U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Surfs Into Cruel Cat Policy on Your Tax Dollars

Is U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service poised to start taking out cats by the thousands? Such a project would be inhumane, not to mention a waste of precious taxpayer dollars in a time of deficit reduction. But believe it or not, this covert war on cats is already being waged and USFWS will be recruiting with a presentation scheduled for a Hawaii conference this fall.

In early November, USFWS personnel are going on a junket to beautiful Hawaii to teach conventioneers how to stop Trap Neuter Return programs in their towns. The program for the Wildlife Society's annual conference states that USFWS folks will give a presentation that includes "role-playing" that can be used to defeat TNR programs across the nation. (How come I never get sent to Hawaii for role-playing?)

And what is the USFWS method of choice to control community cats? Killing. That’s pretty unconscionable in this humane age, especially considering that catch-and-kill doesn’t work. If it did, we wouldn't have any community cats left by now.

If USFWS’s goal is to reduce the number of outside cats, which is laudable, they are being short-sighted by not encouraging Trap Neuter Return projects. Studies have shown that these programs work to reduce the cat population.

The nice thing about TNR programs is that they have broad public support because folks don’t want to see cats and kittens killed. You can also get humanitarians to help fund these projects, which helps with the programmatic bottom line. Maybe employing folks to trap, neuter and return cats would help create more jobs, too, including good jobs for vet techs and veterinarians.

But no innovative thinking for our government leaders. Instead of building on that humanitarian support to find solutions that protect cats, wildlife and the community, they view cats the same way they view Asian carp: search and destroy.

By holding a workshop with the goal of ending Trap Neuter Return programs, USFWS is promoting an approach that hasn't been proven effective, but has been proven expensive. And they have no way to fund it. By leaving local governments to their own devices, they're opening the door for so-called "solutions" like the publication put out earlier this year by the University of Nebraska Extension Service, which described numerous cruel ways to kill outside cats including shooting and using body-gripping traps. This is your tax dollars at work.

Best Friends Animal Society is asking the USFWS to declare a truce in their war on cats and embrace trap, neuter and return programs to reduce the community cat population. Please sign the Best Friends petition today. Politics is not a spectator sport.

Photo credit: Best Friends Animal Society