Wrangler....or wrangled?

Flocks of feral cats are common in this neck of the burb/woods.  Eventually, some otherwise decent people will resort to dealing with the cats by shooting them.  And these people always say the same thing:  "There were so many cats and they all started getting sick...".

Unfortunately, this seems to be true.  The bigger the herd gets, the faster disease spreads.  And the faster the cats reproduce, the more sickly the offspring become.  Inbreeding also occurs more often which is not conducive to good health amongst the feline population.  Toward the end of Mama's (Mama was the cat that started my problem) reign of terror, most of her kittens were not surviving past the cute stage.  Finding these kittens was heartbreaking. But by then, there were plenty of others taking up Mama's torch.  This meant there would be more kittens.  It also meant I would be weeping over more dead kittens.

It doesn't take long, maybe a year of two at the most, for a feral situation become overwhelming.  Once you've walked in a shooter's shoes, it becomes easier to understand why they resorted to killing.  In the middle of such a predicament, the time, expense and seeming impossibility of the task makes other solutions appear far out of reach.

I actually enjoyed the first few ferals.  But these cats, untainted by human foolishness, are fiendishly smart.  They know a sucker when they meet one and take full advantage.  And a human sucker soon discovers she has absolutely no control over the situation.  Get attached to a wild cat that roams freely outdoors and there's a good chance you will loose it.  If a wild feline gets hurt or sick, it is nearly impossible to help it.  Too many felines and you couldn't afford to help, anyway.  Even worse, as the little kittens that played together reach puberty, their wrestling is no longer a game.  Even the females begin fighting over turf and trying to drive each other out.  More savage are the zombie toms.  They'll half kill each other while jumping anything that moves.

If you are soft-hearted enough to feed them and provide shelter for them, that soft heart is bound to get broken.  On average, the more fortunate outdoor cats only live about four or five years.  Of the ferals I've tangled with, about 97% of these creatures are extremely smart and would be wonderful companions.  Only a few remain hard core ferals.  And there lies another problem.  How do you save them all?  If you have any semblance of sanity, you eventually realize you can't.  What you can do is prevent more ferals by making sure your feline friends can't reproduce.

There is a fine line between cat wrangling and being wrangled by cats.
I crossed that line years ago.  Some of these bewitching beasties have become members of my household.  The rest will live out their natural lives here.  But rest assured, none of them will reproduce. 

Now if I could just figure out get rid of the marauding zombie toms.