Alley Cat Advocates

With Feral Felines Numbering in the Thousands, Local Volunteers Set Out to Create Solutions

originally published October 1, 2008

Have you ever left out a can of tuna for the homeless cats on your block? Or taken a feral feline to get vaccinated before returning it to its territory? If so, you might want to invest in a flea collar or two, because according to an Athens-Clarke County ordinance, you’re the owner of those cats and are basically breaking the law.

According to section 4-1-1 of the county code, an “owner” is defined as “any person who owns… or otherwise keeps any domestic, nontraditional livestock or livestock animal for a period of 14 days… or any person who has any animal under his or her care or responsibility, either temporarily or permanently, at any time, within Athens-Clarke County.”

In short, this spells trouble for the Cat Zip Alliance, the umbrella organization that oversees Campus Cats, Kitty Crusaders and other groups who care for the feral cats that call Athens home. By feeding and getting veterinary care to these cats, especially through trap-neuter-release (TNR), these groups are technically in violation of the ordinance, and potentially subject to penalties including $1,000 in fines or up to six months in jail (according to Section 1-1-5 of the code).

Michael Goethe

Volunteer Abby Griner sets up a cat trap on the edge of the UGA campus one evening recently.

”I don’t believe that was the intent of the ordinances, to punish people who are trying to help,“ explains Kelly Bettinger, a wildlife biologist and research assistant in UGA’s Plant Biology department who serves as co-president of Cat Zip and as program coordinator for Campus Cats, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

”They don’t come right out and say you can’t do TNR, but it’s the way it defines ownership,“ adds Abby Griner, head of Kitty Crusaders, the new incarnation of Community Cats. ”When it comes to feral cats, they’re like wildlife in a way. An adult feral cat is essentially as wild as a raccoon. If a raccoon ate out of your garbage, that doesn’t make you its owner.“

Fortunately, local cat welfare organizations have been asked by Mayor Heidi Davison to create a proposal to change the ordinance. In the coming weeks, Bettinger will organize a meeting among TNR volunteers to draft three new versions of the ordinance. The simplest option will be a provision exempting individuals and groups that conduct TNR from the “owner” definition. Other drafts will propose punishing people who feed feral cats without getting them spayed or neutered, and the most complex proposal will suggest creating a cat colony registry. However, many of the colonies monitored by Campus Cats are already included on a database maintained by Catlanta, an Atlanta-based group, so Bettinger feels it would be unnecessary to create one solely for Athens. The drafts will be presented to an ACC Commissioner, most likely Kathy Hoard in District 7, says Bettinger.

But before tackling the ordinance, cat welfare advocates will participate in a TNR panel discussion on Thursday, Oct. 2. The discussion, starting at 7:30 p.m. in Student Learning Center Room 213, was intended to be a debate between those for and against TNR, in response to the heated exchange that erupted on the listserve for Speak Out for Species, a UGA-based animal advocacy group. After Griner’s post asking for Kitty Crusaders volunteers prompted an online argument about practicing TNR, SOS members organized the panel and invited Dr. Julie Levy, a leading expert on TNR and director of the Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine, to be the featured speaker. However, the TNR opponents scheduled to be on the panel have since decided not to participate.

Kelly Bettinger

He may not look happy right now, but in the long run trapping a feral cat like this one and getting him neutered may be the best way to reduce feral cat populations while caring for the animals, too.

“I was actually really disappointed, but I’m hoping we’ll get challenging questions from the audience,” says Bettinger, who will sit on the panel with Griner. ”We want people to ask their questions so we can give them the info they need.”

Among the facts TNR advocates want to make known is that the strategy may be the only way to handle Athens’ feral cat population, which has numbers in the tens of thousands according to some estimates.

“If you’re not going to have a mandatory spay-and-neuter law, especially in a college town where people abandon their animals all the time, what’re you going to do? If there’s no alternative other than euthanizing massive numbers of cats, then I would have to say TNR is the best way,” Griner says.

Bettinger sees a number of problems with the trap-and-euthanize approach many TNR opponents tout, the most obvious being that killing cats might not be acceptable to the general public. “You’re not going to get a volunteer group to do that,” she says, adding that the things that attract feral cats to an area, like garbage cans or rodents, would entice new cats later, so the problems would continue.

“There will never be such as thing as zero feral cats,” Bettinger says. “So, that leaves a choice between having a managed population or an unmanaged population.” To that end, Campus Cats works to make sure the feral cats on the UGA campus are healthy and unable to produce more unwanted kittens. Since the group began TNR on a regular basis in February of 2006, Bettinger says 88 cats have been removed from campus, 76 of which were adopted into permanent homes.

“What we do in our program is remove cats under a year old. That’s an age when they can either be adopted out or easily relocated, because they’re not territorial yet,” Bettinger explains. Older cats are returned after receiving veterinary care, and are closely monitored as the group also looks for new felines. However, Bettinger makes it clear that this doesn’t mean UGA is a cat shelter.

“The goal is to avoid having people dump their cats here, like it’s a utopia for unwanted cats,” she insisted. “To dump a pet cat is so cruel and so illegal. They stand out like a sore thumb on campus.”

On the off-campus side, Kitty Crusaders is in the process of accruing funds for feral cat projects in Athens. While volunteers can’t come out to pick up homeless cats in the greater county area yet, the group offers information about humane trapping and affordable vet care for citizens concerned about homeless cats in their neighborhoods.

In the long term, Griner hopes that changing the ownership ordinance and educating the public about TNR (through events like this week’s panel discussion) will help Kitty Crusaders make a tangible difference throughout the county, as Campus Cats has done at UGA.

“I would like to be able to get enough volunteers together and have enough funds where we can go out and trap, neuter and vaccinate feral cats proactively, instead of in response to requests that we get,” Griner says. “Considering that Athens is a small place compared to other areas that have done TNR, I really think we could get the homeless cat population in check.”

Tamara Gaskin