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Chattanooga: McKamey Center battles growing feral cat population

By: Anne Braly
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They roam throughout the city, making homes in abandoned buildings, in caves on the sides of the surrounding mountains and underneath apartment complexes.

Feral cats — basically wild cats that have very little, if any, contact with humans — continue to be a major problem in the Chattanooga area, animal control personnel say.

“They will probably be a problem for the next couple of years until we can get a handle on sterilizing all of them,” said Donna DeWeese, community outreach coordinator for the McKamey Animal Center.

But right now, the center is “inundated with feral cats,” she said.

To help tame the feral cat population boom, the McKamey Center began renting traps over the summer to area residents who have noticed feral colonies around their homes. And now that breeding season is over, the center is amping up its feral cat project.

Once the felines are trapped and brought to the center, they are vaccinated, checked for their health and sterilized to prevent breeding in the spring, she said.

“We’re accelerating our efforts during winter months, because we want to get them while they’re not having kittens so we can sterilize the adult cats,” center director Dr. Amanda Wojtalik-Courter said.

Volunteers often return the cats to their colonies, in which cases their ears are tipped for identification, and they are vaccinated against disease.

“They are returned to their colonies in order to reduce their stress level because being confined is not what they are used to. It is terrifying for them,” Ms. DeWeese said.

Also, feral cats help with rodent control in the areas in which they live, according to center officials. Some kittens, however, are able to be tamed and put up for adoption.

Michelle Pih recently adopted two cats from the McKamey center: Fisher, a domesticated cat, and Ace, a feral cat tamed at the center.

“He was so loving to me when I first met him,” Ms. Pih said of Ace. “When I Iearned that he was a feral cat and then domesticated I was surprised. The people that domesticated Ace did a wonderful job in raising him and introducing him to humans.”

She said the cat now has a “loving and sweet demeanor.”

Dr. Wojtalik-Courter said taming a feral kitten is a hit-or-miss task and the younger the cat, the better.

“There have been studies that show that kittens older than four months are difficult to tame,” she said. “But we have found that, on rare occasions, when it’s a single kitten that comes into the center, it can be tamed.

“We start out by keeping them in a carrier in a place that’s very active with humans so they can hear voices. Some can definitely be socialized.”

There are about 30 known active feral cat colonies in Chattanooga, most with populations that range between eight and 30 cats, Dr. Wojtalik-Courter said.

Most feral cats are about two generations away from being kept in a home, she said, meaning that if a domesticated cat is left in the wild, its first litter likely will be accepting of humans. The next generation most likely will be wild, she said. Many feral cats begin with domesticated cats being left behind by homeowners or apartment dwellers when they move out, Dr. Wojtalik-Courter added.

Since the center opened last summer, more than 500 feral cats have been brought in for sterilization and returned to their colonies or adopted. The average lifespan for an outdoor cat is one to three years, the doctor said. Since sterilization prevents more births, the feral cat population will lessen as the cats die off, she said.

“Our goal is to eventually sterilize 2,500 per year. That’s five sterilizations, five days a week,” Dr. Wojtalik-Courter said. “There are lots of cities that, on a five-year plan, have drastically reduced the number of feral cats. Eventually our population here, too, will decrease.”

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