Tonya Maxwell

tmaxwell@citizen-times.com

ASHEVILLE – If Buncombe County has a professional cat herder, that woman is Nancy Schneiter.

She estimated she’s wrangled more than 10,000 feral and community cats as she baited a live trap with a can of wet food this week.

Schneiter set the device beneath a wooden porch of a Leicester mobile home and spoke with the woman standing on it about the travails of a randy tomcat. A day earlier, Schneiter had trapped Smoky, delivering him to the Spay/Neuter Clinic of the Humane Alliance on New Leicester Highway, as she does all her wards.

“I can see why you want Smoky fixed,” Schneiter said. “He is pungent.”

And a pungent tomcat is one on the prowl for a little romance, and often, a new litter of kittens is not far behind. They multiply exponentially, those adorable balls of fluff, though the numbers of unowned cats living across the country are hard to pin down, with various studies putting their population anywhere from 30 million to 80 million.

For her nonprofit organization, Friends2Ferals, Schneiter follows Trap-Neuter-Return, a practice of fixing feral and other free-roaming cats and releasing them back to their same territories, often located in high-density housing areas such as apartment complexes or mobile home parks.

In some circles, TNR is controversial, a method that almost always pits free-roaming cats against one prey source, birds.

A highly publicized 2013 study, one that aggregated and analyzed data of other studies, suggested that domestic cats kill 1.3 billion to 4 billion birds a year and 6.3 billion to 22.3 billion mammals annually, usually small rodents.

But cat impact on songbirds and their ilk draws far more attention than quarry that is the humble field mouse or vole, and those numbers indicate felines may lead to more bird deaths than another top cause, collisions with glass in buildings.

Author Peter P. Marra, of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, declined comment but in that study he and his colleagues were critical of returning neutered cats to their homes.

“Projects to manage free-ranging cats, such as Trap-Neuter-Return colonies are implemented across the United States without widespread public knowledge, consideration of scientific evidence or the environmental review processes typically required for actions with harmful environmental consequences,” they wrote in the study, published in the journal Nature Communications.

But controlling the feral feline population is far more than an issue of dealing with cats, Schneiter said. It’s a people issue.

The cats handled by the 56-year-old Alexander woman are not only spayed or neutered, but also receive basic medical treatment like rabies shots at no cost to a resident who might be taking care of them.

Sometimes, she said, someone will ask for her help, having started feeding a single unaltered cat. A few litters later – and females can have two, sometimes three batches of kittens a year – that one sweet kitty suddenly multiplied into double digits, with a resident left at wit’s end.

“A number of people are elderly and cats are the last thing in the world they have to take care of,” Schneiter said. “This is the one last thing they take care of that really needs them.”

Many of the animals Schneiter catches are community cats, felines that are affable and receive at least some care by a resident. Friendly but unwanted cats are taken to the Buncombe County Animal Shelter, or facilities in Henderson or Madison counties where Schneiter also works, for adoption.

She only comes on a property by invitation of the owner, and began the work to fill what she says in an unmet need in the animal and human community to help control the cat population. That need has become a full-time job, sustained by donations to the nonprofit organization.

"I'm not a crazy cat lady," she joked. "I don't wear cat T-shirts or cat earrings. I look at this from a realistic point-of-view."

While she has cats on her small farm and considers herself an animal lover, her goal is to humanely reduce the area population of unwanted felines.

The Buncombe cat

Based in part on an aged study as well as a decade of handling wily felines, Schneiter estimates Buncombe County is home to about 30,000 to 40,000 feral and community cats.

They are a nearly invisible population scattered throughout the county, though a busy 1.5 mile stretch of Patton Avenue is home to seven locations, she said, with one grouping located near a large and popular business.

She asked that it not be named, concerned that unwanted cats would be dropped off.

“Cats are considered disposable by so many people. ‘Let’s just drop Fluffy off over there,’” she said.

A map of community cats produced by Buncombe County indicates that West Asheville is indeed a hotspot for outdoor felines.

That map chronicles hundreds of locations of community cats in Buncombe County, some of them with only a couple of felines, and others with more than 40 cats.

The document was produced as the county sought funding in 2013 to conduct a study to determine the impact of a trap-vaccinate-alter-release program on both community cats and wildlife, said Jim Holland, business officer for the county’s Department of Health and Human Services.

That funding did not materialize and the project did not move forward, but among questions officials sought to answer included public health concerns, like, ‘How do you assure that cats are protected from rabies?’ and ‘If you do trap them and give them a vaccine about keeping those vaccines going?’

Schneiter finds success in statistics that indicate the number of unaltered cats and kittens entering the Buncombe County Animal Shelter is declining. Last year, the shelter saw 940 kittens under 5 months, a drop from 1,114 a year earlier.

Mobile home parks can be home to dozens of stray cats, she said, and she’s seen some park owners eliminate their cat problem though the eradication of felines. But with that solution, she said, rodent numbers skyrocket, attracting more cats, and with that abundance of prey comes more kittens.

Within a couple of years, the area has more cats than it started with, she said.

Coexisting with birds

Few things rile the hackles of cat lovers like the suggestion of eliminating felines, and after the 2013 study was released in Nature Communications, the advocacy group Alley Cat Allies spat back, saying that habitat destruction is the primary killer of birds.

“The authors also neglect to mention that their proposed ‘solution’ really endorses continuing the same failed policies of the last century which call for the mass killing of cats,” Becky Robinson, president of the Maryland-based group, wrote. “Tens of millions of healthy cats have already been killed in animal pounds and shelters, at great taxpayer expense, without achieving anything. A policy of just more killing can never be the right answer.”

But Trap-Neuter-Return isn’t exactly a glamorous solution. Schneiter has had assistance from volunteers in the past, but currently works alone. The spay and neuter portion of her program is covered through donations and grants, but cost of fuel for her van, equipment and her time is often short.

To bird lovers, Schneiter says that the cost of animal control dealing with a stray cat, from catching the animal to a road that might end with adoption or euthanasia, costs about $125 per feline, as opposed to a program like hers that does not rely on taxpayer dollars.

Occasionally, a customer of Wild Birds Unlimited will ask for a cat deterrent, and Steve Muma, who owns three area locations and usually recommends a squirrel-proof hood made for poles.

But customers there will also find an in-house cat, available for adoption in conjunction with area shelters, an idea first proposed by Muma’s wife and co-owner, Heidi Muma.

Most of the customers come in and say, ‘Wait! There’s a cat in a bird store,” he said of the store that sells supplies, but not live birds.

From the Hendersonville location, when the Mumas first started the program, 14 cats have been adopted.

“They sort of run the store,” Muma said. “They come out and get petted. They really like the customer contact and our contact versus a Humane Society where they might not get as much attention.”

The larger issue of altering feral and community cats is not an easy one, said Holland, the county’s business officer, and stressed the same advice that most advocates on both sides of the issue stress.

“I think one of the most successful things is for owners of cats to make sure they spay or neuter their cat. It’s not like it’s an evolutionary process. One litter that does not have contact with humans will become feral,” Holland said. “The reality is, it’s a hard life for feral cats whether they become exposed to disease or become prey, it’s not an easy life.”