At CAT we provide a vital rescue service for animals in need.

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What is a Feral Cat?

A feral cat is an un-owned cat that lives outdoors and avoids human contact: it does not allow itself to be handled or touched, and usually remains hidden from the human.

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Feral colonies

Colonies are where Stray cats had been breeding uncontrolled leading to several different colonies of feral cats living at different areas on a site. A site may be on industrial estates, farm, or domestic gardens. The cats are sometimes fed and cared for by staff working at the site, but because the cats had bred rapidly there was concern about their welfare as the numbers continued to increase. By neutering the cats we have prevented the birth of more kittens and have been able to stabilize the population. The staff will continue to feed and care for the cats and will contact us for assistance should they ever become unwell or injured.

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Usually, we neuter and return feral cats to continue living where they are, Sometimes though cats cannot be returned to site due to redevelopment, demolition, an unsafe environment, no one to feed them, hostile people etc., and for these, we seek suitable new homes. We try to rehome in pairs and families of feral and semi-feral cats. Our feral cats are ideal for outdoor homes such as stables, smallholdings, farms, large gardens etc. They require daily feeding and dry shelter but earn their keep as an effective rodent patrol.

We routinely respond to trap, neuter and return colonies of feral cats. Feral cats that we neuter and return are "ear-tipped” - the tip of the left ear is clipped whilst they are neutered. This does not cause the cat any distress but is done so that anyone can identify at a distance that the cat is neutered. Ear tipping is a standard practice carried out by animal charities around the world. These adult cats are not used to human contact and are not domesticated so are not suitable to live with humans as domestic cats.

 

Feral Kittens

Where there are unneutered adult cats there will undoubtedly be feral kittens. When an unneutered female pet cat gets lost or is abandoned, unneutered male cats will mate her. She will give birth to the kittens wherever she can. This may be under or in a garden shed, in a derelict car, in thick bushes, in an empty building, in an abandoned settee or anywhere she feels she may be safe. Unless the kittens are discovered when they are very young, generally the first anyone will be aware of them will be when they are brought out by their mother to look for solid food at around six weeks old. At this age, the kittens will already be nervous of human contact because they have not been handled and socialized. This nervousness is sometimes termed 'wild', and this is the result of a lack of handling. If the cat and her kittens are rescued, the kittens can be tamed. The younger the kittens are the easier this is. Taming feral kittens takes time, patience and gentle handling but is ultimately very rewarding. If we catch the kittens early enough our aim is to remove them from the site so that we may tame them in order that they can live safely. If the kittens are not rescued, they will themselves be capable of breeding from four months old, and a colony of feral cats rapidly grows.

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It is important to realise that feral cats and domestic cats are the same species of animal. It is the lack of human contact in the critical first few weeks that results in the kittens becoming feral. If a pet cat has kittens, and her owners do not handle those kittens, her kittens will be equally nervous and may be described as ‘feral’.

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Stray and abandoned Cats

A stray cat is a domestic cat that has got itself lost or has been abandoned by its owners. Unlike feral cats, they are used to humans, are friendly and domesticated, As they were once someone’s pet but become nervous because of their experiences living as a stray.

Unneutered male cats are particularly likely to become stray as they wander looking for females. Their fighting with owned cats and the offensive smell of their urine spraying to mark their territory makes them unpopular with people who shoo them away.

Once rescued and neutered it may only be a matter of days or it sometimes takes several weeks for those cats to regain their trust in people and restore them to loving pets.

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Did you know that the ‘stray’ cat who is always turning up at your home for a bite to eat may actually have a family of their own? Many of the cats we admitted for rehoming last year were not microchipped. Many of the stray cats who came through our doors had clearly lived in a home before, but without a microchip, we had no way of reuniting them with their loving owners. Cats will always come back to a reliable source of food so kind animal lovers believing a cat to be a stray and feeding it might actually be luring it away from home. We know of cases where they have even ended up keeping the cat themselves, leaving their loving owners at a devastating loss of not knowing what happened to their pet.