The Plight of Homeless Cats

What Do Cat Fanciers Have to Do with This Anyway?

- Ann Strople

For cats who live in climate-controlled environments with the food, water, and medical attention they need, events and threats to feline safety outside their homes have little or no impact on quality of life. Owned indoor/outdoor cats, while facing more risks than their totally indoor cousins, are generally cared for, fed, treated for illnesses and parasites by their owners and protected from the dangers of extreme weather conditions and events.

However, unowned stray cats and community cats, also called feral cats, live a very different life. These felines depend on their wits and sometimes, in the words of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, “on the kindness of strangers.” While the context is different, for these cats, those words are most apropos. Homeless cats deal daily with the perils of living on their own. They contend with the changes to their environments that weather brings—extreme heat, torrential downpours, flooding, tornadoes, and hurricanes, as well as mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, and the vegetation, some dangerous, that proliferates in warmer months and climates And then come the challenges of the winter months and colder climates, among them freezing temperatures, snow and ice, food shortages, and inadequate shelter.

While taking on the care of a stray or two can be both possible and rewarding, providing for the welfare for many stray cats or a colony of generally human-averse community cats and kittens is a different story. Unlike previously owned stray cats, feral cats have not ever lived with people, are generally not adoptable, and need to live outdoors.

Since Cat Talk’s readers are cat owners, and mostly indoor-only cat owners at that, it can be difficult for them to know how to help keep unowned cats safe and healthy. Or, for that matter, to understand why to get involved at all.