Everybody wants to help a cat

(Jazz noir music and footsteps on a city sidewalk)

Tatum McConnell: Hallie is a Brooklyn resident and a cat lover.

Hallie: If I see a cat or any animal that needs help, I have been late to work before to like try to see what I can do for this cat. 

Tatum McConnell: One day on her walk to work she saw a stray cat who needed some help.

Hallie: So I took a video and posted on the Kensington Facebook group and I said, “does anybody know this cat? He’s limping, it’s cold.” 

(Sad cat meow)

Tatum McConnell: The Facebook cat community immediately came to the rescue. She saw people working together in the comments saying things like … 

Hallie: (keyboard sound) “Oh I have a trap.”

Tatum McConnell: And within the next day or two the cat was brought to Sean Casey Animal Rescue. Hallie even set up a GoFundMe campaign to cover his medical expenses including helping his leg and getting neutered. Sean Casey then found him a new home through adoption. 

Hallie: So just to hear people coming together to sort of like solve a problem for another cat was really, really heartwarming.

Tatum McConnell: Hallie is part of a wide network of volunteers, communities and organizations looking after New York City’s feral cats. When it comes to wildlife, NYC is better known for rats and flying rats, aka pigeons, but it’s also home to an estimated half a million feral cats. 

With cold winters and limited food, they don’t lead easy lives. While some stray cats are former pets, many were raised with no human contact. These cats are nocturnal and avoid humans, but that doesn’t mean they’re wild animals.

Kathleen O’Malley: They don’t just live out in the wild, they’re a domestic species. Because humans kind of created feral cats, you know, I feel a sense of stewardship and I try to encourage that in other people.

(Smooth jazz background music)

Kathleen O’Malley: Hi, I’m Kathleen O’Malley, I’m the director of community cat education for Bideawee’s Feral Cat Initiative based in New York City and Long Island.

Tatum McConnell: Kathleen says on a city-wide level trap neuter return is the most humane and effective method of managing feral and stray cat populations.  

Kathleen O’Malley: It means that cats are humanely captured, they are taken to the vet for spay and neuter, for vaccination against rabies, which is really important in the New York City area where rabies is endemic.

Tatum McConnell: In addition to keeping feral cats safe and healthy, trap-neuter-return has an ecological benefit. In the U.S., outdoor cats are estimated to kill up to 4 billion birds and 22.3 billion small mammals per year. Reducing introduced feral cat numbers also helps cut down their predation levels.

But do those long-term trap-neuter-return efforts really work?

Julia Kilgour: So in theory, absolutely it works. 

Tatum McConnell: To get the scientific scoop on trap-neuter-return, I spoke with Julia Kilgour, a researcher who studies feral cats at Purdue University. 

Julia Kilgour: We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the efficacy of vaccines and how, you know, if we get a certain proportion of the population vaccinated, then diseases will be eliminated. Well, the same thing applies to trap-neuter-return. If you sterilize upwards of 80% of a population, then you’re gonna see a decline.

Tatum McConnell: Julia spent two summers in New York City counting cats to learn more about ways to manage their populations. She looked at blocks where trap-neuter-return was conducted and control blocks with no feral cat intervention. 

Tatum McConnell (to Julia Kilgour): Did you get to know any particular cats in the neighborhood? 

Julia Kilgour: Loads of them were very friendly, you know, they’d come up to us on the street. They were like the stoop cats, there were a lot of bodega cats we got to know. And yeah so a lot of them were sort of regulars. 

Tatum McConnell: Julia explained that it takes more than a year for trap-neuter-return to create a decline in cats. This is because cats have a high reproductive rate and a large percentage need to be sterilized to see a population decline.

Julia Kilgour: The unfortunate thing is that rarely are we actually able to sterilize that number. 

(Samba background music)

Tatum McConnell: But she found that even as cats moved around the city, the blocks with trap-neuter-return still had more sterilized cats than the control blocks. This is an encouraging sign that long-term trap-neuter-return can decrease populations of feral cats. 

Julia Kilgour: I do want to add that this is possible, in practice it has been done. 

Tatum McConnell: For example, the University of Central Florida conducted trap-neuter-return with feral cats on campus. From 1996-2019 they saw an 85% decrease in the number of cats.

But this isn’t just thanks to trap-neuter-return. At the UCF campus and in New York City, organizations combine trap-neuter-return with adoption. The easiest way to get a cat off the street is to give it a new home, but this only works for socialized cats who are used to humans. Those feral cats with no human experience are better off being returned than adopted. 

Hallie, who we heard from earlier knows this well, with some adopted fuzzy friends of her own — Tinkerbell, Olive and Teddy.

Hallie: Actually one was just eating Chinese food out of the garbage can in front of my old apartment, now she’s like a super lovebug.

Tatum McConnell: If you’re interested in getting involved with feral cats, check out bideawee.org or a community Facebook page to learn more about trap-neuter-return and caring for cat colonies. 

(Cat meows)

For Scienceline, I’m Tatum McConnell.