In the Dec. 5, 2003 issue of The Pacer, Steven Pitts wrote about the Ken-Tenn Humane Society’s (KTHS) efforts to assist with feral cat management at UTM.

The article was supposedly based at least partially on an interview Pitts conducted with myself, a UTM staff member, and the KTHS President. Unfortunately, the article was quite inaccurate, misrepresenting much of what I discussed with Pitts.

I am contacting The Pacer to correct many inaccuracies floating around campus about the trapping and relocating of three feral colonies living in buildings around the quad area, colonies that included kittens which were sealed into one building crawl space with no exit and no access to food or water. The building was unsealed and the kittens rescued, and all quad feral colonies have been humanely trapped and relocated.

I expressed concern that the misrepresentation of my discussion with Pitts, and the inaccuracies in his research could affect the perceptions of feral cats held by students, faculty, administrators and staff. I want to set the record straight.

First, the article recommends that a person encountering a stray or feral cat on campus should contact a humane society shelter, and he implies the shelter in Union City is one such shelter. The information in the article was completely incorrect.

The Union City shelter is not affiliated with any humane society but is an animal control facility for Obion County residents.
Their primary interests are in controlling animals in the community, not rescuing animals needing care, and they do not operate outside of Obion County.

Currently there is no animal shelter in the Weakley County area. Another inaccuracy is that feral cats cause significant decreases in numbers of bird and small mammals.

According to Alley Cat Allies, a feral cat management organization with several years of research and experience working with feral cats globally, at least 60 studies on feral cat habits demonstrate that ferals pose little danger to small wildlife population.

The most troubling point is the implied danger UTM campus members face of contracting rabies if they encounter any campus feral cats.

While feral cats could potentially be carriers of rabies, the fact that ferals are more fearful of humans than we are of them is overlooked in the article; they’re more likely to run from humans than to come up to them even for food.

The danger of humans contracting rabies from feral cats is slim. Statistics from the Tennessee Health Department for 2001, indicate that of the 106 reported rabies cases in Tennessee, none came from a cat, feral or otherwise.

According to Kim Deserio, Coordinator of the Montgomery County SPCA feral cat program in Gaithersburg, MD., the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that in a 12-year period, from 1990-2002, of 36 human deaths from rabies in the U.S., none were caused by a cat.

One important fact that was completely ignored was the human factor in unwanted pet populations. The primary causes of feral colonies are two, and they are both human: abandonment of pet cats or unwanted litters of kittens, and not getting pet cats spayed or neutered as soon as possible (which is as early as eight weeks of age for kittens).

Feral colonies exist on many college campuses, and one reason is that dorm residents get kittens because they’re cute (but they soon grow up to be cats, which often aren’t so cute anymore) or they try to sneak cats from home into the dorms.

When they are unable to care for or keep the animals, they abandon them on the campus. Most often, the animal has not been sterilized, so as soon as it meets with other cats, it begins to reproduce, which is the primary cause of feral colonies.

Female cats can generate two to four litters of kittens per year; so over a six-year period, assuming two litters per year with two females per litter, one female cat can be responsible for up to 11,000 additional cats.

To date, here at UTM, the prevailing belief seems to be that dumping cats is the primary source of unwanted cats on campus, so nothing is done to prevent the cats from reproducing and the number of cats on campus continues to grow.

To significantly and permanently reduce feral populations, the most cost-effective and humane method is trap-neuter-return (TNR). An increasingly number of college campuses and local municipalities nationwide have found that TNR is the only method of feral management that truly works to reduce feral colonies. The original feral colony behind the establishment of

Allie Cat Allies is now down to one cat and the primary means of reducing the colony was TNR, with caring maintenance of the cats in the colony by volunteers. TNR would work as a long-term means of permanently controlling and reducing the colonies of ferals currently living at UTM. However, despite having access to the facts about TNR, UTM seem committed to simple periodic “removal” of unwanted cats, which is not an effective means of feral management, especially since the cats that are allowed to remain are not sterilized unless a caring individual takes it upon him- or herself to get them sterilized. Several studies reveal that removal can actually make the problem worse, because it creates what is called the “vacuum effect,” with more cats, not less. Instead, if UTM would adopt TNR as a feral management policy, and if students (if not animal-loving faculty and staff as well) would organize to raise funds, volunteer to help with trapping and transportation of ferals to local area vets for sterilization, and then help monitor and care for the remaining feral colonies, costs for feral management should be minimal.
Grants are also likely available, especially if UTM were to collaborate with KTHS. Once all the cats currently in the colonies are sterilized, it should be minimal effort to practice TNR with any additional loners that wander or are dumped into the colonies.
Any young kittens currently living in the colonies could be sterilized, socialized by UTM volunteer foster families, and hopefully adopted into loving homes.
I am confident that the UTM community could solve the “feral problem” humanely if we would all work together. National Spay Day is coming up in late February, which would be the perfect opportunity for UTM to enact TNR and to become a role-model and educational resource for responsible pet ownership and feral management to northwest Tennessee communities.
For more information regarding the facts about ferals or about what we can do together to humanely manage our campus colonies, I suggest visiting the Alley Cat Allies website at www.alleycat.org. You can contact me at lanak@utm.edu or Dr. Heidi Huse at hhuse@utm.edu if you want to help get TNR enacted at UTM and in Martin or get a UTM student-generated animal advocacy organization started.

Lana Kipling is the administrative secretary in the Office of Institutional Research and Planning.