“We feel it works,” said Linda Crawford of Life Savers Animal Rescue in Polson, which has been running trap, neuter and return programs in Lake County for a decade. “In an ideal world all cats should be house pets, but they all aren’t. The idea behind trap, neuter and return is to keep the population in check, and there are less cats because of it.”

Free-roaming domestic cats in the U.S. alone are estimated to kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds a year, and 6.9 billion to 20.7 billion mammals, according to the CSKT release.

While humans may like the fact that rodents are among cats’ prey, it reduces the food supply for other native species that also rely on rodents.

“The sheer quantity of cat-caused mortality is staggering,” the Natural Resources Department said. “For perspective, consider that 1.4 billion is equivalent to the entire human population of China.”

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In an article Crawford submitted to the Valley Journal, a local weekly newspaper, earlier this month, she said trap, neuter and return is “the only chance feral cats have of living safe, healthy lives without reproducing.”