Monitor Editor
GREEN COVE SPRINGS— Clay County commissioners discussed upcoming funding levels for their trap-neuter-and-return cat policy during a Jan. 25 meeting, with several commissioners wondering if they should continue the program.
Chairman Wayne Bolla said the policy, now funded by $75,000 a year, has not been effective in reducing the county’s community cat population.
He added that with an estimated feral cat population of between 30,000 and 60,000 he gets many complaints from residents about stray cats.
“I don’t get a lot of calls about dogs,” he said. “I get a lot of calls about cats.”
Does it work or not?
Bolla also said that county staff has told him in the past that the plan, in which stray cats are trapped, neutered, and then released back into the same neighborhood in which they were captured, does not work.
“I don’t know what we can do with this,” he said, “but if the program works, let’s quadruple the funding and get it fixed once and for all, at least make a dent in it. If it doesn’t work, let’s figure out what else does.”
Cameron Moore of the University of Florida’s Maddie Shelter Medicine Program assured Bolla and the rest of the board of county commissioners that trap-neuter-and-return is the most effective cat population control program available.
“We can definitely provide you with a lot of research that shows that it does work,” she said. “We’ve never had a community that has implemented this program and then decided: No, that’s it. We’re going to go back to the old ways because it does not work.”
Moore added that Clay County’s northern neighbor has experienced success with the idea.
“I also started our community cat diversion program in Duval County,” she said, “and back then people thought we were crazy. But really it has made a dramatic difference in the amount of nuisance complaints that we’ve had and the number of cats that are entering our shelter.”
“We’ve been doing this for 20 years and it really hasn’t worked,” Bolla told Moore.
“It has,” Moore replied, adding the county should increase its funding level to see better results.
Community cats
Commissioner Jim Renninger asked Moore about the argument that trap-neuter-and-return fosters the formation of cat colonies.
“There’s an opposing opinion that (says trap-neuter-and-return) draws in feral cats from other sources because now they have a place to live and food and warmth and all that,” he said. and so, it magnifies the problem.”
“We actually don’t refer to them as colonies anymore,” Moore replied. “That has a really negative connotation. There are groups of cats and they do live everywhere in our communities. What does happen is we have a lot of people out there that are feeding cats. We have people who are allowing cats to go in and out of their houses. We have cats that are born in the community that don’t belong to anyone, so there are cats out there in the community and what we have found is that trap-neuter-and-return or shelter-neuter-and-return is the only proven method to actually make any kind of positive impact on the number of cats that are out there.”
Moore added that trap-neuter-and-return prevents groups of cats from forming.
“If we sterilize and vaccinate them, they’re not going to be adding to the population, we’re increasing our community’s immunity to rabies because we’re vaccinating all of them and we’re preventing those unnecessary births,” she said.
Return or release
Renninger also said that Orange Park residents have told him they don’t want trapped, stray cats returned to their neighborhoods, adding that residents will not trap the animals if they know the felines will be returned to where they were captured.
He asked Moore if the program could be modified so that trapped cats could be release elsewhere, rather than returned to the neighborhood in which they were trapped.
“Where are you going to release them?” Moore asked Renninger. “There is no magical farm that you can put 30,000 cats on. The cats are already embedded in this community. They have people who care for them, whether they will admit it or not, because they do not want to get in trouble with the county. The county does not have language in its ordinance that supports a community cat program, so it is often underground.”
Moore added that one contributing factor to a growing cat population is that owners of domesticated felines often let their animals outdoors, exposing them to the possibility of breeding.
“Half of Americans let their cats outside,” she said. “We would encourage that people keep their pets indoors because it’s the safest, but trying to control people is like trying to herd cats.”
