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The cat made a deft U-turn, scampered out of the trap, and vanished. We joined Kroh in the street, where she was watching another cat. Its wariness visibly warring with the lure of sardine, it crept into the second trap. When the door fell shut behind it, Raff hastened over to check its ears. Every street cat that’s ta...
“No ear tip,” Raff said.
The cat was silent in the cage, sporadically thrashing.
“Put your finger in there, Gail,” Kroh said. “See how friendly she is.”
In contrast with truly feral cats, which shun close human contact, cats that have run away or have been abandoned after losing their fear of people are known as friendlies. This particular cat was not a friendly. Raff draped a beach towel over the cage, and Kroh secured the door with zip ties.
Behind the house, more cats had arrived. One of them nosed around the trap and tentatively entered it. After a moment of suspense, the door fell shut, and Raff relaxed. “Usually it’s not this easy,” she said.
She had a third trap in her Mazda, and she wanted to use all three of the appointments she’d made for the following morning. Most of her cats go to a nonprofit clinic near the Burbank airport, FixNation, which performs more than forty per cent of city-sponsored surgeries. Raff used to get Saturday appointments every we...
Behind the house, while Raff set the trap, Kroh heard something inaudible to me: the cries of newborn kittens. She groped around in a bank of dense bushes and then, finding nothing, played the sound of a mother cat on her phone. She and Raff were reminding me of birders, who see and hear things that unpracticed people ...
Kroh had extended her search to the far side of the problem house. “I found a baby,” she reported, “and I found the feral mom, she’s in the bushes. I think she just rejected this one.”
From the sidewalk, we watched a tiny black kitten teeter on the edge of a window well. Before it could fall in, Kroh scooped it up and placed a call to a group that she and Raff trusted, Kitten Rescue. All around us, feline shapes were flitting along fences and pausing in the street. “There’s like a hundred cats here,”...
No one knows how many cats live outdoors in Los Angeles. The city’s Animal Services Web site offers a mysteriously precise estimate of nine hundred and sixty thousand; other sources put the number as low as three hundred and fifty thousand and as high as three million. “It’s getting worse and worse,” Raff had told me. ...
While we waited for Kitten Rescue, two women with similar short haircuts approached us suspiciously. Learning that we were there for cats, they immediately warmed. “That’s amazing that you’re doing that,” one of them said. “There are so many cats that need homes.” When Raff explained that, rather than finding homes, sh...
To be finished for the night, Raff needed to catch one more cat, but the sardines were now eliciting little curiosity. The rejected kitten had gone still in the towel in which Kroh had wrapped it. “Are you alive?” she asked it.
“This is why we do this,” Raff said to me. “Because the babies have babies.”
Unexpectedly, the front door of the problem house opened, and a small old man leaned out. “How many?” he said.
“Two,” Raff called.
“How many.”
“Two! Two!” we all said.
The man spoke over his shoulder, presumably in Farsi, and turned back to us. “Thank you very much. Thank you.”
After the door had closed, Raff remarked, “I think he thinks I’m not returning them. I don’t ask questions—I just get them fixed.”
In municipalities throughout the United States, a policy of trap-neuter-return (T.N.R.) has become the preferred approach to the problem of unowned cats. The hope is that, if enough cats are fixed before they can reproduce, the population will gradually dwindle. But few, if any, municipalities have the resources to eng...
To freelance like this means staying out late to trap, keeping the captured cats overnight, delivering them to a clinic in the morning, picking them up in the afternoon, housing them for a second night, and then returning them to where they were trapped. Raff, who works in member services for an H.M.O., and Kroh, who h...
The kitten rescuer, Christine Hernandez, arrived in a four-door sedan and apologized for not coming sooner. She took the kitten from Kroh and kissed its head, whose shape recalled E.T. She agreed that the cat situation was dire, and she laughed about the feral cats in her own yard, which, she said, wanted only “human l...
There ensued a long vigil. The two occupied traps, draped with towels, were silent. All across the city, more kittens were being born. Raff’s days begin before six in the morning, but she hates to quit before she’s filled her quota. “It’s luck, not science,” she said. “Some places, we have to go three times—the cats ar...
Close by us, a cat in heat let out a yowl. Another sat for a long while by the trap, just looking at it. Toward eleven o’clock, a curtain stirred in the problem house. We were still being observed.
“Let’s give it five more minutes,” Kroh said.
“You guys can go,” Raff said. “I’ll sit in my car and watch.”
“She’ll get that third one,” Kroh assured me.
“It’s very addicting,” Raff allowed.
“Trapping is actually really fun,” Kroh said. “When I come home, my husband’s always, like, ‘How many did you get?’ ”
When I come home from birding, my partner asks me much the same question. With a feeling of defeat, I got in my car and drove back to my hotel. There I found that Raff had texted me a photo, time-stamped 11:35 p.m., of a short-haired cat in her last trap. “Ear tipped!!” she’d written, in frustration. “I’m done.”
Both cat-specific advocacy groups, such as Alley Cat Allies, and national animal-welfare heavyweights, such as Best Friends Animal Society, maintain that trap-neuter-return is the only approach that’s been proved to be effective in addressing the problem of outdoor cats. Whether this is true depends on the effect you’r...
When I spoke to the general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services, Staycee Dains, at one of the city’s six shelter facilities, she was frank in her assessment of this objective. “There’s a lot of evidence that T.N.R. is not effective at reducing the cat population over all,” Dains said. She added that T.N.R. is effect...
When T.N.R. is done well, as Gail Raff and Orly Kroh do it—getting to know a particular cat colony, revisiting it until every adult cat has been trapped and fixed, and continuing to monitor it for new arrivals—individual cats will benefit, and the colony population may stabilize. At the most local of levels, Raff and K...
The handful of studies reporting success with T.N.R. have been seriously flawed in one or more ways. The methodology for keeping track of cats was porous, or the cats were confined to a strictly patrolled location, such as a university campus, or the population reduction was achieved by removing lots of cats for adopti...
The embrace of a strategy with no firm basis in science, in city after city, has coincided with the rise of a movement known as No Kill. Fifty years ago, American animal-control facilities euthanized perhaps a million cats and dogs a month for population management. By the early two-thousands, that number had fallen dr...
By the time Best Friends began these efforts, in 2010, Animal Services was developing a new program for feral cats: rather than accepting them at shelters, the city would promote T.N.R. Under state law, the policy would require environmental review, and the city had promised to comply. When it failed to do so, it was s...
Longcore also feared that the policy would leave city residents with no defense against nuisance animals. Over the years, as feral cats had become ubiquitous in much of L.A., the city had received countless applications for permits to trap them and remove them. Some of the applicants reported grievously sick or injured...
A tabby with a huge tumor-like growth on its side. 2 sway-backed, deformed looking cats.
Feral cats in area have some type of skin disease causing lesions. . . . Also one of the feral kittens is in desperate need of medical attention. Approx 2” of colon is protruding from anus.
Many more of the applicants were literally beleaguered:
A rogue feral cat is wreaking havoc & hurting our cats. One of our cats was hurt so badly last week, she had to be euthanized.
They find ways to get into our crawl space & urinate everywhere, which affects our breathing.
The cats also kill the birds in my yard and leave the partially eaten bird bodies laying around.
Feral cats (between 7 & 10) have torn our patio furniture cushions (just spent $500 to order replacements). . . . A feral cat was observed vomiting on our lawn. I have small grandchildren that play in the yard and consider the situation a health hazard.
They fight and cry outside our window at night and have been killing squirrels to eat. Recently I found a squirrel with its limbs torn off and guts hanging out in my back yard. The cats are also using my flower beds as a litter box.
A city resident who trapped a cat was obliged to surrender it to Animal Services, which, in the past, if the cat wasn’t a friendly, had had little choice but to euthanize it. The city’s new cat policy was specifically developed to change this. Its key objective was to reduce the city’s kill numbers.
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs presented evidence that Animal Services, without performing the requisite environmental review, had been promoting T.N.R. and had made it increasingly difficult to obtain nuisance-trapping permits. In 2010, the relevant judge issued a permanent injunction, ordering the city to revert to...
To comply with the injunction, the city eventually commissioned a formal environmental-impact report. The draft report, released in 2019, included a mathematical model of T.N.R.’s long-term effect on the city’s unowned-cat population. It predicted that, if the city achieved a goal of twenty thousand additional steriliz...
A few months after the council vote, Best Friends and L.A. Animal Services announced that its shelters had attained No Kill status in 2020, with a live-release rate of just over ninety per cent. Best Friends, which is campaigning to achieve No Kill at every shelter in the country by 2025, declared a major victory in Lo...
Gail Raff blames Animal Services and the city’s lawyers, for not resolving the legal conflict sooner, and also Best Friends, for chasing donors and headlines while failing to fund T.N.R. “They’re just dollar signs,” she said. “They created this mess. How do you get to No Kill without spay and neuter?”
Raff isn’t alone in her disenchantment with No Kill. To maintain a low kill rate, shelters in many cities have resorted to warehousing animals under inhumane conditions, and have deflected unadoptable animals to open-admission shelters and let them do the dirty work of killing, the stigma of which can lead to harassmen...
In recent years, to soften the image of street cats, their advocates have popularized the term “community cats.” (The word “feral,” besides having a horror-movie ring to it, excludes the friendlies that are often found in cat colonies.) The new term could be taken to imply that outdoor cats are cherished members of hum...
How healthy and safe the cats are is a matter of dispute. The position of Best Friends—that “community cats thrive outdoors”—echoes that of many cat-specific advocacy groups. But the groups’ own fund-raising appeals, such as this one from Alley Cat Allies, paint a different picture:
Maeve had no teeth and couldn’t eat properly. She was weak, starving, and suffering from a respiratory condition. Maeve was also feral—completely unsocialized—and very afraid. But with support from people like you, we were able to trap her and give her the second chance she so urgently needed.
Although it’s generally agreed that outdoor-kitten mortality is high, it’s difficult to find a broad quantitative study of adult longevity. Well-fed cats in a mild climate undoubtedly fare better, especially if they’ve been fixed and have received some vaccinations, but they typically have a higher risk of communicable...
The risks to humans are also consequential. Flea-borne typhus has been steeply on the rise in Los Angeles, and cat fleas were a suspected vector in one of several typhus deaths reported in the city in 2022. A more widespread threat is toxoplasmosis, which is caused by a parasite that cannot reproduce without cats, is t...
In July, in response to citizens’ complaints about the menace to their pets, the Pasadena city council invited the public to a discussion of lethal control of coyotes. Like its neighbor Los Angeles, Pasadena has many of them. Although coyotes have been amply demonstrated to be ineradicable, one councilman, Steve Madiso...
Lisa Lange is a senior vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Last year, when I recorded a short video for peta, urging people to keep their cats indoors, I’d been surprised to learn that the group opposes both No Kill policies and trap-neuter-return. “We’re opposed to outdoor cats, period,” Lan...
To be outdoors, watching birds, is to be at home with death. Every spring, outside my back door, in Northern California, I count twelve or fourteen little fluff balls dashing after their quail parents; by midsummer, only half a dozen adolescent chicks remain, and by September, when the quail retreat into the underbrush...
In the past fifty years, their base population has fallen by thirty per cent, from an estimated ten billion in 1970. Habitat loss and degradation account for much of the decline, but, because the remaining habitat could still support a larger population, an increase in modern threats is also implicated. The greatest of...
A paper published in 2013 in Nature Communications, an offshoot of the journal Nature, estimated that cats kill between a billion and four billion birds annually in the Lower Forty-eight states, along with far greater numbers of small native mammals. The paper’s authors based their modelling on a synthesis of numerous ...
Outdoor-cat advocates were quick to dismiss the paper as “junk science.” Their intellectual authority, Peter J. Wolf, on his cat-science blog, Vox Felina, seized on the reported base population of birds, ignored its huge expansion in summer, and asked how anyone could imagine that cats kill more than half of all Americ...
The most dismal number in the Nature Communications paper was its median estimate for the birds killed annually by cats with owners: six hundred and eighty-four million. Unlike the death toll from unowned cats, this number could be zero, because tame cats can be kept indoors. In my experience, people who let them outsi...
These teeth and claws account for a significant percentage of bird mortality in the United States. Although cat defenders dispute the scale of the numbers, few of them go so far as to deny that cats kill lots of birds. Instead, they may assert that the killing, rather than adding to over-all mortality, merely “compensa...
But maybe the predator isn’t actually non-native? Alley Cat Allies, on its Web site, assures its supporters that domesticated cats have lived outdoors for more than ten thousand years, “sharing the environment with birds and wildlife.” Unfortunately, although this is true in some regions of the Old World, where domesti...
Best Friends Animal Society began, in the nineteen-eighties, as an independent animal sanctuary, situated in scenic red-rock canyon country near Zion National Park. Some of the sanctuary’s founders had been associated with the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a hippie-era group that sought to integrate satanic and...
The sanctuary is a working care-and-adoption facility, not a place where animals roam. On a clear morning in August, I toured it with one of the founders, Francis Battista, a vigorous and prepossessing man in his seventies. Battista was quick to tell me that he, too, is a bird-watcher. As we proceeded up through junipe...
Every animal in the sanctuary has a name. In a unit for cats with special needs, in Cat World, I met Aurora, who was blind; Howard, who’d been treated for feline infectious peritonitis; and a small cat, Circleville, who was missing a foreleg. Passing by some cats afflicted with cerebellar hypoplasia, an incurable and c...
For lunch, in a green glade at the foot of red-rock cliffs, Battista and I were joined by his son, Judah. When I asked them about the problem of outdoor cats, Francis cited statistics indicating that they suffer less than people may think, but he allowed that both cats and birds are at risk. Judah, who co-founded Best ...
A family of quail had emerged from the shadows near our lunch table. I commented that people and cats are pretty much everywhere now, not just in city centers, and that cats and dogs seem to have been granted special status as animals, higher than that of wildlife. I asked the Battistas if an individual cat’s life has ...
“We believe that the lives of all animals have intrinsic value,” Francis said. “I don’t disagree with you that there is an elevation of value of domesticated dogs and cats. But I don’t think we regard those quail, or the other little animals around here, any less.”
“Dogs and cats are the first step outside of ‘Humans are the only thing,’ ” Judah said. “If we can establish a value of solving problems not by killing animals, there’s no reason not to extrapolate that more broadly. If we can break the pattern with our companion animals, which most people consider family, it sets the ...
I said that, being pessimistic about human nature, I fear that we’ve merely made dogs and cats into honorary humans and added them to our families, and that a family is defined by what it excludes—in this case, wildlife. The Battistas agreed that this was pessimistic of me.
When I brought up T.N.R., Judah proposed that it seems ineffective because we’ve never tried it at a large scale, with full funding and community engagement, and given it time to work. “There’s this idea that it doesn’t work, and so we’re not going to fund it fully,” he said. “Right now, in Los Angeles, the approach is...
I struggled to imagine how T.N.R. efforts could be vastly scaled up. Francis acknowledged that there is already a shortage of veterinarians nationwide, and that more and more vets work for corporations that emphasize premium pet services, rather than low-cost spay/neuter. At Orly Kroh’s request, I asked why Best Friend...
Participation and community are recurrent Best Friends themes. Like the stories it tells in its promotional materials, accompanied by pictures of cats with fetchingly startled expressions and dogs smiling or frolicking, the story the Battistas told me about humanity was inspirational. They envision a world in which ado...
When I went out again with Gail Raff and Orly Kroh, two nights after the trapping mission, Kroh had sad news from the kitten rescuer. “Poor Christine,” she said. “The little kitty died. She gave it fluids, she did oxygen, she did everything.” She shook her head. “The kitty got to know love.”
Our destination was a charmless residential neighborhood, abutting the Hollywood Freeway, where Raff and Kroh feed street cats. Their first station, an upended plastic bin, stood by a weedy lot on which a boat had been parked for as long as they could remember. As Raff approached the bin, carrying water and dry food, a...
“We name them all,” Kroh told me. “We don’t want them to be just cats on the street.”
Several dozen adult cats live outdoors in the immediate area. Raff and Kroh not only know all of them, they know most of the human residents as well. Around a corner from the first station, we passed the house of a man who feeds four or five of the cats. He knew an acquaintance of Kroh’s spin-class teacher, and the tea...
The other cats now feed near an overgrown grassland, attractive to birds and coyotes, that is bordered by the freeway and by a fence with a large hole in it. In failing light, Raff emptied cans of wet cat food onto a broken slab of concrete. She also dispenses kibble, about sixteen pounds of it a week, at various locat...
Cats were emerging from bushes, from beneath a yellow Hummer in the nearest driveway, and from lawns farther up the street. Among them were Crystal, Batman, Brave, and Tofu. None of them seemed to be in a hurry or to be interested in the others. All of them were ear-tipped, and many looked reasonably healthy, but one o...
For an unhoused person, feeding unhoused cats can be a way to feel good about giving. Even among the housed, feeders tend to live on the margins. Among the classic cat-feeding types in the Valley, Raff and Kroh mentioned an elderly Hispanic man and a solitary woman with kibble in her shopping cart. Staycee Dains, of L....
Such feeders are effectively outdoor-cat hoarders, akin to the people who hoard cats in their dwellings. Raff and Kroh’s third feeding station was by the house of a woman who, while seemingly prosperous, allows numberless cats to come and go through her windows. As Raff walked along the side of the house, attracting fo...
“We don’t know what’s in her house,” Raff said.
“One of the neighbors checks on her,” Kroh said. “She’d tell us if there were kittens.”
“You’d think she might ever say thank you.”
“I left her a bottle of wine at Christmas to thank her for letting us feed her cats.”
At this station, too, Raff put out wet food. “These cats are so inbred,” she remarked. “This black-and-white one only has one eye.”
Wet or dry, cat food consists almost entirely of animal parts. Watching the inbred cats eat their meat, in the loneliness emanating from the house, I glimpsed a dystopian future in which, to quote Judah Battista, “humans are the only thing.” Los Angeles has abundant habitat for resident and migratory birds, and for all...
If everyone in the country stopped letting their cats run free outdoors, the predatory impact on American ecosystems would be dramatically reduced. To go further, and humanely reduce the unowned-cat population, would be a slower process. It might include T.N.R., provided that the cats are registered, microchipped for i...
A neighborhood overrun with cats is a spectacle of contradictions. Our sympathy for animals has created a situation that’s terrible for animals. Cats are considered creatures of the natural world but also members of the family. (If a child had a penchant for disembowelling wildlife, would his parents shrug and say it’s...
Closing your eyes and focusing on breathing can be hard for those who are easily distracted. But it is possible.
Eyes gently closed, breaths slow and steady: Meditation, at least when other people are doing it, always looks so peaceful.
But in our chronically distracted, phone-addicted world, sitting still for 10 or 20 minutes is tough and often causes your brain to pinball between errant thoughts. Meditation teachers say that you should recognize those impulses and then come back to your breath or whatever you are focused on.
But what if you can’t find your way back? What if you are just left frustrated?
“That feeling is very common,” said Dan Harris, co-author of “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics” and founder of the mindfulness app Ten Percent Happier. But, he added, “distraction in meditation is not proof of failure.”
Still, it can feel discouraging in the moment, as if you’ve failed or somehow missed the point. But the benefits of mindfulness can outweigh the frustrations; even short bursts of meditation can help people become more focused, less anxious and less depressed, even those who have the most trouble focusing in daily life...
“Mindfulness helps people for a number of different reasons — including that it helps with learning how to regulate attention,” said John Mitchell, an associate professor at Duke University and an expert in mindfulness and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

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