How many stray cats are in the us

Click here for a nationwide list of 's of professional stray cat trappers serving all 50 states. How do you feel when you walk past a stray cat in the street that is obviously malnourished and in desperate need of a loving home? Do you want to help the cat by taking it home and making it your own, or taking it to the local shelter so that in time, it will find new owners?

If you are the latter of the two, let me fill you in some facts. How about some more facts — Over 60 percent of all households in the United States have a pet of some sort, and around 85 million of these are cats. Thankfully, around a third of these cats are strays that have been given a new lease of life by some very nice pet-people.

The average cost of taking care of a cat will range from around six hundred dollars to nine hundred dollars per year. Still, despite this relatively low cost, there are still a large number of cats neglected and abandoned every year, with low income homes not being able to afford the poor little pets as well as their own family members. It is still believed that house cats will soon get back their feral instincts when they are released onto the streets, but in actual fact, this rarely happens and many of these neglected cats will simply die.

If you see a stray or feral cat, feral cats are the wild offspring of strays there are a number of things that you can do in order to prevent 50 million dollars of your tax paying money being spent on sorting out the problem. Many scientists, birders and wildlife managers oppose trap-neuter-release programs in general, noting that free-ranging cats are destructive predators, annually killing billions of birds and mammals, while also spreading diseases like toxoplasmosis.

The programs have been successful in one way, however. They have enabled shelters to sharply reduce the number of feral cats they impound, then euthanize, at a time when public shelters face immense pressure to reach a no-kill ideal, usually defined as not euthanizing any healthy or adoptable animals. An added bonus is reduced taxpayer cost: sterilizing and releasing cats costs less than housing, feeding and then killing them. How well the cats themselves fare is less clear than you might imagine.

Contrary to popular belief, cats are not self-sustaining. That means colonies under the watchful eye of caretakers willing to devote considerable time and money to their welfare may thrive. Those without human guardians may suffer from malnutrition, infection and parasites.

Some of the cats get hit by cars or eaten by coyotes. Carol Barnes, another signatory to the letter, shared photos of one cat she said was released by Orange County and later found malnourished, with broken ribs, an upper respiratory infection and an injured eye crawling with maggots. The answer? And well-run trap-neuter-release programs may be an important part of dealing with our national cat problem.

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