Cats Are in the Doghouse

Sixty million abandoned cats run loose in America. That’s the latest estimate of experts--a pure guess, of course, but still makes the point. Susan Fleming believes that about 10,000 roam the barrier island of Miami Beach. That’s a guess too. Fifty of these cats she calls hers. And even that is a rough calculation at any given time.

On this sultry sundown, just as every night, seven days a week, Fleming ventures out and feeds them. She waits for cover of darkness, because there is no guessing about this: Cats are causing big trouble in the land. Nature and the nature of cats are in collision. Cats are killing birds. Cats are killing small wild creatures of all kinds. Animal lovers find themselves disturbed and angry, and a world apart about what to do.

With so many million cats now roaming backyards, open lots, beaches and parks, no less of an organization than the Humane Society of the United States, a group born of pet owners, has now joined in the call: It’s time to bring all cats indoors and keep them there. For the good of the cats and wildlife.

Conservationists say hurry up, it’s about time.

Felines don’t get a voice in the matter, but those who would speak for them say don’t sacrifice cats, it’s not their fault.

As never before, Americans are being asked to alter their ancient bond with the domestic cat.

“OK, kids,” Susan Fleming coos down an alleyway, clanging spoon against bowl. Cats bound over fences, drop down from trees, squeeze from underneath buildings, tails erect, eyes aglow, mouths watering. From a car that smells of sodden kibble, Fleming makes 13 dinner stops in a territory of just a few square blocks. Elsewhere in the back streets and parks, along the boardwalk and around the dunes, a hundred or more people, mostly women, divide up the city. They fan out with bowls and buckets. Some feed twice as many cats as Fleming. Others, ones and twos.

Stand back for a bigger view: Untold multitudes in San Diego and New York, Costa Mesa and Pasadena, are out tonight feeding cats. Extrapolating the density of Miami Beach’s feeders to the entire nation, there could be 300,000 people like Fleming, digging into their own pockets to pay for cat food, answering what she calls the “curse of compassion.” Maybe the numbers are unimaginably greater. Estimates come up with as many as 17.5 million cat feeders.

Animal Lovers Are Divided

Whatever the real count, it is large enough to split America’s animal lovers. Because stray cats are predators. As are the millions of house cats allowed to roam free. They kill more than a billion small mammals and hundreds of millions of birds each year. That’s the guess of scientists.

So after simmering for generations--Hatfield and McCoy neighborhood feuds between cat and bird fanciers--the whole question of cats in America is boiling over. The Humane Society, the largest animal organization in the country, anguished about the conflict for years. This autumn, it has joined with the American Bird Conservancy and assumed leadership in redefining the proper place for cats in a crowded nation:

One, the groups declared, cats should be subject to municipal animal controls, or protections if you prefer, just the same as dogs.

Two, it’s no longer responsible to let your cat roam.

Such a profound change in thinking will be difficult for many to accept. Ever since the first house cats arrived with European settlers, Americans have told themselves that cats have a right to freedom, a need for it. Dogs came to be licensed but not cats. Dogs were fenced and leashed. But people granted cats the “nature” to ramble. In 1949, for instance, then-Gov. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois vetoed a bill to restrict felines. “All cats should be allowed some unescorted roaming,” he said.

Of course, there were many fewer cats then. After lagging dogs for most of the 20th century, cats have become our most popular and numerous pet, with 53 million of them in 34 million households. The Humane Society estimates 60 million roam the country without owners. Total cats: 113 million and surely increasing.

Pet Owners Face ‘Radical Notion’

Never before has such an important humane group asked so much of its members: to rein in their house cats and, even more, to rid the nation of free-ranging felines.

“It is,” said Humane Society Vice President Wayne Pacelle, “one of the biggest challenges of the humane movement.” It is also, he concedes, the most “radical notion” for pet owners since the campaign for spaying and neutering began in earnest in the 1950s.

Even this hardly says enough.

The people who own cats, and particularly those who accept responsibility for unowned cats--cat people, as they sometimes are called, can be righteous crusaders. Cats, after all, are innocent of everything except their nature. They are, like children, blameless. Cat people must protect them.

Driving through Miami Beach, Susan Fleming is talking about her friends who help feed the homeless cats. “She’s a nut,” Fleming says of one. So is another and, later, a third is revealed to be a nut. Good people, but nuts.

Does Fleming get called a nut?

“All the time,” she laughs. “My boyfriend calls me a real nut. . . . OK, kids.” Clang, clang. “This guy here is Tuxedo. He’s 11 years old. I’ve had him since he was a kitten. I’ve never been able to touch him.” Clang, clang. When Hurricane Andrew lashed the South Florida coast, most people prepared by boarding up their homes. Fleming, who owns several apartment buildings in South Beach, raced around trapping her stray cats. She locked them in empty upstairs apartments with tubs of food and water. Otherwise, they would seek shelter under buildings where a storm surge would drown them.

A Friend to Felines

To venture into these side streets as a stranger is to see only garbage cans and backyard fences. But cats are attuned to the vibrations of Fleming’s car. They have dinner reservations. By the time she pulls to a stop, they have materialized in colonies of three, five, seven. Clang, clang. Some have names, others are recognized by color. Here’s a newcomer. This tomcat has been around from the start. These two are brothers. Oh, and there’s a mother with new kittens.

Each cat gets a mound of moistened kibble but only fleeting affection. Fleming believes, as do most pet owners, that cats deserve love and attention. For these creatures, though, it’s better if they do not become too trusting of people. Not everyone is soft on strays.

Yes, Fleming acknowledges that her cats kill birds, and this makes her uncomfortable. “I love all animals equally. And there’s no doubt that a well-fed cat will continue to hunt. Unfortunately, that includes birds. But what’s the alternative? Do you want to kill all these animals too?” She points to the cats surrounding her--black and orange and white and gray, spotted and solid, all eyeing the bowl in her hand. “What’s the alternative? These cats didn’t do anything to deserve to be killed.”

Stiffening, she adds: “And let’s face it, the real damage to wildlife in this world comes from humans.”

Fleming has been feeding here for 12 years, taking over from “two little old ladies who died.” She is now middle-age, and she hopes that someone “will take over for me when I can’t go on.”

But she does not just feed cats. Fleming and her 100 friends call themselves SoBe Spay-Neuter Inc. In two years, they have sterilized 2,000 of South Beach’s estimated 10,000 strays, notching each one’s ear to prove it. A start. Fleming says the result is a shrinking stray cat population in Miami Beach, an observation shared by city officials.

Still, Fleming has no illusion about the colonies dying away even if she controls their reproduction. Others keep coming. People discard cats like rubbish. People share their houses and yards with cats for years and never truly claim them. People move away and leave the cats behind with the unpaid rent. People tire of cleaning the cat box and lock the door. A house cat produces a surprise litter in the laundry room--oh, dear, put the kittens in the park where the little old ladies will feed them.

Fleming spends four hours a day on cats--an hour feeding and three hours trapping them for sterilization, or responding to calls of abandoned kittens, or trying to find homes for strays, or nursing the sick. Her concern is widely known in the neighborhood, and once she had to ransom cats stolen from her car. Can you imagine?

Her apartment is full of sacks of food, traps, cat carriers and, of course, her own seven house cats. Her bathtub sometimes squirms with rescued kittens. She spends about $5,000 a year on cat food. She pays the homeless to watch over her colonies.

If not for such people, cats by the long ton would go hungry, get sick, die. Or be killed. Los Angeles took in 25,609 cats last year. For lack of adoptive homes, 80%, or 20,375, were put to death. Nationwide, the toll reaches millions.

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When it comes to cats and birds, German philosopher Georg Hegel’s axiom seems apt: Tragedy is when two sides are irreconcilably right. Because just a short drive away, in Miami’s Coconut Grove, Dennis J. Olle is a compassionate animal lover too.

He is conservation chairman of Tropical Audubon, the Dade County Audubon Society. In 20 years, he watched cats spread through every park in the region. He recorded a decline in migratory birds, a decline in water birds, a decline in resident songbirds.

“It’s devastating,” he said.

Granted, human regard for wildlife, for birds, is substantively different than for pets. House cats make people feel good about themselves; wildlife makes people feel good about the world.

A lawyer, Olle vaults from his desk without a backward glance. With a tour of local parks, he will demonstrate that birds need help too.

“See that?” Olle has parked at Crandon Park on Key Biscayne. A small laughing gull lands nearby for a drink of fresh water. He caught the swift side-movement of an advancing cat. The gull has too, and flees. Lounging on the grass of the small pocket park are 20 more fat, healthy, yawning cats. A couple of young ones bound up, perhaps mistaking Olle for a feeder. The others feign boredom.

Only a few yards away is a fenced area where Audubon members tried to protect the beach for breeding terns. The terns never came, and cats now frolic on both sides of the fence. In all the park, only one bird is seen feeding on the ground, a mockingbird.

Birds Are Major Victims

At another park, a small mainland remnant of Florida’s once-mighty tropical hardwood forests, the afternoon is eerie quiet. Melodious chirps emanate randomly from Olle. Bird calls. They are unanswered. No sounds of life. The only animals to be seen are a cat lounging in the shade and, overhead, a single turkey vulture.

“We don’t know what this place should be like, if there were no cats. Should it be teeming with birds? It’s kind of scary. It’s not a cat problem, I’ll grant that. It’s a human problem. But there’s no place in Dade County for feral cats. The best I can say is to capture them and get them homes or euthanize them,” Olle said.

Olle and wildlife scientists across America, and for that matter around the world, say cat lovers may not fully realize, or accept, the extent of the cumulative problem arising from all these cats. As practically any cat owner knows, and science has documented, a well-fed cat still hunts. On average, 20% of their prey can be birds.

Throughout the hemisphere, birds are suffering from loss of wild habitat. Their nesting grounds, migratory flyways, seasonal ranges are chopped up into smaller and smaller tracts by human development. Enter cats, “the most specialized living carnivores,” to quote Andrew Kitchener, curator of mammals and birds at the Royale Museum of Scotland and author of “The Natural History of the Wild Cats.”

Because of fragmented habitat, cats typically range free to prey without being preyed upon. This is not the case in larger swaths of wild country. Few cat colonies have taken up permanent residence among the alligators and owls in the Everglades, for instance. But when allowed to concentrate without predatory challenge, cats extract an astounding toll of small wildlife.

One of the most authoritative studies of the subject was conducted by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. They measured wildlife damage in rural areas, estimating that some proficient cats kill up to 1,000 animals a year, 200 of them birds. Even one cat described by researchers as a klutz killed 28 animals. Add it up and you arrive at their estimate of a billion-plus animal casualties in the U.S.

Other scientists have attempted to measure the specific consequences of cats in suburban areas and parks, where increasing numbers of colonies are being established. One problem has inhibited this science: Because cats are everywhere, it is difficult to make comparisons.

For his doctoral thesis from Texas A&M; University, wildlife ecologist Cole Hawkins almost gave up before finding parks with and without cats in Alameda County, Calif. His findings: “significant differences” in the numbers of resident and feeding birds in each. Ground-feeding California quail and California thrashers were common in the catless area but virtually nonexistent in their presence.

At the California Department of Fish and Game in Sacramento, wildlife biologist Ron Jurek says free-ranging cat colonies have created localized concentrations of predators unequaled anywhere in the natural world. Here, cats have a “major impact” on wildlife and pose a danger to some threatened species like the ground-nesting least tern. One tern nesting site has been fenced off near Marina del Rey since the 1970s. A couple of years ago, a cat found its way in. Jurek says it slaughtered “a large number of chicks per day” until finally trapped.

Findings like these are more than some cat fanciers can endure. Alley Cat Allies, a Maryland-based advocacy group for feral cat feeders, struck back in a recent newsletter. Cats are taking the blame for habitat destruction, hunting, pesticides, plate-glass windows and other human misdeeds: “Those who want to discredit cats are grasping at straws. . . . Cat populations need to be controlled, but let’s not turn the cat into the scapegoat of the century.”

California Is Among Battlegrounds

Conflicts between cats and wildlife, and the clashes of their human partisans, are sharpest in states with temperate climates, fast-growing human populations and vast varieties of native animal species, like California and Florida. In these places, some cat feeders advance an argument that stray felines are not intruders in nature, but settlers. Immigrant cats thus are owed the same hands-off freedom given coyotes, chipmunks, songbirds and the least tern.

Passions run high in the quarrel, and superheated rhetoric is common. For just this reason, the leaders of the Humane Society debated the question long and vigorously before speaking out. They take pains to avoid being classed as anti-cat. Instead, they argue that the best interests of cats are served by keeping them inside because they live longer and healthier lives. Why not spare both cats and birds?

As for feral cats, the Humane Society says there is no single national policy that will solve the threat to wildlife. The group says it will support responsible local efforts to bring down the free-ranging cat population--whether ordinances to bring cats under control, the same as dogs, or carefully managed colonies where all cats are spayed or neutered and newcomers are prohibited.

The Humane Society’s Pacelle, one of the most important animal rights activists in America, believes that the arguments over cats will occupy pet owners for years to come. “This is a cultural change that’s being sought. And it’s a debate worth having.”

Wildlife advocates also dread being branded as heartless scolds. George H. Fenwick, president of the nonprofit American Bird Conservancy, says, really, isn’t anyone in his line of work, by definition, soft on animals? But birds, not cats, are in trouble. “It’s real bad now in many places, and it’s going to get worse in a lot more places.”

Fenwick is one of those responsible for making cat-control a national conservation priority. Until his organization decided to take on the challenge this year, most of the work fell to local Audubon chapters. Other eco-groups shied away, knowing that cat owners were among their members and not wishing internal conflict.

The bird conservancy, Fenwick says, will support the Humane Society’s flexible approach. “But only up to a point.” After that, he suggests that wildlife advocates will have to carry the argument beyond pet owners, believing that the concerns of the larger citizenry will favor birds.

As for strays, Fenwick wants them gone, beginning in parks. He does not say how. “We have no policy. I hope they do the most humane thing possible for these cats.”

Curbs Run Into Resistance

Judging from the recent past, those seeking to curb cats will encounter resistance. In 1994, the California Legislature briefly considered imposing fines on people who let their unspayed and unneutered cats range freely. Cat advocacy groups marshaled their forces, calling the proposal a “cat-killer bill” and vowing to make life miserable for any politician who crossed them. So ended consideration of the law.

Complicating the discussion is the emergence of a “no kill” animal-control philosophy. That is, the belief that animal shelters should not destroy animals. Municipal authorities and traditional humane societies say this would be impossible--not enough homes for stray animals, not enough money or space to provide permanent refuge for all. Still, the sentiment has caught on among animal advocates and is the subject of popular fancy.

Meanwhile, tonight on Miami Beach, moist tropical air carries smells of perfume, cigars, suntan oil, tropical duff and restaurant broilers. Music drifts out of Art Deco clubs. In pastel flickers of neon, young faces come alight with expectation for another night in fashionable South Beach.

No one hears the lone woman drive into an alley behind, stop, and emerge from her aromatic sedan, spoon and bowl in hand. But the cats hear. Clang, clang.

Researchers Anna Virtue in Miami and Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles assisted with this story.