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Wild Things
By Jennifer Dunning

THE shadow cats come out at night.

In the daytime, New York's homeless cats are too frightened to emerge from behind the grated openings where they lurk, or from the abandoned buildings and overgrown lots where they live. They listen as trucks and buses roll noisily by, and watch in stealthy silence as pedestrians go about their chores.

True, there are hints. Somewhere in the city, a child may see a flash of black, white or orange that disappears in seconds. Tiny teeth marks will appear on the remains of a fried-chicken lunch that has been tossed into a corner. Birds will steer clear of one particular bush, sensing that danger lies beneath its leaves.

But it is the night that is the real domain of the shadow cats, the time they come alive. Atop a box in a cemetery in southeast Queens, a snaggletoothed black-and-white veteran named Oreo guards his kingdom. On Roosevelt Island, Princess YinYang leaps into the air, a small blur of black and white as she chases fireflies across the grass. On Grand Street on the Lower East Side, small coal-black sisters named Topsy and Beebee trot out behind their mother from an abandoned building to forage for food.

Commonly known as ferals - their "names'' come courtesy of observant passers-by - the shadow cats have become an increasingly visible part of the urban landscape. One reason is that greater development and density leads to an increase in abandoned pets and more places for them to hide. Another is that public awareness of the problem has increased exponentially.

"Our rough estimate would be somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 feral cats in the five boroughs," said Bryan Kortis, executive director of Neighborhood Cats, a five-year-old group that seeks to control the city's feral population through T.N.R. (trap-neuter-return), a program in which animals are caught, neutered and placed in homes or returned to their habitat.

Today, according to Mr. Kortis, the typical abandoned cat is eight months to a year old and unneutered.

"People get these animals when they're kittens,'' he said. "Then they grow up, and they're not these cute fluffy things. They spray against the wall. They howl at night. Instead of just getting them neutered, people abandon them." The cats have litters, and the litters have litters.

In the last decade, an alphabet soup of rescue groups has sprung up around the city. They are typically staffed by passionate animal lovers, many of whom will attend the Neighborhood Cats' National Feral Cat Summit to be held Saturday (National Feral Cat Day) at the SLC Conference Center on Seventh Avenue near 29th Street. (Cats of a much more pampered variety can be seen today at the Cat Fanciers' Association show at Madison Square Garden.)

Rescue workers are almost pathologically reluctant to identify neighborhoods where ferals congregate, fearful that doing so will only encourage further dumping. At the same time, they engage in intense debates over subjects like no-kill shelters, sterilization, euthanasia and managed colonies, an approach in which cats living together are neutered, returned to their habitat and supervised by human caretakers until they die out naturally.

Cats Here, Cats There . . .

Until the Depression, life for New York's feral cats was probably like that of strays in Mediterranean countries today. They roamed and procreated, living off rats, garbage and the kindness of strangers. "The difference is that there is a warm climate there," said Mike Phillips, a choreographer-director and veterinarian technician who founded the Urban Cat League two years ago. "The harsh winters here cut down on reproduction, because the animals couldn't survive."

Humans also helped control the numbers. Through the 19th century, strays were rounded up in large numbers, and until late in the 19th century, when the Women's S.P.C.A. in Philadelphia developed the first humane euthanasia gas chamber for animals, unclaimed dogs and cats were unceremoniously clubbed to death or crowded into cages and drowned.

Read the rest of this article here.

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November 16th is National Feral Cat Day. For more information on what YOU can do to help homeless cats, please see the September 20, 2004 issue of The Cat's Meow! and http://www.nationalferalcatday.org/