarely turn Fido out to fend for himself when they move to new apartments.

“College students and apartments—a lethal combination,” mutters Farretta. She’s seen it all, and what she’s seen hasn’t elevated her opinion of human nature. Many—especially the young and mobile, bouncing from one household or city to another—view cats as lifestyle accessories, to be enjoyed for a while and then cast off to the next home—or, more likely, to a brief, squalid homeless existence. Or they swoon over cute kitties, and then the kitties grow up and aren’t so cute; or the apartment manager tells them to get rid of their pets, and they leave the cats to find their way, because somebody will take them in.

Again and again, when she sets out to get stray cats vaccinated and neutered, neighbors who feel proprietary about them will holler at her, “Leave my cat alone!” Her stock answer: “I’ll leave him alone when you take care of him.” “The plain truth,” says Farretta, “is that breeding and fighting over females is a major cause of death for cats.” And it leads to something too awful for the rescuers to contemplate: euthanasia, the murder of innocent kitties whose crime was to be born.

Once euthanasia was the main stock in trade of animal “shelters” or, as they were called, pounds: In the early 1970s, Seattle Animal Control took in about 25,000 cats and dogs a year and killed the vast majority. Adoption, education, and sterilization drives have reduced, but not eliminated, that toll. The city shelter still euthanizes around 850 cats and 550 dogs a year, only a handful of which it considers “adoptable.” Some shelters in other cities claim they kill only the “unadoptable”—old, deformed, infirm, and other “problem” animals.

Rescuers insist that many of these unwanted cats could actually thrive in the right homes. And they contend that, even without adoption, prolonging sterilized cats’ lives in the wild does more than euthanizing would to mitigate the feral plague, because these cats will guard their territory and keep other, unfixed cats from moving in.

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That view is widespread in TNR circles, but it’s controversial elsewhere. Felis catus isn’t strongly territorial, and feral colonies aren’t strictly closed systems; if there’s enough food, they may accept new members. Adding to the problem, in our mild climate cats can bear three litters a year, three to six kittens per litter. One fertile cat can bequeath hundreds of offspring and descendants in two years.

And the environmental effects of outdoor cats—whether feral outcasts or well-fed house cats let outside to wander—can be severe. Cats spread a host of pathogens that can infect humans and wildlife, from rabies (extremely rare here) to toxoplasmosis (more common) and, in the Southwest, deadly plague. And, conservationists complain, they wreak havoc on songbirds and other small wildlife; one Cornell University study estimates they kill 465 million birds a year in the United States. These losses come just as many songbird populations are crashing—bad news not just for the tens of millions of birdwatchers and backyard idlers who enjoy the original tweeters but for ecosystems in which birds play important roles, such as suppressing insect infestations.

For Vicki Farretta, stalking cats is more than just a sport or therapy. She is a trapper on a mission.

The bird-killer rap especially riles the TNR rescuers. To a woman, they insist that free-roaming cats are not a serious threat to bird populations. They base this contention on a study published by the Defenders of Wildlife in 2003 and widely promoted by Alley Cat Allies, the leading national advocate for feral cats and TNR. It concluded that the worst threat to migratory songbirds was the loss of the tropical forests where they overwinter, and that, however many individual birds cats may kill, they (along with wind turbines, window strikes, and West Nile virus) weren’t a significant threat to bird species.

The birds the Defenders considered were mainland species with wide ranges. Island birds have narrower ranges and tend to be more vulnerable to cats and other exotic predators; feral cats have been implicated in the extermination of eight bird species and 41 local populations on New Zealand islands alone, and in other eradications everywhere from the tropics to sub-Antarctic outposts.

Today, sprawl and infill are pushing urban and suburban birds into isolated parks, greenbelts, and vacant lots—artificial islands. And like their island counterparts, birds there are becoming more vulnerable to epidemics, cold snaps—and cats. Feral cats can transform urban and suburban green patches from “decent habitat into poor habitat,” says Tim Quinn, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s chief habitat scientist. Cats may not imperil a healthy prey population, but they can deliver the coup de grâce to one already stressed by habitat loss.

And ferals aren’t the only menaces. Feeding house cats doesn’t blunt their hunting instincts; it may even make them more effective hunters, “subsidized predators” in the argot. They’re more patient, since they’re not desperate; Quinn compares them to “master fly-fishermen.”

Some of these master hunters rack up breathtaking tallies; one cat stalking a wildlife experiment station killed more than 1,600 animals in a single year. And such kill counts don’t include all the injured critters that escape but may perish afterward. About 15 percent of the thousands of injured critters brought to the Progressive Animal Welfare Society’s and Sarvey Wildlife Care Center’s wild-animal rehab centers are seized from the jaws and claws of pet cats.

Cat defenders still take heart from the fact that many predation studies find that cats eat far more small mammals than birds. One, done around stray and feral cat colonies in parks around California’s East Bay, found rodent hair in 65 percent of scat samples and feathers in just 4 percent. Aren’t cats doing us a favor when they catch rats and mice?

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A closer look suggests cats aren’t so good at hunting the vermin we want them to catch. In the East Bay parks, native deer and harvest mice were much less common in areas with cats—as were songbirds, suggesting that even if cats don’t catch as many birds, they drive them away. House mice were more numerous in areas with cats. Makes sense: Unlike wild mice, house mice (and rats) have coevolved with cats for thousands of years and learned to avoid them. By eliminating wild competitors, cats may pave the way for the pests they were originally brought here to control.

Jammed against the sailboards and barbecues in Janis Newman’s spacious suburban garage is a wall of cages—a feline homeless shelter, recovery ward, and, sometimes, hospice. When I visited, Newman had 11 trapped cats here in the garage, six in the house (plus three cats of her own), and 12 more farmed out to foster homes. She gently set a plush pillow beneath one sad-eyed sack of shaggy fur and jabbing bones, dying of throat cancer. This garage would be his final kennel: “It wouldn’t be right to put him back out,” she explained. Otherwise, these cats were on their way back where she found them, as soon as they’d convalesced from their veterinary visits.

Janis Newman is a full-time cat trapper, catching at least 55 homeless cats a month; three weeks into March she’d trapped 75. Seven years ago she retired from a career as a phys-ed teacher; she still has the efficient, no-nonsense manner of someone used to keeping dozens of children in line. Retirement wasn’t supposed to be like this, she sighs as she baits a trap. “I really didn’t want to do this. I wanted to have my own time, to work on the garden.”

Then she discovered the hordes of lost, hungry cats lurking in the shadows of her picture-perfect Bothell neighborhood. “My neighbor started feeding cats, and I did, too. I borrowed a trap from someone in our neighborhood, and that was the beginning. I couldn’t avoid it.” Her husband even devised a remote-control trap trigger.

Traps in the car trunk, Newman took me to the Woodinville house of a gentle man of about 60, living with his 90-year-old mother. Cats lurked everywhere, darting in and out of an inset door and an open basement window; I shuddered to imagine the interior.

Most of the cats Newman and her fellow rescuers catch are not truly feral, i.e., born and bred in the wild and unreconciled to humans; ferals compose just 8 percent of the cats taken into King County’s animal shelters. The rest were someone’s pet at some time. In theory they’re adoptable, and the trappers do everything they can to find them homes or sanctuaries, short of posting them on Craigslist. (It’s the worst purveyor of unfixed cats, says Newman—“just jammed with free kittens. Nine out of 10 aren’t fixed.” One rescuer tried to persuade Craigslist to stop listing kittens. No luck.)

The rescuers regularly host free-kitty bazaars at the Animal Talk pet shop on Roosevelt Way, which aids animal rescuers and does not sell unneutered cats. But finding takers can be hard; the day I stopped by dozens of heart-melting kitties mewed plaintively in their cages. Only a cooing trio of teenage girls paid them any mind.

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In a Lynnwood strip mall just off I-5, in a storefront situated between Right Choice Real Estate and Leather to Lace Drycleaning, rows of doped-out kitties lie spread-eagled on counters and operating tables. Some are out cold. Some stare regally at the humans fussing over them. Vets and volunteers clean, shave, cut, spay or neuter, and stitch them up assembly-line style. More patients loll in cages recovering from surgery or awaiting their turns. One polydactyl (extra-toed) cat with infected claws lies on a special bed receiving an antibiotic drip.

This surreal spectacle is the Feral Cat Spay/Neuter Project, a pioneering grassroots effort at humane feline population control. According to its operators it is the first and largest such operation in the country. It began in 1997 as a one-day-a-month service, with free sterilization for feral and other free-roaming cats. The demand proved greater than expected and people were lining up at five in the morning. Today it operates out of its own clinic, in Lynnwood, where it moved last year after outgrowing a Lake City storefront. Strays and ferals still get fixed and rabies-proofed for free; pet owners pay modest fees.

Five days a week, cat rescuers pour in from 13 counties around the state, their station wagons packed with cat cages filled with mewing captives. One from the Tri-Cities explains that the vets in her town charge high fees for spaying and don’t seem concerned about strays and ferals. Janis Newman ticks off the myths she says vets, most of whom rarely deal with breeding cats, still perpetuate: Cats shouldn’t be neutered till they’re six months old—“That’s too late, they go into heat at four months.” They can’t get pregnant while they’re lactating, and won’t continue lactating if they’re spayed—“Absolutely not true.” You can’t spay them if they’re in heat—“There’s some risk, but it can still be the better option.”

The spay/neuter clinic flogs the cause with clever seasonal promotions: “Happy Neuter Year” in January and “Beat the Heat” as the weather warms. Today it will desex 51 cats; on busy days it may fix 110. Industrial-style efficiency pays off; the project fixes cats at an average cost of $17 each, almost all paid via private donations. Other animal welfare and cat control groups around the world look to the Spay/Neuter Project as a model. To assist copycats, the organization has posted exquisitely detailed accounts of its procedures, right down to release forms, online. A cat-care group in Romania ordered the project’s “Sexless in Seattle” T-shirts to promote its own efforts.

But even these are just a drop in the demographic bucket against the hundreds of thousands of local feral and homeless cats. And even stalwart rescuers sometimes wonder if TNR really can stem the feline flood. Janis Newman and Vicki Farretta have both seen individual colonies shrink over time thanks to TNR—but Newman isn’t so sure the effect lasts. She sees unwanted cats—more than ever now with recession victims unable to afford their pets—swamping the best efforts to neuter and care for them. She recalls one Woodinville winery with a booming cat colony. Its managers would regularly scoop up new litters, have them euthanized—and leave the adults to breed again. “These are people who know better. That’s why I don’t think we’ll ever get ahead of this. It’s the people that wear you down. They cause all the problems.”

Many wildlife advocates would concur. They contend that TNR can’t possibly meet the scale of the crisis. “Not even 1 percent [of U.S. feral cats] has gone through TNR,” the site TNRRealityCheck.com notes, and the practice condemns even neutered homeless cats to “miserable lives” that may or may not include regular feeding and medical care, depending on whether volunteers like Farretta step forward.

At the very least the TNR movement gives cat lovers a chance to try to correct the big problem, not just contribute to it by succoring individual cats. Feeding strays didn’t start with TNR; if no one trapped and neutered ferals, sympathetic souls would still sustain them—and inadvertently help the population grow. That’s one reason many wild animal managers who were initially skeptical about TNR have come to accept, even embrace it. Seattle and King County’s animal control agencies both work with the Feral Cat Spay/Neuter Project.

Without such cooperation, encounters between bird and cat lovers can turn violent. In late 2006 a Galveston, Texas, ornithologist named Jim Stevenson became a jailbird, a birdwatchers’ hero, and the cat lovers’ bête noire when he shot a feral cat that lived under a local toll bridge and preyed on endangered piping plovers. At Stevenson’s trial, the jury deadlocked—echoing the impasse between environmental ethics (save the endangered bird) and animal welfare (spare the individual cat) evoked in his case. Afterward, the bridge keeper, who had fed—but not fixed—the cat Stevenson shot, was cited for keeping too many animals. And Stevenson reported to police that someone shot at him as he stood on his porch.

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Armed birders are rare. Another nemesis of free-ranging cats is much more common: Coyotes have spread like SUVs across America’s suburbs and many of its cities, including Seattle. Each spring, when Seattleites emerge from their winter stupor, the coyotes emerge from their dens with new litters of young. And a new rash of coyote sightings ensues, along with coyote stories in the papers and coyote alarms on the neighborhood blogs.

All that came home three years ago for Erin Wenzel, who lives near West Seattle’s Schmitz Park, one of the city’s few remaining old-growth stands. Wenzel noticed coyotes crossing her yard on their way to the park, and critter-crazy neighbors setting out food for them. “We started seeing a lot of missing-cat flyers around the neighborhood,” she says. She and her family tried to keep their cats inside. Then one hot night they left a window open, and one jumped out.

Wenzel’s cat was gone but not forgotten. She blogged; she wrote the paper; she called city, county, and state officials, urging them to get the killer coyotes out of Seattle. (This would mean killing them; state law forbids transporting and releasing coyotes, raccoons, foxes, and other “nuisance animals.”) “No one would do anything,” she laments. “Those who haven’t lost pets don’t seem concerned.”

In the high season, state wildlife managers receive more than 30 reports a day of coyote sightings. Seattle Animal Control receives hundreds each year. The coyote surge is due in part to another human intervention in the predator-prey chain. Nearly a century ago, systematic hunting, trapping, and poisoning exterminated wolves—the coyotes’ nemeses—in the 48 states. That gave carte blanche to coyotes. And it was good news for the birds.

“Where cats are available, coyotes’ prime prey is cats,” says University of Washington wildlife biologist John Marzluff, a leading authority on local birds. “That’s a really important service they provide to urban and suburban songbirds. If you have a healthy coyote population, it suppresses the cat population.” It also introduces an element of ecological justice: If we let cats run free and prey on other critters, perhaps it’s only fair that they become prey, too.

That’s not how Erin Wenzel sees it: “As much as people love songbirds, a robin is not the same as a cat somebody’s lived with for 20 years.” The schism recalls the bitter, fruitless abortion debate that has haunted American politics for four decades. And as in that impasse, calmer heads urge a third way, including one practical measure that applies to both issues: birth control. To end abortions and unwanted births, embrace family planning and prevent unwanted pregnancies. To end the misery of abandoned cats and the slaughter of birds and other small animals, prevent feline pregnancies. Ban the sale or gifting of unfixed cats except to licensed breeders.

Even if a massive spaying and neutering campaign could stem the flow of unwanted and unhoused cats, it wouldn’t reduce the slaughter of birds and other wildlife by house cats. Another measure would: Make owners keep their cats indoors. Make free-ranging felines—currently about two-thirds of all pet cats—outlaws, just like unleashed dogs, ferrets, chickens, iguanas, and other pets. (Only cats and pigeons are exempt from city law requiring that pets be contained or restrained.) Not only is cats’ impact on wildlife more severe than dogs’, their feces has nastier pathogens.

And so, rather than scrapping over TNR, the American Bird Conservancy waves a “Cats Indoors!” banner with a win-win slogan: “The campaign for safe birds and cats.” Turning hunters into homebodies still demands psychological adjustments by cats and owners alike. Keep my free-spirited feline indoors? No way—it would kill him and drive me crazy!

Cats’ habits are more malleable than their owners often think. Seattle animal behaviorist Ellen Leach, a former zoo trainer who consults on cat care, recommends enriching home environments with such measures as mesh tunnels under house eaves. Cats can learn to walk on leashes just like dogs. Those most likely to be satisfied indoors, Leach notes, “are those that have never known the outdoors or those that have known the outdoors but have had terrible experiences there—sick and hungry strays for example, or sometimes cats that get picked on in colonies.” A traumatized, ear-tipped outcast might make the perfect couch companion.

So cats are educable. What about people? Just two or three decades ago, dog owners also assumed they had a God-given right to let their pets wander, breed, and (without scooping) defecate where they would. Outside some towns, pet dogs ran in packs, killing livestock. No one would tolerate such abuses now, or justify them as “natural” dog behavior. For cat owners, assuming responsibility may come as a shock. But the dog people have already shown the way.