However, these animals were the ones that had survived long enough to be trapped and studied. The unowned cats in our study looked healthy, were reproductive, and had few external parasites. It’s vital we find effective ways to reduce their numbers - but what’s the best way to go about this?

In fact, our recent studies show unowned cats have significantly shorter lives than pet cats, with less than half surviving their first year. Like their feral counterparts, unowned cats are a public health threat, they can fight with or transmit diseases to pet cats, and they kill native wildlife.Īnd, of course, they themselves suffer poor welfare. Feral cats, on the other hand, live in the wild and can survive without relying on people for food. Unowned stray cats rely heavily on human settlements for food and shelter and breed freely. Unowned cats are sometimes called “stray” or “semi-feral”: they, or their parents, were once owned by humans but are now abandoned or lost. Australia is home to hordes of unowned cats, with an estimated 700,000 living without appropriate care in urban areas, around rubbish dumps or on farms. Hopefully publication will follow soon, and it could well have far-reaching consequences, beyond the borders of Israel, on the question of dealing with free-roaming cats.Odds are, if you’ve seen a cat prowling around your neighbourhood, it doesn’t have an owner. Since the disagreement was unbridgeable, the editors at PNAS sent the article to a fourth academic, who gave a favorable opinion about publishing it. Both of them, Gunther and Klement claim, were straightforward and academic when making their initial remarks, but during the next round offered non-scholarly and baseless arguments.

In fact, three persons commented on the article during the first round of review, and two had reservations about its publication: One apparently had an ecological/environmental agenda, basically claiming that free-roaming cats should be kicked off the streets even if they have to be put down (this practice is illegal in Israel since the Supreme Court rendered a decision on the issue in 1999, whereby only ill or dangerous cats can be euthanized) the other reader appeared to have been a “cat lover,” believing in the virtues of TNR.

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