Anchorage Daily News

They do their best to be invisible, sticking to shadows and the darkness of night. But they're there, feral cats, eking out an existence in nooks and crannies around the city, from trailer parks to sheds to crawl spaces beneath buildings.

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These are not hapless strays.

Feral cats are born wild, live without human contact, and are about as cuddly as chain saws. Strays, on the other hand, were once pets, then got lost or dumped, forcing them over to the wild side. In time, strays can be brought back around. Ferals cannot. Even people who have fed them for years typically can't get near them.

For a city not to have ferals would mean every single cat owner in its history took the job seriously enough to spay and neuter and provide a home for life. It's doubtful such a paragon exists.

It's not Anchorage, that's for sure.

Alley Cat Allies, a national organization devoted to the humane treatment of feral cats, estimates there are tens of millions in this country. Anchorage numbers are unknown. But last year, Animal Care and Control put down 160 ferals, cats trapped and brought in by members of the public fed up with their wild and sometimes destructive ways.

There's no way of knowing how many fell victim to vigilantes.

Just for the record, it's illegal to maim, mutilate, torture, kill, abandon, injure, poison or otherwise abuse an animal. And that applies to feral cats, too.

But what to do about them?

Ferals cannot be handled and therefore aren't adoptable. Those that end up at animal control never leave. They're sedated, then killed by lethal injection. And that's as close as Anchorage has to any kind of feral cat plan.

Grass-roots organizations around the country have come up with some. In the Seattle area, for instance, a group called South County Cats partners with King County animal shelters to spring feral cats from death row and find them jobs in barns and garages doing rodent control. And a growing number of cities and towns have adopted the Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) program, which advocates say is the best long-term solution.

Under TNR, feral cats are trapped, fixed and put back where they were found. Fixed ferals are less of a nuisance, proponents say. No more yowling, back-alley brawling and other annoying mating rituals. And since ferals are territorial and don't tolerate outsiders, over time colony numbers decline until none are left.

But no-can-do here. As municipal code goes, turning a cat loose, or any domestic animal for that matter, is illegal, fixed or not.

That doesn't mean people aren't doing it.

WHERE'S THE LOVE?

"There's just no love for feral cats," says Deborah Allen, owner of Chateau Pampered Purr, a licensed cat rescue facility on Tudor Road. "There just really isn't."

Allen has taken in many ferals over the years, but no more.

"That was back when I thought I could make a difference," she said. "But there are just so many of them, and there's no help. I ended up with 70 ferals that I spayed and neutered -- went out there and trapped."

Cat rescuer Cindy Liggett, co-founder of Kitty & K9 Connection, isn't taking ferals into her licensed facility anymore either. She has a houseful of rescued cats, including about a half dozen ferals. And that's enough.

These two are not your everyday cat lovers. They're willing to go where few would dare in order to save a cat. They've been known to crawl beneath apartment buildings, Dumpster dive in the dark, stay up all night in a car, huddled under blankets, to monitor traps in the dead of winter.

Allen and Liggett are fans of the TNR program. The alternative -- trapping and killing -- is the equivalent of hanging a "vacancy" sign for other ferals to move in, they say, and the problem just perpetuates.

On the other hand, people who put food and water out for ferals -- and you know who you are -- may not realize what they're taking on. The way the code can be interpreted, if you feed feral cats, you're a caretaker, and a caretaker is the same as an owner. So if a neighbor complains, you can't say, "They're not my cats." They are your cats.

Technically, if these cats become a nuisance to others, and your caretaker status can be proven, you could be cited for not having proof of rabies vaccinations or not having the cats confined to your own property.

Knowing this, if people still want to care-take a colony, Allen and Liggett, with the spay-neuter mantra in their heads, will provide traps, or will even do the trapping. And although they don't have the resources to pay for it, they can help grease the skids for spay and neutering, since not every vet clinic wants to deal with ferals. But that's as far as they go.

The R part of the TNR program is up to the caretakers. Allen and Liggett maintain a sort of don't ask, don't tell policy.

"We tell people we'll help them if they have a plan," Liggett said. "But we don't really want to know what your plan is."

Once these feral cats are fixed, they're returned to their "owners." What those "owners" do with them after that is their business.

Needless to say, the TNR program, even where it's officially sanctioned, is contentious.

FERAL PERIL

"There are people who are absolute cat haters," Allen said. "They say the only good cat is a dead cat."

And that goes double for ferals.

With only eight officers covering the area from Girdwood to Eklutna, seven days a week, from 7:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night, animal control doesn't have the resources to trap feral cats, said Myra Wilson, veterinarian and shelter manager.

"Someone says, 'Come pick up this loose cat that's running around my neighborhood.' It isn't going to happen.

"A lot of people are very, very concerned about the impact on wildlife," she said. "The bird people. And there's a public health risk."

Animal control does lend traps, for a $50 deposit. People with feral cat problems can trap them and drop them off for the city shelter to deal with.

When a cat ends up at the shelter with no tag, collar or microchip, it has three days to make a good impression. It stays in a holding area where, if necessary, staff members use heavy gloves or a kind of fake hand-on-a-stick to determine how it responds to humans.

"It's not a perfect science," Wilson said. "Hiding in a kennel wide-eyed, it doesn't mean you're feral. It means you're scared. The extremely non-socialized we deem feral."

The TNR issue is "very complicated," Wilson said. "You can find all sorts of information pro and con.

"I think the TNR program can work well for some communities, but the community needs to embrace the concept."

FERAL CATS: More information on humane trapping, how to manage a feral colony, the Trap-Neuter-Return program and more.

www.alleycat.org

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