By Elise Stolte
EDMONTON — Virginia Dobson and Lisa Paskar drove slowly down the snowy back alley near the city’s Mill Creek Ravine, searching for members of a colony of feral cats they’ve come to recognize on sight.
“Did you see him?” Dobson called, jumping out of the car and searching around the vehicles in a back driveway.
A black tom flattens itself against the pavement, then dashes off, bounding down the back alley 20 metres before pausing to look back.
“He’s fathered a couple litters,” said Dobson. “We have to still trap him.”
Dobson and Paskar, founding members of a new cat rescue, are working with the City of Edmonton to pilot a somewhat controversial approach to controlling the estimated 44,000 feral cats that breed and hunt garbage, songbirds and mice in the city’s back alleys.
The pair formed the Little Cats Lost Society three years ago to run a trap-neuter-return program, catching the cats, fixing and vaccinating them, and then letting them loose to live out their lives in wild colonies of four to 50 cats. Any friendly cats or kittens get adopted into homes. The city is giving the group $30,000 in January to expand their program so they can evaluate how the technique works and whether it reduces the problem of nuisance cats in Edmonton.
“Our objective is to reduce the population humanely,” said Dobson.
But it’s a controversial approach because some homeowners just want the cats gone, and ecologists worry each cat can still kill thousands of song birds, frogs and small mammals before it dies.
Even if you feed cats, “they don’t stop killing. It’s absolutely hard-wired into them,” said Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a conservation biologist at the University of Alberta.
Feral cats are a common problem across North America. They are, or are the products of, pets that wandered off or are abandoned by their owners before they are fixed. They form colonies and survive by eating garbage and hunting. In some communities in the United States, they have been shown to spread rabies, and when they live in back alleys, homeowners complain about the mess. If they haven’t been fixed, tomcats will spray their territory and fight while females yowl while they are in heat.
Edmonton currently deals with feral cats by inviting homeowners to borrow one of 60 available traps. About 5,500 cats are trapped and brought to the animal control centre each year. Of those, about 2,000 were euthanized last year because they were too wild or too sick for adoption.
Paskar got involved with feral cats in 2008 when the Jasper Place trailer park closed, leaving behind a colony of strays no one knew what to do with. The homecare nurse noticed more colonies as she drove around the city, and started to feed them on her own because she felt sorry for the mangy felines scrounging garbage to survive.
She and Dobson got together, researched best practices and started to fix the cats, a practice that is being done in several American cities. She now feeds, traps or talks with local businesses about the cats nearly every day, trying to build up the new non-profit. They solicit donations to cover bills at the vet.
Six regular volunteers build shelters for the cats out of Styrofoam boxes, beds of straw and heavy wooden pallets to keep out the coyotes. They bring their colonies food and water every day, and monitor and trap any new cats that haven’t been fixed.
They have about 20 feeding sites in an industrial area in southeast Edmonton where they started their efforts, as well as 10 others in residential neighbourhoods where homeowners were already feeding strays. “We’ve probably seen about a 40 per cent decline in the last two years, from the colonies that we’ve started working on,” said Paskar.
“Street cats only live two to three years,” said Dobson, who now runs Little Cats Lost as a full-time volunteer.
The problem with traditional methods – trapping and killing – is that cats that are left will just breed and maintain their colony.
Near the Mill Creek Ravine, a woman noticed her parents’ garbage bags were often ripped open and started putting out food. “Then these cats just started coming out of the woodwork,” said Sandy, who didn’t want her last name used for fear neighbours would be angry about the colony.
She didn’t want a cat colony, she said, but “how can you stand by and just watch suffering? You can give these cats the best life you can.”
This spring, Little Cats Lost trapped and adopted out 13 friendly adults and kittens from Sandy’s parents’ yard. At the same time, five cats were trapped, fixed and returned to shelters in the back of the yard.
Two cats were killed. They were trapped by a neighbour down the road, unaware of the Little Cats Lost effort, said Dobson.
That illustrates the problem with traditional trap and remove approaches, she said. People trap two and think they’ve helped, but trapping two out of nearly 20 does little. A female can produce three litters of five kittens each year, easily replacing those cats.
“What purpose did that serve? Those (two) cats died for nothing,” Dobson said, her voice full of emotion.
“People don’t understand the dynamics of cat colonies.”
The City of Edmonton is getting involved to try to reduce the numbers of cats they euthanize each year at animal control, said Susan Copeland, co-ordinator for the project with the city. She’s working with Little Cats Lost to make sure they keep clear records. She will also run education campaigns in the neighbourhoods where Little Cats Lost works to encourage more people to license and spay or neuter their pets.
Part of the pilot project is to see how neighbours react to knowing there are cat colonies being fed in their area. “It’s not an instant fix. But we think the pilot project is a good way to see if this works in Edmonton,” said Copeland.
The effort is a first for Edmonton, and even estimating the number of feral cats is difficult. The estimate of 44,000 to 65,000 stray cats is based on studies done by national rescue groups which have found a city’s wild cat population is typically equal to 67 to 100 per cent of the pet cat population.
Edmonton might have smaller colonies because of severe winters, but cats do survive and have very high reproductive capabilities, Copeland said. Plus, cat owners here have comparatively low rates of spaying, neutering, and licensing their pets.
“We have a lot of cats going stray here. We have a high incidence of people just letting them go.”