Clearing 500k feral cats from New York’s streets

> Who's to say cats can't live independently among humans (and rats and other animals) in cities?

I knew about this nonprofit via a cat colony caretaker, @poetssquarecats (I follow her on Tiktok and she's amazing) that talks about the struggles of feral cats and uncontrolled cat colonies. Yes, of course animals in the wild also suffer from diseases, parasites, and injuries. But these animals aren't in the wild. They're far more constrained than in the wild, with a lot more access to food, and with a lot more dangers. One of the problems is that, in those conditions, the number of cats can and does explode (female cats can become pregnant at 4-6 months old already, and they have on average 16 kittens a year in multiple litters).

And yes, of course getting rid of them is going to have unwanted consequences, but having them has other unwanted consequences. For example, as the article mentions, birdlife is severely affected, which can also have other unwanted consequences. I think that in that case it's better to have the cause under control: either way it's going to have unwanted consequences, but at least when you control it you know that it's happening.

Time for foxes or bigger stray cats

How would anyone know how many rats the cats are eating?

Apparently rodents avoid places that have a scent of a cat. So, cats don't even have to hunt them to have an effect on the population.

purely as a thought experiment, I wonder if given enough time, the NYC stray cat population would observe a genetic drift towards larger body size and start preying on the abundant local rat population? I never lived in NYC, and don't know how big the rats are there, but the rats I've seen (mostly at uni. biology labs) they grow to about 25cm in length (about the length from tip of index finger to tip of thumb with hand stretched out to the fullest for someone with large hands, not counting the tail), which I think is entirely within what a normal-sized adult cat can tackle.

urban rodents is a rich food source begging as an ecological niche to be filled.

NY could introduce coyotes that will take care of both the rats and cats. They mostly hunt at night here in SF.

That’s nonsense - When I lived in a rural area I had a Bengal cat that would bring home much larger prey than Rats such as Rabbits and Squirrels.

Rats didn't show up in comment again because cats came.

Then his neighbor moved in...

There was a commenter, I'm not sure if it was here, slashot or reddit, he would start with interesting premise but then halfway he got distracted and finished different story with something mundane never finishing the interesting story. He was famous for it.

The other commenters got it: ...and then the neighbor with the cats and the traps and the camera and the occasional feral cat locked in her bathroom moved in.

Before then... One time I woke up to my girlfriend-at-the-time standing in our bed in tears, wavering over me with a baseball bat in hand. We were in good standing at the time, so I was confused but thought I was done for. Turns out she was trying to hunt down a big fat rat that she saw waddling across the dresser.

I had just finished a thirty-hour stretch of work so I was in no shape to deal with it. She broke some things with the bat, and it ended up waddling its fat ass back into the walls. I think it ate some poison because it ended up scratching at the walls for about a week as it slowly expired. Then the stink arrived and it took about as long to leave.

I used to live one block away from Melrose and that’s where I found my stray cat…

Cook st - a Banksy showed up on my building a few weeks after I moved out.

I'm sorry but you're dreaming of you think that feral cats aren't destroying local bird populations.

Your citations contradict your claim.

[2], p. 30: "Predation by nonnative and/or nuisance species. Predators, such as nonnative cats, dogs and foxes, as well as native crows and ravens, that are thriving in human-altered environments. The City policy of removing cats and foxes has been effective and beneficial for the burrowing owls."

[3]: "There are many factors that could explain the low numbers. The owls are ground-nesting, living in holes hollowed out by squirrels. That can leave them vulnerable to a long list of predators, including foxes, skunks and raccoons. Feral cats are considered the worst of the lot, preying on owls as well as the small birds and rodents that make up the owls' main food supply. In fact, a released cat last year ended up mauling one prolific male owl, Kleinhaus said."

[5] appears to concern burrowing owls in Black Hills National Forest, which is substantially different from Mountain View.

[9] does not call out cats specifically, but does recommend "[r]educing adult mortality rates by preventing the use of harmful rodenticides near occupied habitat and reducing the threat from non-native predators" on p. 22.

Can you fill the missing gap in this story? Why does the NYT have any authority over internal policies of Google?

Of course TNR is better than doing nothing, but if you trap the cats anyway why not just kill them then?

You are badly misrepresenting the content of your sources.

[1] says:

>The owls are endangered from many sides. One of the biggest threats uses the Shoreline golf course. A bleak Mountain View report three months ago noted there have been deaths “due to direct contact between golf balls and burrowing owls.”

They do not blame only cats. They discuss cats in particular but do mention there are other threats. I will grant that this one confusingly-worded paragraph is not enough background.

They also do not call for the killing of all cats. The article mostly criticizes the practice of feeding cats, not TNR or adoption.

[2] says:

>Feral cats are supreme predators and actively prey upon burrowing owls. One study in Florida found owl mortality by cats accounted for 30 percent of deaths (Millsap and Bear, 1988). Cats also impact burrowing owls indirectly by decimating small bird and rodent populations, reducing the available food supply for burrowing owls.

One suggested solution is to:

>Proactively discourage all feeding of cats in Shoreline

It is exactly the same message as the NYT article.

[3] calls out the threat of cats first and foremost.

>There are many factors that could explain the low numbers. The owls are ground-nesting, living in holes hollowed out by squirrels. That can leave them vulnerable to a long list of predators, including foxes, skunks and raccoons. Feral cats are considered the worst of the lot, preying on owls as well as the small birds and rodents that make up the owls' main food supply. In fact, a released cat last year ended up mauling one prolific male owl, Kleinhaus said.

>In the aftermath of the shutdown, the local feral cat population predictably exploded[8], and the burrowing owl population at Shoreline Park went down to zero[9].

You seem to acknowledge that the large cat population was in fact a threat to owls, but still object to the NYT story.

> NYT seems to be running an anti-cat agenda.

My sides.

> NYT made Google kill all cats on Google campus.

NYT didn't "make" Google do anything. They published an article which may or not be correct and then the Google people made their own choices.

I have some personal knowledge of this. I worked at Google 2005-2017, and in 2006 I quite often walked through the hills across Amphitheatre from Google. I would often see burrowing owls then.

South of there is Shoreline Amphitheatre, north is the golf course, and east is more park, plus a restaurant. None of that changed at all, as of 2017. The owls were gone long before that. Unfortunately I don't recall exactly when I stopped seeing them.

Often they would just sit and stare at me, even though I was only 15 or so feet away. So I can easily believe that predators got them, maybe even cats; it seems being more skittish would be more adaptive. I've also seen snakes in there.

[3] says "Humans can also be a big nuisance for the owls. City parks staffers have installed signs and fencing to cordon off sensitive areas, but hikers sometimes go trailblazing. Shoreline Park prohibits dogs except in an off-leash zone near the entrance, yet some people still untether their canines in other parts of the park."

This is completely unsubstantiated and just plain wrong, from my experience. People do not go "trailblazing" and off-leash dogs are just not a thing.

"a certain Mountain View company rapidly expanding its campus circa 2018" -- you have outed yourself here. Google did not expand into the habitat area at all.

NYT has always been pro-rat.

The 50s is a pretty long time ago by 2020. It's not so recent as it was in the 80s or the 00s

Exterminators cost money. TNR runs on volunteers and a lot of donated services. (Nobody volunteers to kill cats, and if they do, you don’t want them.)

And the overall effort isn’t that different.

With TNR you trap, neuter, release.

With extermination you trap, kill, dispose. (I don’t think you can leave a bunch of dead cats and poison traps laying around).

Neutering is a lot more effort than killing, but disposing is more effort than releasing (you can’t just throw piles and piles of dead cats in a dumpster).

While neutered cats don't always have their ears clipped, a cat with a clipped ear is near-guaranteed to be neutered.

This is why it makes sense to mention it.

NYT, which called TNR (trap-enuter-release) "controversial", isn't interested in informing people about it, it seems.

Well, yeah, it'd done for TNR so people know they don't have to catch the cat again.

Not sure if it's changed here, but in Australia it's a tattoo on the inner ear (a circle with a line through it).

I think that's pretty normal for pet cats: mine are like this.

However, I don't see how it's useful for stray cats. You can't just pick up a stray cat to look at its belly. A clipped ear you can see from a distance.

This really depends on how hungry the cat is. Feral cats commonly kill mammals larger than NYC rats, although they prefer smaller game. In general, you can expect a feline to be able to kill prey over twice it's body weight. In many habitats felines are the apex predator, and even feral cats are apex predators of some habitats.

The biggest issue is that NYC rats, the non-native species that have evolved in urban environments, have evolved with cats as a predator for a long period of time and are better than native birds/small mammals at evading cats. Cats eat the native population at a higher rate, which means the invasive and hated 'NYC rats' have less competition from native populations.

Imagine how many more rats would get to that size if cats didn't get them when they were smaller. Or if they could breed in spaces currently occupied by cats.

We gonna need bigger cats

> 3. cats control rats population

I'm not here to tell you I know the absolute truth on the matter, but I can say definitively that your assertion of this fact extends beyond conclusive data. Cats decrease rat sightings, but urban rat populations are good at evading them [1, 2]. Where cats do prey on rats, it's usually juveniles with ultimately little effect on local populations [3, 4].

It's easy to imagine that a certain percentage of the birds cats are killing are ill or old. Yet in the absence of actual data, your assumption that this is the bulk of bird deaths seems like obvious wishful thinking. It's also just as easy to imagine many of the deaths are juvenile / nesting birds too. And unlike rats, most birds can't repopulate so quickly.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/science/cats-v-rats-in-ne... [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1381025 [4] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Poor people aren't the problem here, it's the relatively wealthy who feel that responsible pet ownership laws don't apply to them.

What does this have to do with environmental harm? I thought the discussion was about animal population.

I'd also argue that starving to death is pretty traumatic, hence why we should have better regulation on pet population.

> Do you know how traumatic spaying is

How traumatic is it? The surgery and recovery doesn't look that hard. And heat's not exactly pleasant.

> how absolutely trivial it is to not get your dog knocked up unintentionally

I wouldn't say it's trivial to guarantee your dog never gets out or has a visitor to the yard. (And your own track record here is just an anecdote.)

> Until you snip all your own tubes and those of all your children

I can control myself, and if my child gets pregnant that's their responsibility. A dog can't be responsible for its own babies.

> keep your euthanasia propaganda to yourself.

The fuck?

Yeah, I saw a TikTok and this guy was filming a cat that had lost it's tail and an eye. Apparently, it had gone toe-to-toe with the rats of Brooklyn if I remember correctly and lost. NYC rats can get pretty gnarly in size, nothing like the mice or squirrels we think of that cats usually kill.

That study doesn't make "cats rarely attack rats" accurate.

More accurately from that study - a transient group of feral cats rarely attack huge rats that are in a 150 rat colony at a waste management facility.

- They watched huge urban rats that had engorged themselves at a waste management facility

- A large rat colony can communicate and they had safe routes established by the time the researchers and cats visited

- The feral cats had better options in and around that facility for food or fun

- They observed many cats in the environment which changed the rat behavior. "a one percent increase in the number of cats on a given day made it 100 times less likely that a rat would trigger the team’s motion-sensitive cameras". So throw a ton of cats at the problem and they become less effective.

“You can watch a lot of cats and rats accommodating one another, easing by one another, eating out of the same trash bag.”

Many predator/prey animals will ignore each other if there is an ample food supply to share. Hyenas and lions do this. Lions don't stop eating a kill to go kill hyenas. They'll chase them off or choose to share a meal.

Long time ago I used to have a huge cat that was indoor/outdoor. It went outside and killed anything that moved. It once drug home a large rabbit and put it on the doorstep.

This study shows, contrary to what many would think, that you can't toss feral cats at a huge rat colony and expect them to eradicate them. True. Especially good to know if you run a waste management facility in New York.

You'd probably get more kills if you used a single well-fed housecat than letting a lot of feral cats come and go into the rat colony which drastically changed their behavior and made them stay in hiding.

Put a rat and cat in your house and the cat WILL attack it. Send a cat into a rat's environment, same thing. Watch a bunch of feral cats come and go into a rat colony with huge rats - yeah, probably not many attacks as they load up on the easy food from the trash bags and the rats stay hidden. Fat rats can do that. Especially at a waste management facility.

The general claim that cats rarely attack rats due to that study is silly.

Sort of. You have to feed them about half what they need to get them to hunt. That was the official policy of the General Post Office in the UK at one time.

Stanford once had something known as the Stanford Cat Network, now called the Feral Friends Network, which sounds like something from the Camp Wedontwantcha comic. This group caught feral cats left on campus and tried to find them homes. Some of the cats that were too feral to become cats ended up at the Stanford horse barn.

Some of the barn cats would hunt. I've been presented with a dead mouse. Others managed to get people to overfeed them, and they'd get fat and lazy. Once I saw a mouse, found a cat, and put the cat down near the mouse. The cat did nothing. Useless cats accustomed to free food were sometimes placed as house cats and replaced with new hunters. About four good hunting cats could clear the entire property of vermin.

You have to manage the cats to get results.

Opportunity for a new children's book: The Pied Pssp Psst Pssper of New York.

That would be counter-productive. The main driver of cat population are humans. Cats evolving to being hostile to humans might in the end diminish public opposition to extermination programs.

To expand, cats also can't (don't prefer to) take on a lot of fully grown birds.

What they can do easily is kill young, like most predators.

It's simple: NYC just needs to introduce lots of mountain lions or panthers to deal with the rat problem.

Rats generally avoid areas where cats live, though.

I’ve noticed it depends on your karma score and reputation

Generally correct, especially if it's too subtle for the varied age groupings and interests - everyone's hair-triggered to get butthurt about some triviality. Eventually the adults will show up in most threads and will occasionally be bothered to correct the karma injustice.

It is not, the appropriate response to this post is to downvote and reply with a terse comment on the misuse of the apostrophe.

Could you really induce a cobra problem if the only reward were a burger? Raising a few hundred kittens every year just to eat a steady diet of burgers doesn't seem very efficient.

Well the obvious solution is bigger sewers that cats can get into, and meaner cats.

I imagine that rats will become way more visible to humans after elimination of cats

Follow by lowland gorillas to manage the snakes?

This smells like a moralism that has very little real impact on the population (which is driven by food supply and neutering efforts).

My guess is that the lockdown halting spaying/neutering operations was 100x as impactful as additional abandoned cats.

Which is also something I can just not comprehend as a pet owner (cat / dog). I already feel bad leaving my dog alone for a few hours a week lol. (With a cat, less so. They are less dramatic about being left alone.. :) )

EDIT: forgot to close a parenthesis and the LISPer in me panicked.

> Cats on the streets are a disaster for the bird population

and still pale in comparison to the effect us and our cities have on their populations. cats are not the big problem, we are, people just don't like to admit it and would rather blame them. As is likely us destroying the insect populations many species depend on.

> threat of dead cats makes rat poisoning efforts far more difficult to implement

the reality of dead owls and other small natural predators is a more real issue here, and why rat poison should not be used and be banned. It just was in my city Vancouver because it was doing more damage to owl populations then cats were.