San Antonio homeowners fall victim to feral cat population explosion

“I can’t take it anymore,” said the 81-year-old, who has counted as many as 14 cats at a time in her yard. “I’m stressed to the max and exhausted from cleaning up all their poop.”

Spradley said she’s tried many ways to keep the cats away. A tall fence encircles her yard, she’s placed barbed wire where they like to congregate and she’s even paid $43 for a can of cat repellent.

She’s also contacted the city several times, only to receive emails informing her the matter “has been investigated by the department and has been closed.”

And still the cats — attracted by the food a neighbor puts out his back door — keep returning.

There are few issues more polarizing in neighborhoods coast to coast than what to do about the feral cat problem. There are an estimated 60 million unowned and free-roaming cats in the United States and to frustrated San Antonio homeowners it can sometimes seem like half of them live here.

Cat bites aren’t funny: They can lead to infections, even rabies

The cat lobby is strong and vocal, arguing that the feral feline population can be controlled and these cats should be allowed to roam and hunt freely because that’s their inherent nature.

The other side of the argument, however, is that outdoor cats live harsh and shortened lives and they’re more susceptible to disease, injury or death. They also say that hunting instinct decimates local wildlife such as birds, small mammals and amphibians.

The San Antonio Feral Cat Coalition, a volunteer organization that promotes the spaying and neutering of outdoor cats, estimated several years ago that there were at least 262,000 stray cats on the streets of the city and Bexar County.

While that’s more than in most cities, the number likely has increased significantly in recent years — and there are for several reasons for this population explosion, according to coalition president Sherry Derdak.

“Because of our warm climate, cats breed year round,” Derdak said. “A single cat can have three or four litters in a year.”

The city also has a high abandonment rate for cats and many cat owners fail to get their pets spayed or neutered to prevent them from breeding.

The pandemic also contributed as many cats, adopted during the early days of stay-at-home orders, were abandoned once owners became overwhelmed by the cost and responsibility of caring for a pet. 

The pandemic also forced the cancellation of many spay and neuter events.

Before the pandemic, the city spayed and neutered about 150 cats per week, according to Fumiko Fujimoto, coordinator of the city’s Community Cat Program, which provides provides spay and neuter services for outdoor roaming cats.

“After, we were doing only about 50,” she said.

Until the mid 2000s, the city’s go-to method for controlling the feral cat population was simple: catch and kill. Fujimoto said it simply wasn’t effective.

Cats are territorial, she explained. They’ll spray their area with urine, which acts as an olfactory Keep Out sign to other cats.

“But if you remove and euthanize a group of cats,” Fujimoto said, “more, often many more, will simply move in to take their place.”

Tips and tricks: How to catch a savvy feral cat

There’s even a name for it: the Vacuum Effect, which describes how the sudden absence of cats in an area will suck in more cats to replace them.

These days, the city and private entities such as veterinarians fight feline overpopulation via a strategy known as TNR, or trap, neuter (or spay), and return, in which strays are surgically sterilized before being released back to their colony.

TNR is popular with government officials for several reasons. It’s less expensive than catch-and-kill because most of the people who trap cats are volunteers, while cities usually rely on professional pest control companies to handle catching and euthanizing cats. TNR is also more popular with the general public, who view it as a more humane way to handle the problem because, theoretically, without new kittens being born, the number of spayed and neutered cats will decline and eventually disappear completely.

That’s the theory, at least.

According to a recent Express-News story, securing a surgical appointment for these cats is increasingly difficult. And, wrote columnist Cathy M. Rosenthal, “a clinic can decline a cat for various reasons. A feral cat can be too thin or sick to have surgery, meaning the trapper must pay for medical treatment to get the cat well.” 

According to critics, such as Stephen M. Vantassel, owner of Wildlife Control Consultant and author of “The Practical Guide to the Control of Feral Cats,” TNR doesn’t work.

“If TNR is such a good strategy,” Vantassel said, “why hasn’t it solved the feral cat problem? There may be isolated cases where it reduces the numbers in an area but it never gets the population down to zero.”

Fujimoto concedes that the only evidence the city has about TNR’s effectiveness is anecdotal — individual neighborhoods that saw the number of strays drop after they’d been spayed or neutered. 

But even if TNR did work, critics contend that, returning cats to the street is tantamount to releasing stone-cold killers to wreak havoc on the natural world — or at least the small animals in the neighborhood.

Studies have found that cats have from four to 10 times greater impact on wildlife than native predators and it’s estimated that each year, free-ranging domestic cats take down from 1.3 to 4 billion birds and from 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals annually.

Being allowed to roam outdoors isn’t good for cats, either. As a policy report from the American Veterinary Medical Association bluntly, states, the life expectancy of a feral cat, “is radically reduced due to death from trauma, disease, starvation and weather extremes. These same factors may also contribute to an overall poor quality of life.”

Free-roaming cats also are a public health menace. They can carry diseases contagious to humans such as rabies, ringworm, tularemia and parasitic diseases.

Vantassel suggests one way to help alleviate the problem would be to institute laws stating that someone who feeds a feral cat becomes the de facto owner and so is responsible should that cat scratch or bite someone or otherwise become a nuisance.

“That means you have someone to go after if the cats they feed dig up your garden,” he said.

In San Antonio, actively feeding feral cat colonies without actively working to have the individuals fixed is a violation of city ordinances and someone in violation will be, after one warning, subject to a $200 citation, according to Derdak.

The coalition has volunteers who will work with homeowners who want to feed cats but lack the resources to trap and have them spayed and neutered. For information, call the coalition at 210-877-9067. 

According to Fujimoto, the most effective way to keep cats out of one’s yard is to install motion-activated sprinklers that shoot a spray of water when they detect an animal nearby.

“Our residential field officers have told me that these work to scare away cats and other animals,” she said.

[email protected] | Twitter: @RichardMarini