We may not know the impact of Feral Cat TNR, but we do know the impact of not doing TNR.

In 2008, a group of bird organizations in Los Angeles – most notably the Los Angeles Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy -- sued the City of Los Angeles for advocating and/or funding TNR (feral cat trap/neuter/return) without first conducting environmental impact studies in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

Last month --without addressing the merits of TNR --Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas McKnew ruled in favor of the bird organizations and issued an injunction against the City of Los Angeles’ participation in TNR until its full effects are studied. McKnew’s ruling is a very narrow interpretation of CEQA -- and it puts an undue burden on feral cat caregivers to document the environmental effects of sterilizing their colonies. It’s feared it may greatly reduce the effectiveness of TNR overall by dramatically reducing the number of individuals and organizations willing and able to put in the added time and cost of conducting these studies. Many TNR organizations have little funding and are thinly-staffed.

We believe that placing TNR programs under CEQA guidelines is inappropriate and shortsighted. TNR programs do not add cats into the environment -- they simply fix and manage the cats that naturally occur outdoors. Even if you accept the premise that feral cats are evil predators – which we do not – TNR sterilization is the only humane and effective way to lower their numbers – and, it respects their rights to live as all other wildlife is allowed to live.

Organizations that single out cats as the cause of bird endangerment are guilty of nothing short of speciesism. A 2005 study commissioned by the Defenders of Wildlife and conducted by scientists from the USDA, Forest Service and The Smithsonian Conservation and Research Center pointed to the destruction of tropical habitats as the major contributor to the decrease in avian species that spend their winters in those warmer climes. They barely mentioned cats in their extensive survey of existing data, equating cat predation to that of dogs, skunks, raccoons, opossums, rodents and human hikers. Yet these bird organizations persist on singling out only cats as the villain. If bird organizations truly want to help birds, they need to give up their irrational anti-cat rhetoric and concentrate on the core issues impacting birds today. Imposing sanctions on cats doesn’t help birds – it only hurts cats.

Without TNR programs, communities lose their best hope at containing cat populations leaving them only with the broken animal control model – killing off the visible layer of outdoor cats while leaving the rest in place and intact to reproduce creating the same problem over-and-over again.

We know from our own TNR work that most property owners are more than willing to care for the occasional naturally-occurring feral and stray cats that take up residence in their yards and barns – but they need front-end help to get the cats fixed. If there is no organization there to fix the cats, the numbers grow beyond what the property owner can manage – and eventually they’ll be dropped at another outdoor location – still able to reproduce – or they’ll be taken to a shelter to be killed. Both of these outcomes are preventable through TNR. And no -- we don’t need an environmental impact study to know that.