A stray peeks out from a hideaway on the Sea Bright beach earlier this week. (Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
A year after it was launched, a pilot trap, neuter and release program appears to have stopped population growth among Sea Bright’s stray cats in its tracks, proponents say.
No kittens are believed to have been born in the past year among the dozens of felines that inhabit the ocean beach and nearby edge of the Shrewsbury River, says Mayor Dina Long.
Long, who championed the program as a council member (and is the owner of ‘Leonard,’ a 14-year-old former stray from another town) says the program “had a great first year.
“Almost 100 cats were trapped, immunized, neutered and microchipped, at no cost to taxpayers,” she said, noting that costs were picked up by a grant from the Monmouth County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “And for the first time, no new kittens were born on the beach last spring, which is huge,” she said.
The grant followed enactment of an ordinance that enables certified caregivers to feed and tend to the cats in the wild. The volunteers stepped in to trap the cats, and hosted them in cages in their homes during a transition period following sterilization and medical treatment and before the animals were released back into the wild, says borough resident and caregiver Frieda Finegan.
“The cats are all fed and healthy,” Finegan tells redbankgreen. “And there are no kittens.”
Long credits the volunteers for hunting down and trapping cats in advance of the 2011 winter mating season for the turnaround.
“We were out there in the rain and cold. We sat there for five and six hours” waiting to snare some of the feral cats, which won’t approach humans, said Finegan, who is 70 years old. “We had blue fingers.”
Some cats were trapped in an abandoned building, she said.
The borough was forced to act by the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service, which has responsibility for safeguarding piping plovers that inhabit the beach and are prey for cats. Previously, the town would round up as many cats as it could and have them euthanized, but the killings did little to halt population growth.
After requiring the borough to “jump through a lot of hoops,” the agency “thankfully, worked with us, and allowed us to manage our own beach” by signing off on the trap, neuter and release program, Long said.
Caregivers are responsible for tracking the microchipped cats and looking out for those without clipped ears, the signifier that a cat has been treated.
Finegan and four other volunteers monitor the cat colonies behind the beach recycling center and along the river twice a day, giving them “good quality food,” some of which she cooks herself. She estimates there are 40 cats in the two locations.
The challenge going forward, said Long, is keeping up the ranks of volunteers, who visit the cat colonies one or twice a day with food, fresh water and attentiveness to their health and safety. They also trap new cats – animals that have wandered off or been abandoned by their owners – and take them to the SPCA for sterilization.
Long says she’s not ready to declare the program a success yet, though. It’s a five-year operation, and “we’ll see after five years how many cats we have then,” she said.
The goal, she adds is not to eliminate the stray cat population –”I don’t think that would be possible,” she said – but to have all cats accounted for and cared for.
Finegan, who once took a waitressing job just to have access to scrap meat and fish for strays, says she’ll keep doing it as long as she can.
“They’re god’s little creatures,” she said. “They didn’t ask to be here.”
I am so happy to hear about the great success this has been so far! TNR is the way to go. A big thank you to all involved in this effort.
Great job by everyone. Working with nature is the way to go every time. Thanks!
Wait, “working with nature” is collecting members of an exotic species and surgically sterilizing them and returning them to an environment where they are not native then keeping them well fed with food made by humans so that they don’t eat what would be their natural food because their natural food is endangered by human encroachment?
More like “working nature over.”
Robert,
Feral cats aren’t an exotic species. Cats are most definitely native to Sea Bright. Who would try to argue with that?
It seems your take on working with nature would be to euthanize them. Sorry, I can’t agree with that one.
Better to work with nature by preventing more kittens……that’s my view of the situation.
Robert, obviously this process isn’t natural, but it is a humane solution to a current problem stemming from past issues (human encroachment, as you mention). Instead of harping on the past and what shoulda/woulda/coulda been done differently, coming up with a solution for today and the future seems like a good idea, no?
The people who worked to make this happen should be commended. The trap and neuter program is far more humane than euthanizing them just because they live in the wild.
I didn’t say it was a bad solution, but it’s not working with nature. It’s imposing an unnatural solution on an unnatural situation. A more natural solution would be to return the cats to Europe or Africa where at least close relatives live naturally. Maybe ship them to Crete, where the native cat population has gone extinct.
Or release a few bobcats in Sea Bright. Bobcats are a native species and they would effectively control the domesticated cat population. But they’d be bad news for the plovers (and chihuahuas) once the cat population dwindled.
House cats are not native to Sea Bright or North America. They were introduced a few hundred years ago by humans. The species would not survive in North America without human support. What could be more exotic than that?
This problem was created by people feeding strays. Setting up a network of people to keep strays well fed is not the way to solve the problem.
I also commend the people who came up with the plan to neuter all the cats. They saw a problem and came up with a solution they liked. They got everyone to go along with it. They got it paid for.
They saw a problem and tried to solve it. Bravo!
But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with their solution.
Robert,
By that reasoning, you could say that the descendants of the English men and women who settled here and established the 13 colonies aren’t native to America either. I can assure you that we aren’t going back to where our descendants came from…except for a visit…any more than the cats are going back.
Better talk to the police and the wildlife experts before you introduce bobcats. They’d make feral cats look like a pretty good deal.
Amazing work for the fur angels! Thank you!
Make that “….we aren’t going back to where our ancestors came from…..”
I especially like two of your proposed solutions.
Exporting the feral cats to Crete and importing bobcats to Sea Bright.
I don’t think anyone will mind if you just do both.
Let us know after you’ve let the bobcats loose.