Cat got your tongue? The misnomer of ‘community cats’ and its relevance to conservation

Intensive Adoption as a Management Strategy for Unowned, Urban Cats: A Case Study of 25 Years of Trap–Assess–Resolve (TAR) in Auckland, New Zealand

“…The primary legislation enforcing the strategy is the Animal Welfare Act 1999 [ 52 ], including provisions for codes of welfare that, where applied to individual species, state the minimum standards for care and recommendations for best practices. Sumner and colleagues [ 43 ] note that New Zealand legislation is clearer with regard to New Zealand’s feral cats than it is for stray cats (in New Zealand, as in Australia, feral cats are those remote from human habitation and with no human interaction [ 10 ]), so they argue for national legislation for managing all categories of cats.…”

“…Thus, one unfortunate consequence of their global popularity as companion animals [ 2 , 3 ] is the potential for large populations of unowned, free-ranging cats around human habitations, sustained by the abandonment of owned animals and uncontrolled breeding [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ]. They are variously named unowned cats, free-ranging cats, stray cats, community cats, or feral cats, with little agreement on a chaotic nomenclature [ 9 , 10 ]; see Figure 1 for the nomenclature that we use herein. The numbers of unowned cats are difficult to quantify, with estimates of their abundance ranging between 30 and 100 million in the USA (Ref.…”

The animal welfare, environmental impact, pest control functions, and disease effects of free‐ranging cats can be generalized and all are grounds for humanely reducing their numbers

“…'Free-ranging cat' describes objectively a cat's ability to move unrestrained, but masks ownership sub-categories important for cats' welfare, potential environmental and health impacts, and utility as pest controllers. Some free-ranging cats are owned, others are supported by human caregivers who do not own them, some scavenge refuse, and some live remotely from humans (Lepczyk & Calver, 2022). The welfare issues for these sub-categories and their potential to interact with wildlife, spread zoonoses or control pests vary, yet our understanding of population dynamics and interactions among the subcategories and the difficulty assigning individual free-ranging cats to groups in situ (Cove et al, 2023) are reminders that management implications are context-specific.…”

Piloting an International Comparison of Readily Accessible Online English Language Advice Surrounding Responsible Cat Ownership

“…Cat husbandry practices vary, leading to a plethora of terms to describe their movements in relation to human populations. Here, we follow [9] in broadly defining cats as pets (which may be contained, sometimes contained but with occasional freedom to range, or completely free-ranging with no constraints on their movements), stray (associated with human habitation and receiving intentional or unintentional human subsidies), and feral (self-sustaining without any human subsidy). We do acknowledge, though, that these terms have different emotive connotations for different cohorts of people [9][10][11][12].…”

“…Moreover, management decisions and efforts advocated by public authorities do not always translate into ownership practices. Responsible ownership requires owners to (a) identify issues with cat behaviour and/or welfare, (b) accept responsibility for managing cat behaviour and/or welfare, and (c) have knowledge, capacity, and incentives to manage such issues [9]. The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) proposes that attitudes, anteceded by beliefs surrounding the consequences, expectations of important others, and the feasibility of an effort, influence an individual's intentions to perform a behaviour [18].…”