History of the Trap-Neuter-Return Movement
Ellen Perry Berkeley
Published by Alley Cat Allies (ACA) circa October 2004.
http://www.alleycat.org
Check Marketplace or Resources webpages.


Purr-sonalities
A TNR pioneer
September 2004 Issue Cat Fancy Magazine
Article about Louise Holton of Alley Cat Rescue
[saveacat.org. Ms. Holton was a founder of Alley Cat Allies.]


CATS AND CAT CARE - A RETROSPECTIVE
Sarah Hartwell
http://www.messybeast.com/catarchive.htm#retros

[Scroll down and click on]

Part 7: 1940s to 1960s - Breeds & breeding, feeding, welfare, adoption and neutering.
Part 11: 1960s & 1970s - Behaviour, Welfare (& Legal), Adoption, Neutering and Older Cats).

FERAL CATS, CATS & THE ENVIRONMENT
Sarah Hartwell
http://www.messybeast.com/catarchive.htm#feral

British Feral Cat Control/FERAL CAT CONTROL IN THE UK
http://www.messybeast.com/ukferal.htm

THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN CAT DILEMMA
http://www.messybeast.com/ausdilemma.htm

THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN CAT PREDICAMENT
http://www.messybeast.com/auspredicament.htm

The American Cat Problem
http://www.messybeast.com/usferal.htm

Feral cat control in Denmark. In: The ecology and control of feral cats.
T. Kristensen
Potters Bar, England: The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, 1981;68-72.


Saving Feral Cats, Part 2
Louise Holton, in Animals Voice Magazine
[Louise Holton is president of Alley Cat Rescue and a founder of Alley Cat Allies.]
http://www.saveacat.org/acr_articles/voice2.htm


Cat Herding on the Military Range
"Trap, Neuter, Return," Cat Lovers Urge
[Excerpt]
Holton, who first practiced TNR in South Africa, said the method has been used in Great Britain for almost 30 years. Based on her work in South Africa, she concluded that nonlethal control methods successfully reduce overpopulation. "Our plan -- nonlethal control -- is a better ecological plan," she stressed. "It eliminates cat colonies slowly, over time."
She said she was surprised to encounter opposition to the humane method of dealing with feral cats when she arrived in the United States. She said it seemed to her animal welfare either ignored the whole issue or they routinely killed the cats they did go trap.
http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/cats/trapneuter.html


Trap/Neuter/Return: The Best Choice for Feral Cats
Ellen Perry Berkeley
Home for Life Newsletter, Winter 2003/4
[Excerpt]
While some people think they’ve invented TNR themselves, the practice goes back at least 50 years in England. TNR received a tremendous boost, in 1980, when the British group Universities Federation for Animal Welfare held an impressive symposium – afterwards, feral cats were no longer considered vermin. TNR received another gigantic boost, in the U.S. in 1990, with the founding of Alley Cat Allies. This energetic organization is largely responsible for the education and encouragement that has spread TNR widely in recent years.
http://davedz.home.isp-direct.com/2004_newsletter/2004_page_07/page_07.htm


The ABC's of TNR: Trapping and Sterilizing the Ferals You Feed
(from Alley Cat Action, Winter 1998)
[Excerpt]
England and Denmark started much of the work in this field in the early 1970s and where the organization Cat Action Trust established extensive spay/neuter services for caretakers. Other countries, including South Africa and Australia, have been using the trap-neuter-return (TNR) control method for many years.
http://www.theanimalrescue.com/feraltnr.html


Femmes Ferals!
How a birthday dinner led to the launching of Alley Cat Allies, the nation’s largest organization for the protection of feral cats
Carolyn Mitchell
from Best Friends Magazine: January/February 2000, downloadable pdf file
http://www.bestfriends.org/allthegoodnews/magazine/bfmjan00.pdf


Alley Cat Allies: History and Highlights
From Annual Report 2003, downloadable pdf file
http://www.alleycat.org/pdf/anreport.pdf


TNR: The Humane Alternative
The nation is turning to trap/neuter/return to solve the feral cat problem-because it's ethical, and because it works.
Karen Commings
Reprinted from ASPCA Animal Watch, Fall 2003, Vol. 23, No. 3
[Excerpt]
A Brief History
Although individual cat lovers had been practicing trap/neuter/return for years, the TNR movement in the United States formally began in 1980, when AnnaBell Washburn established an animal shelter on Martha's Vineyard. "People would adopt animals for the summer then leave them behind, so we were getting colonies of cats," says Washburn. To help build a shelter for the disposable pets, Washburn became a fundraiser and attended a conference in Boston held by the World Society for the Protection of Animals. At the conference, Washburn heard Dr. Peter Neville, veterinarian and author, give a presentation on TNR efforts in Britain. Inspired, Washburn formed PAWS (Pet Adoption and Welfare Service) of the Vineyard. After Washburn's successful TNR efforts on Martha's Vineyard and in the British Virgin Islands in the mid '80s, she received a call from author Ellen Perry Berkeley (see "Resources"), who was writing an article for a national cat magazine. "After the article appeared, I got calls from people all over the United States saying they were doing TNR on a private basis," says Washburn.
In 1989, The Stanford Cat Network formed to manage cats abandoned by students on the Stanford University campus. The group, founded on the belief that all life should be valued and treated with respect, continues to provide a viable alternative to euthanasia through spay/neuter, vaccination, return and feeding of feral cats, and adoption of tame cats and kittens.
A formal network for managing feral cats was created in 1990 when Becky Robinson and Louise Holton formed Alley Cat Allies. "It was clear when we opened our doors and phone lines that people all over the country wanted this information," says Robinson. "There was a huge interest among people wanting to help these cats."
http://www.petfinder.org/journalindex.cgi?path=/public/animalissuesawareness/overpopulation/1.10.2.txt


Best Friends Society/No More Homeless Pets (NMHP) Forum
Ferals, ferals everywhere, and not sure what to do?
Speaker: Nathan Winograd
September 8-12, 2003
Subject: Addressing perceptions of feral cats living short miserable lives
[Excerpt]
While I was in law school, I got involved with a young organization called the Stanford Cat Network, the first TNR program on a university campus. When the administration of the school announced plans to exterminate the campus felines, a small group of dedicated individuals turned to local and national humane organizations for help – all who uniformly suggested trapping the cats and taking them to the local humane society where what would happen was anything but humane. From the local humane society to the Humane Society of the U.S., not a single organization offered any solution but extermination. For the next five years, while the Stanford Cat Network was neutering the feline campus residents, and preaching the gospel to other universities, another young organization cropped up to advocate for saving feral cats. Back then, Alley Cat Allies was two people working part-time taking on an enormous challenge to convince humane organizations that TNR was a humane alternative to trapping and killing. Until relatively recently, national organizations called TNR an “inhumane act,” coined the phrase “subsidized abandonment” to describe it, while most shelters continue to treat “feral cats” as second class citizens with little or no holding periods, relegated to cramped rooms, while they do little to try to stem the tide.
http://www.bestfriends.org/archives/forums/ferals.html#one


Stanford Cat Network History
The Network was founded in 1989, in response to concern for the health and welfare of the University's growing homeless cat population. The population of homeless cats on campus had reached an estimated 1,500. The initial solution proposed by the University was to trap all the cats and convey all animals lacking a collar to the Santa Clara County Humane Society where they would be killed. Cats deemed adoptable would be held depending on space.
A group of volunteers, with the assistance of the Palo Alto Humane Society, developed a plan offering a humane alternative to proposed eradication. Most of the volunteers had already been acting to trap, spay/neuter, and vaccinate the cats on their own. But by forming an organization, these people developed a plan for a long term solution to the problem of abandoned pets.
The founding members of the Stanford Cat Network presented information and research on the management of homeless cat populations to University representatives. Together, the Network volunteers and the University came to the decision that the best long term solution was to implement a trap, spay/neuter and release program. In 1989, this strategy had already begun to gain support as the most effective and humane method of controlling homeless cat populations. The Stanford Cat Network was one of the first organizations to promote this strategy, which has since become a national model.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/CATNET/about_history.html


Kill the Problem, Not the Cats
Sherrie Walker
[Excerpt]
Published on: October 1, 2000
A program that HAS proved effective, however, is what is known in cat circles as "TNR" - trap, neuter, and return. Cats are territorial creatures. An altered cat will guard his territory and his food source against new cats who try to move in, and, being altered, he will not add to the population of the colony. This method was first tried on a large cat population at Stanford University in 1989. In response to an announced plan to trap and kill approximately 500 cats on the campus, students, faculty and staff formed the Stanford Cat Network. They presented a plan to trap, neuter, release, and manage the cats; and as a result, Stanford now has a healthy population of cats holding steady at around 300. Other colleges have adopted similar programs, including Campus Cat Coalition at the University of Texas, and Friends of Campus Cats at the University of Washington.
Following close on the heels of the Stanford Cat Network was Alley Cat Allies, a national feral cat network founded in 1990, and Feral Cat Coalition in San Diego, CA, founded in 1992. Both if these organizations are dedicated to controlling the feral cat population through TNR and are eager to share their expertise with individuals and grassroots groups with similar goals.
http://www.suite101.com/print_article.cfm/8122/46956


Prime Directive on Trap-Neuter-Return
Merritt Clifton, ANIMAL PEOPLE NEWS
[Excerpt]
ANIMAL PEOPLE was instrumental in introducing Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) to the United States, beginning in 1991 with a seven-month trial of the method in northern Fairfield County,
Connecticut.
http://animalpeoplenews.org/IMPORTANT_MATS/tnr.html


Where cats belong--and where they don't
Merritt Clifton, ANIMAL PEOPLE NEWS, June 2003
[Excerpt]
Maverick Cats
Few cities and counties and even fewer states have existing written feral cat policies because historically feral cats were not recognized as a presence, much less a problem. Feral cats were not covered in the model animal control ordinances circulated by national animal advocacy groups as recently as the early 1990s; there is no corpus of common law pertaining to them; and felis catus, their species, is not even mentioned in the Bible, even though cats were and are native to the Middle East.
Recognition of the existence of feral cats in great numbers may be traced to the 1982 first publication of Maverick Cats, by Ellen Perry Berkeley.
Feral cats at the time were still generally seen­­if seen at all­­as a rural phenomena, haunting dairy barns where they hunted mice in haylofts and begged for milk.
Urban feral cats were presumed to be strays, and urban cats dumped in rural habitat were believed to have a very low survival rate. At Tilden Park in the hills above Berkeley, California, for example, the ranger lecture given to visiting schoolchildren during the 1960s and early 1970s included inspecting cat bones and hearing about how cruel it was to dump unwanted cats to "give them a chance" because a typical urban cat could not catch enough mice and birds to feed herself.
Discussion of the possible impact of feral cats on rare resident birds and reptiles was added after the passage of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973.
The Walt Disney film Lady & The Tramp (1955) marked the apparent turning point in a battle begun with the passage of the first U.S. animal control ordinances to persuade Americans to confine dogs at home and have them wear identity collars. The popularity of the film apparently accomplished what more than 200 years of municipal dog-catching and 100 years of humane society lecturing had not. Within the next 25 years allowing dogs to run at large passed from being the American norm to being a socially unacceptable act in most parts of the country, but not even Ellen Perry Berkeley seems to have given thought to what the disappearance of free-roaming dogs might mean to feral cats.
What happened was that confining dogs opened habitat and diurnal hunting and travel opportunities to a self-sustaining cat
population who until then had been confined to places where dogs could not go, hunting and traveling mostly by night.
Coyotes, foxes, raccoons, deer, and opossums also took advantage of the absence of dogs to claim urban territory, but cats had the dual advantages of already being there, albeit mostly unseen, and of having by far the greatest fecundity, enabling them to rapidly breed up to approximately the same biomass as the dogs whose jobs as refuse raiders and rodent-catchers they took over.
Between 1960 and 1985, available records indicate, the numbers of "stray" cats killed by U.S. animal control agencies approximately tripled, even as dog intake leveled off and began to drop.
In gist, each free-roaming dog weighing 30 pounds on average was replaced by three 10-pound cats.
Feral cats became the most abundant and reproductively prolific mammalian predator/scavenger in the urban environment.
That in turn brought feral cats to the attention of animal advocates and wildlife researchers.
"Fewer than a dozen research papers [about feral cats] had been published by the mid-1970s," recalls Ellen Perry Berkeley in a the new final chapter of a 2001 reissue of Maverick Cats. "We now have more than 20 times that number."
Most of the new studies focus on the relatively obvious predatory role of outdoor cats, but a few researchers have also recognized the importance of cats as prey.
Coyotes and foxes often take urban habitat niches from feral cats by force. A 1998 study by the late Martha Grinder (killed in a 1999 car accident) and Paul Krausman, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, found that feral cats were among the main prey of urban coyotes. A1999 study by Kevin Crooks and Lee McClenaghan, of San Diego State University, affirmed the Grinder/Krausman work by discovering cat remains in 21% of the coyote scats they found in canyons near San Diego.
As hawks, owls, and eagles recovered from the reproductive depression of the 1950s through the 1970s caused by exposure to the pesticide DDT, many species­­including bald eagles­­surprised ornithologists by thriving as readily in some cities as out in the wild. Cats, it seems, have also become a big part of urban raptors' prey base.
The common view of cats as a top predator in the wildlife food pyramid because they are wholly carnivorous is true of most wild species, but not of felis catus, who shares with coyotes the distinction of being among the few predators with the fecundity of a prey species.
http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/03/6/wherecatsBelong6.03.html


Can we outlaw pet overpopulation? Part 2, continued.
Just limit the numbers
Merritt Clifton, ANIMAL PEOPLE NEWS
[Excerpt]
A demonstration neuter/release project completed by ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1992 and a national survey of cat rescuers undertaken later in 1992 by ANIMAL PEOPLE and the Massachusetts SPCA produced somewhat ambiguous results, from the humane perspective. (See "Cat Project Update," 9/92, and "Seeking the truth about feral cats," 10/92.) The survey did indicate, however, that neuter/release is effective in reducing the homeless cat population. About 75% of the respondents who had tried neuter/release reported that it stopped the growth of the feral cat colonies they observed. Neuter/release may have been included in an official animal control plan for the first time in Cape May, New Jersey. According to Cape May animal control department head John Queenan, neuter/release has helped to reduce the euthanasia rate in his jurisdiction to virtually zero.
http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/canweoutlaw2.html


Cutting Euthanasias without conflict, Part I
Merritt Clifton (From Animal People, 3/95)
[Excerpt]
Further data on homeless cats collected during a 1991-1992 neuter/release demonstration project that Bartlett and Clifton coordinated in northern Fairfield County, Connecticut, involving 320 cats in all, essentially confirmed the estimates of 50% pre-weaning mortality: 32% mortality in kittens rescued during their first 12 weeks of life, plus a strong likelihood that many kittens died before their litters were found.
At the midwinter low end of the homeless cat population cycle, in January 1992, 32 respondants fed 357 cats, an average of 15.7 apiece. By January 1995, 30 respondents fed 339 cats, an average of just 11.3 apiece, a drop that seems best explained by the adoption data.
As of August 1991, 29 people people reported feeding 381 cats, or 13.1 apiece; by August 1994, the same people were feeding 435 cats, the same as in August 1995, for an average of 15 cats apiece. This would suggest that the homeless cat population actually peaked in 1993 or 1994, and has subsequently leveled off, possibly due to the growing popularity of neuter/release.
http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/CuttingEutha.html


Cutting euthanasias without conflict, Part 2
Neuter-release
Merritt Clifton (From Animal People, 3/95)
[Excerpt]
Neuter-release was the third most popular rescue activity in both surveys, following homeless cat adoption and cat-feeding. In 1992, 14 rescuers had neutered and released 120 homeless cats, for an average of 8.6 apiece. In the interim between the surveys, 17 rescuers neutered and released 77 cats, an average of 4.5 apiece­­and one individual, who had neutered and released 50 cats prior to the 1992 survey, reported neutering and releasing 900 between the surveys, including about 400 males and 500 females, of whom 400 total were still alive. This level of activity was so intense that this indivi-dual's data had to be dropped from the tabulations to make sense of the rest.
As anticipated from study results showing that neutering adds from 20% to 50% to the life expectancy of owned cats, homeless cats seem to live far longer when neutered and therefore not obliged to take risks in search of mates or to get food for kittens. Among the cats neutered and released by the 12 normal-volume neuter/release practitioners during the interim between the 1992 and 1995 surveys, 28 of 39 males (71%) were still alive at the 1995 survey date, of whom 86% had lived at least two years after release; 48 of 56 females (86%) were still alive, of whom 83% had lived at least two years after release. Assuming that the average age of the cats who were neutered and released was one year, 71% of males and 86% of females had already lived longer than all but 17% of the 147 males and 22% of the 173 homeless females picked up during the1991-1992 demonstration neuter/release demonstration project.
ANIMAL PEOPLE also asked respondants in 1995 about the fate of cats they neutered and released before July 1992. Of 120 such cats, the fates of 95 (79%) were known. Thirty-four of 42 males were still alive (81%), as were 42 of 53 females (79%).
In fact, cats involved in the 1995 survey respondants' neuter/release projects seem to be living longer than owned cats: of 287 living owned cats reported in a separate survey of Animals' Agenda readers that Clifton did in 1991, just 64% had lived three years or longer, and only 56% had lived four years or longer. Only time will tell whether the neutered and released cats will match the other longevity marks found in the 1991 survey: 19% had lived 10 years or longer, and 11% had lived 12 years or longer, while 3% had lived 17 years or longer.
http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/CutEutha.2.html



Researched and compiled by Barb, AnimalResources@aol.com
Feral Cats in the News ~ the Feral Cat Blog!
Daily national and global cat news, information and resources to actively use for cat advocacy and cat management.
http://www.catsinthenews.blogspot.com