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Our Cat's Abduction and Return
Cat fanatics trapped and mutilated our cat
Posted July 27, 2012
McDude's belly was shaved in preparation for surgery.
Our cat vanished without a trace a couple of days ago. Then as mysteriously as he had disappeared he reappeared nearly forty-eight hours later at the kitchen door with a plaintive meow. He was dehydrated, malnourished and abused. His face was scratched, his belly shaved as if for surgery, and his left ear mutilated. He acted as if he were drugged or coming off anesthetic.
I concluded that he had fallen prey to cat fanatics who reportedly were trapping and neutering cats in our Miami Beach neighborhood, then returning them to their little piece of paradise. No other explanation quite fit. Black cats are used in Santeria and Voodoo, both of which have their practitioners in South Florida, but they sacrifice their captives, and even if our cat had been rejected because of a patch of white under his chin, he most likely would not have found his way home. Had he been nabbed by dog fighters, he wouldn’t have come back at all, especially not prepped for surgery.
That leaves the cat trappers. I can just imagine the scene at the clinic: the cat is anesthetized and stretched out on the operating table to be spayed, his belly shaved and ear clipped to show he had been processed. The veterinarian is about to make his first cut when he pauses, looks closely at the cat, and after uttering an expletive says, she is a he and already neutered.
The cat, our cat, was then presumably dumped back into a trap/cage until he had recovered sufficiently to be dropped where he had been trapped. No one attempted to find out where or with whom he lived in order to apologize for abusing our cat, although had they stuck around, they would have seen him running toward the back of our house and struggling to scale our 6-foot high fence.
Miami Beach hosts a multitude of feral cats—now referred to as ‘community cats,’ presumably to soften their image. By most accounts their numbers have soared during the Great Recession, with one professional cat trapper telling ABC news two years ago that there were 300,000 in residence—at least ten times the actual number, according to a city official with whom I spoke. Cats abound along the boardwalk where dedicated cat people feed them. Those cats have been charged with spreading hookworm on the beach and other malfeasances and so the city has an arrangement with a group called the Cat Network to trap, neuter, and release them in an effort to control and possibly reduce the population. The city also received a grant from PetSmart Charities to help fund the program. I checked with the city and Cat Network and was told that there was no sponsored trapping in our neighborhood at the time of McDude’s abduction. A Cat Network volunteer explained to me that the “snipped” ear signifies to other cat trappers and animal control officials that this animal is already neutered. In a way McDude and we are lucky, I am told, that he was brought back because there are also private entrepreneurs who trap, neuter, and send desirable cats and kittens elsewhere for adoption, always an iffy proposition with wild cats. A neighbor told me she had to beg these cat fanatics to leave alone a group of cats she feeds and is having neutered at her expense.
The tip of our cat's left ear was sliced off by his abductors.
The irony here is that our cat—McDude, aka Duder, Woodrow, Wooder, Monroe, and Mooder—was born wild and abandoned by his mother when he was no more than six weeks old. He was living under a bush in a neighbor’s yard when Gina started feeding him. It took weeks more to coax him into our house and by then he was already predatory. He hunted anything that moved. We neutered him as soon as we could. He has defended his home against every cat invader, including his own mother.
He practices his moves during endless hours of play with his best friend, Toodles, an eight-month old Jack Russell terrier. She was thoroughly depressed when McDude vanished.
McDude loves human attention, but he will not be kept in the house, and he should not be abducted and mutilated for being who he is.
On the surface, these trap-neuter-return programs are a humane alternative to capture and kill programs. But I have always had problems with them, primarily because they are patently eugenical—the reproductive freedom of the cat is taken away for no reason other than that a group of people has decided they are too low born and too abundant to be allowed to reproduce. Hard evidence of cat overpopulation is seldom if ever produced for any given region or area, nor is there much evidence that trap-neuter-return programs reduce the feral cat population. They seem best for managing cat colonies to extinction, as long as spaying and neutering are accompanied by shutting down recruitment. (Killing the cats in shelters doesn’t suppress the feral cat population either, primarily because not enough cats are killed each year.)
On islands or in restricted areas where they are considered an invasive species, any cat is one too many, especially if it threatens indigenous wildlife. ln larger landscapes if cats threaten endangered species or present a serious and immediate public health problem, they require removal.
But what disturbs me most about the current situation is that in the name of humane management of a perceived problem well meaning volunteers are allowed to trap and mutilate another person’s cat.
I say perceived problem because I have not seen a reasonable estimate of the number of feral cats on Miami Beach, an island, or of its carrying capacity for cats, much less the considerably larger Miami-Dade County. Do trap-neuter-release programs reduce the number of cats euthanized each year? Do they reduce absolute numbers?
What thought is given to the role of feral cats in an urban environment—in rodent control, for example? Is any thought given to the individual cat or its human companions when it is taken in the dead of night?
