Urban Stray Cats: Monitoring and Control of Population

Dear Colleagues,

Management of the unowned urban stray cat population is a major challenge. This is because of the prolific breeding rate of undesexed female cats, and the considerable task of trapping and removing or desexing sufficient animals to maintain control of the population.

I encourage submissions to this special issue that present robust strategies for monitoring urban stray cat populations. Decisions about the most effective approaches to urban cat management must be informed by reliable, evidence-based methods for monitoring cats before and after interventions. There are no generally agreed standards for enumerating stray cat populations or monitoring their dynamics. Methods based on camera traps, foot patrols to count or photograph cats, and tracking collars on released animals have been used. Although theoretical modeling may provide some insight into population dynamics, this approach should ideally be supported by evidence from field-based research.

There is considerable polarization among scientists and the animal welfare community about the most effective, practical and humane approaches to urban stray cat management, given the constraints of manpower and economics. Proposed solutions range from focused or generalized trap/cull programs, through to broadly applied or targeted trap/desex strategies with or without release of the animal back into its urban environment. The impacts of adoption of young tameable animals, euthanasia of apparently unadoptable cats, and immigration from neighboring areas within the context of such programs also raise controversy. In this special issue, I hope to stimulate ongoing informed discussion of the relative merits and effectiveness of these different population control strategies.

Prof. Helen Swarbrick
Guest Editor

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• Urban feline
• Unowned
• Stray
• Cat management
• Spay/neuter
• Euthanasia
• Trap-neuter-release
• Population monitoring
• Population modeling
• Rehoming
• adoption
• Identification
• Microchipping
• Immigration
• Population control