LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) - Josh Klumpe pulled up outside an office at Cor-Dale Court, where a bowl of cat food and a heated bowl of water sat under the glow of a Coke machine, and heard the question for at least the third time that morning.
“How many feral cats are there in Lafayette? You could keep on asking,” said Klumpe, a Lafayette animal control officer. “And I could keep on guessing.”
In the past month, as the Lafayette City Council considered a trap-neuter-return solution to control colonies of untamed, unowned cats scattered throughout the city, the estimate given to council members has climbed from 10,000 feral cats to somewhere around 26,000.
If the 10,000 number, the lower end of an incredible range, is true and not a sales pitch for an ordinance that would make people who feed an unmanageable cat population responsible for keeping it in check, that’s one feral cat for every seven people in Lafayette and one for every 2.85 households listed by the U.S. Census for Lafayette. If the 26,000 number is right, nearly every household would have its own feral cat.
Is there a way to know? Getting a number is, well, like herding cats. Even the experts tread lightly.
“The truth of the matter is, no one really knows,” Barbara Williamson, with the Utah-based Best Friends Animal Society, told the Journal & Courier (https://on.jconline.com/1vPJWxw ). The national group commissioned a “Feral Fiscal Impact Calculator” in 2010, but retired it, Williamson said, “because there were just too many variables.”
For Klumpe, he’s given up pinning a number to it, even though he’s on the streets each day and he was the one who during a city council hearing in October speculated, based on some formulas he’d heard of, about that upwards-of-26,000 figure.
Standing in Cor-Dale Court on a cool Thursday morning, he was keeping track of a cat that kept darting from under a minivan to the food bowl set out for the dozen or so cats sunning themselves on decks off mobile homes on the northern edge of the city. The cat under the van doesn’t want much to do with Klumpe. But she’s hungry. And she slinks to the bowl, back under the van, to the bowl, under the van, several times in the span of a few minutes.
“How many are there? You mean, counting that one that you probably don’t see driving by, under the van?” Klumpe asked. “I’m a facts guy. I like facts. And the fact is, I see one, two, three . six, seven . what, 12 or 13? And that’s just right here. We have a problem.”
Inflated numbers don’t seem to be needed anyway for a city council that wants to make trap-neuter-return the new standard for feral cats.
The ordinance is predicated on the same sort of logic that led the Best Friends Animal Society’s calculator to figure that it would cost governments, nationwide, $16 billion to trap and kill 87 million homeless, feral cats as opposed to $7 billion to support trap-neuter-return programs run by rescue organizations and individual volunteers.
In the Lafayette ordinance, a feral cat is defined as “any cat that has no apparent owner or identification and is wild, untamed, unsocialized, unmanageable and unable to be approached or handled.”
The ordinance makes it illegal to give food, water or shelter to feral or free-roaming cats unless the person registered as a “colony caretaker” through a city-approved “colony sponsor.” Colony caretakers would be required to “make every reasonable effort” to trap the cats, have them spayed or neutered, get the cats vaccinated and then returned to the same area, at their own expense.
Feeding free-roaming cats without taking those steps could bring a fine of between $50 and $250 a day, according to the proposed ordinance.
Stacy Rogers, executive director of the Almost Home Humane Society in Lafayette, said her agency will apply to be a colony sponsor and is preparing grant proposals to offset the cost of the traps and surgeries, as well as methods to keep feral cats out of the yards of people who don’t want them around. How much that will take or how much she anticipates it will cost someone to become a colony caretaker, she said she didn’t know.
She said Almost Home is hoping the trap-neuter-replace program will reduce breeding among the feral cat population, whittling down the number through attrition and reducing the number of litters of kittens that wind up at the shelter. A small population also will mean fewer cats to fight, spray to mark territory and treat neighborhood yards as litter boxes.
The cat intake numbers at Almost Home, the city’s designated shelter, ranged from 808 and 1,230 a year between 2007 and 2013. In 2013, the number was 933.
On a recent Friday, the shelter had 266 cats. By comparison, Rogers said, Almost Home typically has between 50 and 75 dogs.
“Of our stray intake, we’ve seen that euthanasia with ’feral cat’ (listed) as the reason has ranged from 15 percent to 21 percent of total euthanasia between 2007 and 2013,” Rogers said.
Almost Home started a program in 2013 to find people with rural property willing to take adult feral cats to take care mice.
“But there are only so many barns,” Rogers said. “And so many cats.”
Of the total number of stray cats that wound up at the shelter between 2007 and 2013, she said, between 40 percent and 46 percent were kittens.
“Those usually are ones that people found in their garage or under a porch or something - something you’d assume came from a cat that didn’t have an owner,” Rogers said.
During testimony for Lafayette’s ordinance, several people came forward to tell how they’ve done some version of trap-neuter-return on their own dime. That included Reta Karner, who lives on South Sixth Street. She told council members that she’s trapped 10 cats, five of which wound up as working cats on a farm near Mulberry and five of which were returned to the neighborhood.
“All the cats are fine and healthy and, most of all, beautiful creatures,” Karner said. “Who are we to kill another living being?”
Klumpe said the management of Friendly Village, a mobile home park in southern Lafayette, has done it with some success, too.
“I could trap cats and get them out of here all day,” Klumpe said, as five cats monitored his movements from a sideyard of one of the Friendly Village homes. Two of the cats had the straight-line ear tip marking of a cat that has been fixed and returned.
“And it wouldn’t do any good. It hasn’t done any good,” Klumpe said. “Killing feral cats just gives you a vacuum for more cats to come in. Returning them keeps the structure of the colony, just without all the litters. . Things I used to see out here - litters dying on driveways, kittens all infected and deformed by inbreeding - I don’t see as much. It’s a small sample in a kind of protected place. But it seems to be working.”
Klumpe said no matter what the number of feral cats is, the figures to watch will be at the humane society once the trap-neuter-return ordinance is in place.
“Something has to be done,” Klumpe said. “Is ’TNR’ going to work right away? No, it’s going to take some time. . I’m just glad to see Lafayette’s ready to give this a chance to work.”
___
Information from: Journal and Courier, https://www.jconline.com
Please read our comment policy before commenting.