Cat Culture: The Social World Of A Cat Shelter

5. The Feral Cats and Shelter Solidarity

5 The Feral Cats and Shelter Solidarity IN PREVIO US CHAPTERS we referred to feral cats at the shelter. In this chapter we examine these cats in more detail to see what they can teach us about cat behavior and the shelter community. The term feral cat is generally applied to domestic cats who are born and raised independently of humans. Those who have studied or observed such cats over an extended period! generally find that, contrary to the stereotype of cats as solitary, most feral cats live in colonies. The size of the colonies ranges from six to sixteen members,2 and they usually congregate near a food source such as a restaurant, dumpster, or apartment building where residents regularly feed the strays. Thus, although feral cats live independently of humans, they are heavily dependent upon human food sources. Our best resource for information on the composition of feral cat colonies comes from a national survey of cat feeders and cat rescuers carried out by the Massachusetts chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (M/SPCA) and the magazine Animal People. They estimate that roughly one-third of 139 Copyrighted Material 140 Chapter Five the cats in feral colonies are abandoned pets, and the remaining two-thirds are the "true ferals," cats born and raised completely away from humans.3 At the time of our study, approximately 30 to 40 percent of the cats at the shelter were considered feral or semiferal. These were cats who were living independently of humans at the time they were admitted to the shelter, and who remained unsocialized or only partly so. That is, they did not allow themselves to be handled, and they generally resisted being touched or petted. Some ofthem, like Lucky and Sunshine , simply retreated if someone approached too closely or extended a hand to pet them. Others, like Tasia, hissed and bared their teeth and occasionally struck out with their claws (as one of the authors discovered when he shed some blood testing the limits of Tasia's "personal space"). There is no way of knowing whether these cats were "true ferals" or strays who became feral. We do know, however, as we describe below, that many of the cats who came into the shelter as ferals became socialized either partially (the semiferals ) or completely through their contact with the volunteers and, possibly, with the friendly cats. Shelter policy on feral cats evolved over the years. The shelter officers at first routinely took in ferals, but since these cats could not be adopted out (except in special circumstances) they threatened the ability of the shelter to take in new cats. Indeed, the ferals who remained unsocialized were clearly the long-term residents of the shelter. Feral cats also presented problems if they became ill and needed to be medicated on a daily basis. Carly, for example, would not allow herself to be medicated and would not eat any food that had medicine added to it She eventually had to be euthanized. And Misti, a tiny tiger feral who hid most ofthe time behind the refrigerator, became Copyrighted Material The Feral Cats and Shelter Solidarity 141 ill and died there before she could be tended. The shelter eventually tried to place limits on the number of ferals it took in, but it could not exclude them altogether. They sometimes came in accidentally when a group of strays was rescued or when homeless kittens were taken in with their feral mothers. Sometimes volunteers who fed stray cats in their neighborhoods pressured the shelter to take in a feral cat who became ill or injured. In the almost four years of our observations in the shelter, we saw only a few new feral cats admitted to the shelter . Feral kittens were a different matter, of course, since they could almost always be socialized and adopted out. Ferals and Friendlies in the Cat Community Two bulletin boards at the shelter contained pictures of all the current residents. One was for the "ferals," and the other was for the "friendlies:' We will use the term "friendly" to describe shelter cats who were oriented to, and could be handled by, humans. The pictures were important because staffers needed to know who was approachable and who was not. The cats themselves, however, made no such distinctions in their relationships with one another. The line between friendlies and ferals was regularly...