Feral cats—nearly every college campus has them. They may hide in the bushes, run along window ledges, or scatter across paths as students catch them off guard.
But free-roaming cats—a category that includes strays and feral felines as well as owned cats allowed to go outside—are often hit by cars or fall victim to disease, starvation, poisons, attacks by other animals, or mistreatment by humans. Free-roaming cats also prey on small mammals, songbirds, and other wildlife; spread zoonotic diseases such as rabies; defecate on other people's property; and cause car accidents, among other problems.
And while many campuses have their own feral cat population, not all have a plan in place to deal with it. But they should.
"A university campus is a community just as any other," says Stephanie Shain, The HSUS's director of Companion Animal Outreach, "and if their community has a problem with free-roaming cats, they have a responsibility to deal with it over the long term."
One group is doing just that. The Aggie Feral Cat Alliance of Texas, or AFCAT, is a student organization that cares for the free-roaming cats on Texas A&M University's campus.
"There have been cats on (Texas A&M's) campus for at least 20 years," says AFCAT faculty advisor Margaret R. Slater, DVM, PhD., who recently published Community Approaches to Feral Cats: Problems, Alternatives & Recommendations as part of The HSUS's Public Policy Series. "We used to do just trapping and removal of the cats, but then became aware that perhaps there was a better solution, a more long-term solution."
AFCAT started four years ago. In conjunction with Texas A&M's veterinary college, the group humanely traps the feral cat population for identification, disease testing, vaccination, spay/neuter, and re-release. Volunteers, comprised of students, faculty, university staff, and a graduate student who coordinates the program, feed and observe the cats daily. "While the organization is all volunteer, the cats' health check-ups and sterilization are integrated into the veterinary college's curriculum," says Slater. "It gives [vet school] students extra experience, and also expands on existing programs and makes students aware of the feral cat issue."
The group also provides adoptions for kittens and socialized adult cats, but volunteers purposely keep fairly quiet about that aspect of the program.
"We don't want to tell people if they dump their cats they [AFCAT staff] will take care of it," Slater says. "We try to keep it deliberately nebulous. We get people dumping animals off at the vet school already. We try to prevent more kittens from appearing. The adoptions were actually an accidental part of the program, which we had to create as we found socialized cats and kittens. We try to return only feral cats to campus."
Slater said when they do have adoptions they're usually "in-house"—the cats are adopted by people from the veterinary college.
At Texas A&M, what started as a program to control the campus's feral cat problem turned into a tool for teaching and research. Slater notes that they have treated approximately 200 cats since the program began four years ago. Most of those cases were within the first year and a half, but now, primarily due to the spaying and neutering component of their program, they have switched their focus from controlling the population to monitoring them.
And that is the principal idea behind active management of feral cat colonies: That the number of ferals will ultimately be reduced through attrition.
