Feral cats travel far and wide
Left to their own feline devices, feral cats wander a wide, wide area, and eat a variety of foods, including some left by humans.
House cats? No so much.
A two-year University of Illinois study has found that one of 42 adult cats tracked with a radio collar traveled on a range of 1,351 acres south of Champaign and Urbana.
That was a male, mixed breed feral cat, and much of its travel was nocturnal and almost unseen by humans.
But your average well-indulged house cat? The mean home range for pet cats in the study was less than 5 acres.
The pet cats managed this despite being asleep or in low activity 97 percent of the time, a couch time even Homer Simpson would envy.
Feral or pet, most cats studied ranged within about 300 meters of human structures, said Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey at Illinois
The other authors are former graduate student Jeff A. Horn, Professor Emeritus Richard Warner and Edward J. Heske, a mammal expert in the natural history survey.
Mateus-Pinilla said owned cat had smaller home ranges than unowned cats, but the study "failed to detect consistent differences in home range size between the sexes or among seasons.
"Home ranges of unowned cats included more grassland and urban area than predicted based on availability in all seasons, and farmsteads were selected in fall and winter," the study reports
"Within home ranges, unowned cats shifted their use of habitats among seasons in ways that likely reflected prey availability, predation risk and environmental stress, whereas habitat use within home ranges by owned cats did not differ from random. Unowned cats were more nocturnal and showed higher overall levels of activity than owned cats."
Horn, who did much of the actual hands-on work tracking the casts, could not be reached for comment this week.
The results surprised Warner, who has done extensive cat research over decades.
"When I first did a major cat study in Ford County in the '80s, we worked with all the human residents in 20 square miles for five years, and radio-tracked the animals over some terrible winters," he said.
Feral cats by definition have little or no association with or dependence on humans, but in reality all of them could traverse a farm and eat human-provided food, even if it were not meant for their consumption, Warner said.
"Considering what it takes to live outdoors — coyotes, disease, cold — plus what we know about cat mortality by fighting with other cats, these outdoor cats did surprisingly well with establishing a range, and sometimes a very impressive one," Warner said.
Of the radio transmitters used in the study, 23 had tilt and vibration sensors that tracked the animals' every move, the study said, allowing Horn to do work that might ordinarily require a field team.
Living among coyote and foxes, not to mention humans with bad intentions, unowned cats did not always survive the two years. Three went missing and presumed dead, the researchers found, and another was found in a Dumpster.
Pet cats spent only 3 percent of their time engaged in highly active pursuits, such as running or stalking prey, the researchers reported. The unowned cats were highly active 14 percent of the time.
Yes and I wonder if those collars at all impeded any cat's ability to survive. Collars, even breakable ones, can be as bad as helpful.
But THANKS, Paul Wood, and researchers, for throwing a bit of light on these stressed, hidden-in-the-dark creatures whose lives are far harder and more miserable than most of us care to look at or admit. This "study" is mostly common sense to me, but then I've personally "studied" and tried to help stray and feral cats for over 55 years. Somehow it seems they ALL end up on my porch for a handout! -- many in the most pitiful shape you can imagine. Every new season sees from several to a dozen newcomers, with as many battles. Some hang around, most move on. Often the ones I can catch, I try to "tame," have "fixed" asap and try to find homes for or set free; they tend to wander off, a few return. Most, even those obviously sick or injured, are not "catchable" even with humane cage-traps. Despite best intentions and huge effort, cat rescue groups and feral programs are swamped.
I hope no one thinks, from research or not, that most cats on their own have a very good chance of survival after a couple years. General dangers are mentioned, but I bring them up again, more explicitly: other animals (including yes, psychopathic humans -- who torture/poison/shoot for "fun"/maim and kill because little outcry or legal punishment curtails their depravity), disease/parasites, cold/heat extremes, natural disasters of floods/tornadoes/fires, cat turf wars, traffic, hunting traps, poisonous/prickly plants and trees, broken glass/nails, endless obstacles, but mostly, slow starvation and thirst.
Bird lovers fear cats are killers, and yep, we all know most cats will stalk birds. Ironically, I've seen shivering bone-thin cats in winter eat bread crusts and popcorn tossed out for birds. Most ironically, predatory birds (the now more prevalent protected raptors such as hawks, eagles, owls, falcons) can easily swoop, grab and shred kittens/small cats and even dogs in seconds. Even smaller birds can peck out kittens' eyes or attack cats. Unhappily, I've seen all this firsthand IN OUR AREA.
Some think, "Oh well, too bad, just Nature's way, no different from rabbits, squirrels, coons or any other wild animal." But I feel since people have so often carelessly bred cats (and dogs) as nothing more than "furry toys" to be discarded at whim, with cats especially abandoned to fend for themselves, we have largely created the huge feral problem ourselves -- NOW nature takes over more cruelly. I've found parasite infested kittens born in bushes, strangled in vines, have throats ripped out by toms or other creatures. Heartbreaking.
We, highest on the food chain, are lucky to have our hunger satisfied blindly with (usually) sanitary pre-processed precision and ease. Mother Nature is not such a tidy or thoughtful provider; I've seen newborns, (while mother was hunting for bugs, snakes or whatever else to survive), with eyes, ears and noses filled with maggots, stung by insects. Perhaps most sadly, I've found kittens half-eaten by their starving mothers.
This stray and feral struggle goes on NOT just far off in "those farmers' fields, the woods, by the river, in alleys." It's on campus, in parking lots, our own yards in town. Again, and understandably, most people do not want to look at such suffering in their midst. Yet it's a problem too great not to see. I admire all who focus on and try to help solve it.
The whole problem with feral cats can only be solved one way: address the underlying problem, which is our pet-obsessed society. Everything from dog bites to the huge euthanasia rate of the Humane Society would be solved instantly simply by making sure pet ownership is done responsibly. Face it, pets are the ultimate non-indigenous invasive species. Controlling, and yes discouraging, casual pet ownership would go a long way toward solving all these issues.
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