Feral Cat Colony, or Kitty Singles Bar?

It’s hard to believe that the elderly “cat lady” could ever possibly be considered a trendy stereotype, yet these days, keeping a “controlled feral cat colony” is becoming more and more popular.

When I was thirteen years old, I found a mother cat and six kittens in my backyard and decided to spend a few hours a day feeding and socializing them. Two months later, I’d gotten all seven cats placed in homes and I moved on with my life. Meanwhile, my grandmother was also feeding stray cats outside her house, although she had no intention of taming them or finding homes for them. While my method was successful and rewarding for everyone involved, my grandmother’s colony of cats continued to grow for years without a single happy ending. Now, I’m seeing that there are individuals and even entire organizations that are devoting their time to encouraging people to care for feral cat colonies similar to the one my grandmother acquired.

The idea behind these feral cat colonies is that if you find a cat on your property, catch it in a humane trap, have it spayed or neutered and vaccinated, and then feed it for the rest of its life in your backyard, it won’t reproduce. But what happens when an unneutered male cat and an unspayed female both hear about the free food being dished out at your place at the same time? Whenever you feed animals on your property, you’re going to be continuously attracting more animals. My grandmother’s feral cat colony also included an opossum. Even when you attempt to have all the cats on your property spayed, feeding cats outside your home can at times be equated to pimping the cats out to each other. You might see it as a controlled population that isn’t likely to grow, but the cats might see it as a great place to both get a meal and meet someone to spend the night with.

Another myth advocates for feral cat colonies may want you to believe is that when you feed feral cats, they won’t be likely to hunt songbirds. But if it were true that a well-fed cat will never kill a bird, PetsMart wouldn’t carry feather toys. For cats, catching birds is like a hobby. Who knows, maybe when a new female feline enters a colony, all the males compete for her attention by bragging about all the cardinals they’ve taken down over the last week.

People who encourage others to care for feral cat colonies also claim that well-fed cats never leave the place in which they are fed, which means colonies reduce the number of cats that are killed by cars. However, in my experience, cats are smart. They know a schedule when they see one, and if you feed them at a certain time each day, they’ll know that time of the day is the only time that they need to be on your property. The cats in my grandmother’s colony came and went all the time, and many times, one would disappear and never return or would be found dead after being hit by a car or attacked by another animal.

While the intentions behind the controlled feral cat colony idea are good, the results often aren’t. What people often don’t realize is that in the best of situations, a well cared-for cat can live as long as twenty years. So what happens when the teenager who thinks it would be fun to take care of a bunch of cats goes away for college? When my grandmother entered a nursing home and later died, she left behind a total of twenty-three cats (some inside and some outside of her house) that my family became responsible for.

It’s likely that there is no way of completely solving the feral cat problem. However, rather than attempting to control as many cats as possible, finding homes for just a few can make an even more positive difference.