The Great Cat Debate: Can An Adult Feral Cat Become Socialized?

How often do you read that if kittens aren’t given intense human attention during their brief socialization window (the time before they turn 8 weeks old), they’ll stay feral cats all their lives? This is the premise at the heart of TNR (trap-neuter-return) – that feral cats are more suited to living in outdoor colonies than indoor homes. On the surface, this is understandable science. After all, cats are animals – why would they want to sit on a human’s lap or share their home without having been pre-conditioned to do so as kittens?


Yet how often do you also hear individuals who rescue cats – or find cats living in their yard or barn – say that adult feral cats do tame – even if it takes awhile for them to calm down. But if the science is correct, this is impossible. Right? So what’s really going on here? Here are a few explanations:

• Lost or abandoned pet cats revert to feral behaviors to survive outdoors. And these previously-socialized cats tame quickly – usually within a few weeks or months of when they reconnect with humans. And,

• Feral cats often bond to a caregiver who regularly brings them food. The cats learn through repetition that the caregiver is their friend and will not harm them. So eventually they let their guard down around that particular person, but still not around other people. This is a form of habituation not socialization.

Yet neither of these situations explains what we’re seeing in our own home with our four teenaged feral cats: Larry, Joyce, Emmy and Cleo. When they first moved indoors in 2005, they were clearly feral – always hanging out as a group in the areas of the house we didn’t. They wouldn’t even come to our kitchen to eat – we had to feed them separately in their own area. Then, about a year ago, we started seeing subtle changes in them – with Cleo leading the way by sleeping with us at night – even though she kept an arm’s length away and stayed on the edge for a quick exit.

After moving to Santa Fe last fall, the cats seemed to come around even more. Right from the start they ate in the kitchen with our companion cats – and started joining us in the office comfortably napping while we worked. Now Emmy and Larry are routine bed visitors – and Cleo no longer stays an arm’s length away -- often sleeping on my pillow all night long. Now Emmy and Cleo allow me to pick them up and carry them – without struggling to get free. And – while renovating our home – there’s been a frequent flow of work crews in the house – and they see as much of our feral cats as they do our companion cats.

So if feral behavior is truly irreversible – how can teenaged feral cats – change so dramatically? We know enough about their backgrounds to know that they weren’t socialized as kittens – and yet their acceptance of people now extends well beyond their caregivers. What’s really happening here is a question -- but my guess is that cats aren’t as genetically pre-wired to be permanently feral as we portray them.

Right now – with as many homeless cats as there are – leaving feral cats outdoors is still our best strategy. They’re proven survivors. But once we get the numbers down, it’s a concept we may have to revisit. Just because they aren’t stereotypic lap cats, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t enjoy the life of Riley as much as the next pampered pet cat – Larry, Cleo, Joyce and Emmy prove that they can. So when it comes to feral cats, it's not true that they’re all black-and-white – a lot of them are calico.