Fred Grimm: Miami-Dade’s trap-neuter-release program utterly ignores science

[XemaSab]

Statistics hardly matter. When it comes to feral cats, emotion trumps science. It hardly matters that peer-reviewed science indicates Miami-Dade County’s official policy of releasing hordes of free-roaming cats into the community amounts to songbird annihilation, a government-sanctioned massacre of birds, lizards and small animals.

“Un-owned and owned free-ranging domestic cats kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds and between 6.9 and 20.7 billion small mammals each year in the contiguous United States,” the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute scientists reported last year in Nature Communications.

The Smithsonian study said, “Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals.”

So it was nearly shocking to read a Miami Herald report last week by Douglas Hanks that said Miami-Dade animal control workers, following the tenets of the County Commission, had released 3,138 feral cats into the community in 2013.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/08/3983391/fred-grimm-miami-dades-trap-neuter.html#storylink=cpy

[Demeter]

1. I never did understand the concept

other than the "I can't kill the liddle pussy!" emotional trap. Cats aren't part of the original ecosystem, so why pretend they are?

[phantom power]

2. my understanding of the theory is ...

You populate an area with neutered cats. The neutered cats occupy/compete-for territory with potential non-neutered cats. And I assume "mate" with non-neutered cats. So the overall effect is fewer cats actually breeding more cats. That, and they can help control pests such as roof rats.

That's the theory, as described to me. I don't know whether it holds up, either for overall cat reduction, or pest control, or what it does to non-pest species.