Free-ranging cats (domestic cats that roam freely) are commonplace in urban settings; as you may have noticed, the University of North Texas is no exception. Frequently, trap-neuter-return (TNR) programs are implemented in urban areas to humanely minimize the size of free-ranging cat populations. TNR programs create housing and feeding areas to trap new free-ranging cats (see photo below), volunteers take newly trapped cats to a veterinarian to be sterilized, and then the cats are released back to the housing/feeding area from which they were trapped.
TNR programs have become highly controversial with conservation biologists who study birds because they hold that TNR programs enable massive predation on bird populations. Therefore, conservation biologists suggest that euthanizing (or putting down) cats may be a more humane way to reduce free-ranging cat populations. TNR proponents wholly object to free-ranging cat euthanasia. This issue is extremely polarized and inhibits effective bird conservation from being implemented. In our recent paper, TNR and conservation on a university campus: a political ecological perspective , we explore student perceptions of TNR and conservation at the University of North Texas.
Our goal was to create a bridge between the two opposing sides of this argument. To do this, we spotted two main areas of research that, we felt, needed to be addressed more fully in the literature regarding this debate. First, we provide a brief literature review for TNR proponents that pertains to cat domestication, evolution, and behavioral ecology. That is, we sought to answer the questions: where do domestic cats come from, what made them domesticated, and what types of behaviors are responsible for their evolutionary trajectory? This is important because there are very clear reasons to suspect that cats can have significant predatory impacts on small animal populations (particularly birds). One clear reason is the leading hypothesis for cat domestication, which suggests that cats were domesticated to rid villages of small pest animals during the dawn of agriculture.
Second, we sought to understand how conservation information changes opinions about this issue. To this end, we surveyed students in Archaeological Science and Earth Science classes. We first presented students with a narrative about the goals of TNR programs and asked to what degree they support TNR programs. Then, we presented a narrative about the conservation side of the debate and again asked to what degree they supported TNR programs. We tracked the shift in opinions from the first to second part of the survey to see if there was a significant change. We found that there was a statistically significant negative shift in opinion after being presented with conservation-oriented information about this debate. However, the practical significance of the statistical tests we conducted was generally low, suggesting that while conservation information had a statistically reliable effect it was of little importance.
We then compared test results from Archaeological Science and Earth Science classes, and found that the practical significance of the tests we conducted was almost double in the Earth Science class as compared to the Archaeological Science class. One possible reason for this difference is a lack of basic environmental and ecological knowledge among students in the Archaeological Science sample.
In relation to the TNR debate, this means that the time spent providing specific information on bird conservation related to TNR programs might not be very effective at changing the opinions of TNR proponents and, therefore, might not be very effective at producing actual conservation policy in regards to these controversial programs. We argue that a broader understanding of earth processes can help contextualize conservation information relevant to this debate. There is more than enough information out there on this topic that should convince TNR proponents of the potential impact of concentrating the predatory behavior of domestic cats into focused geographical areas, the question is: is that information falling on deaf ears? If so, this would suggest that conservation biologists need to switch tactics and work with TNR proponents. Including TNR advocates in bird conservation programs and including conservation biologists in TNR programs could help provide basic ecological information that is needed to contextualize this issue, decrease the hard line stances of proponents on both sides, and maybe promote effective policy.
Photo: Free-ranging cat housing and feeding station outside of the Environmental Education Science and Technology (EESAT) building.
(Photo Courtesy of Jeff Johnson)