May 08, 2025 The Community Cat Conundrum

Cat management in the United States often sparks intense debates among animal protection advocates. One notable example occurred at a conference on outdoor cat management held in a hotel near Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., toward the end of the 20th century. The discussions among the attendees quickly devolved into chaos, with one group arguing that outdoor cats should be left undisturbed. In contrast, another group contended that these cats faced numerous dangers and needed to be trapped and brought to shelters. There, they could receive proper care and, hopefully, find adoptive “forever” homes.

Approximately two decades later, Professor Kate Hurley, the Director of the Koret Shelter Medicine Program at the University of California, Davis, argued that trapping feral cats and bringing them to an animal shelter is essentially a death sentence for these animals, as their chances of being adopted as household pets are virtually nonexistent. She proposed that a more humane approach would involve returning feral and unsocialized cats to their original site of capture, a process she referred to as “Return to Field” (RTF). Various national animal protection groups have endorsed this approach. However, some animal advocates remain unconvinced or object to how RTF programs have developed, viewing them as a form of cat abandonment. Animal abandonment is generally considered illegal under most animal cruelty laws.

The predecessor of RTF is a practice commonly known as Trap, Neuter, Vaccinate, and Return (TNVR). In this approach, outdoor, “unowned” cats are trapped, neutered to prevent further breeding, vaccinated to protect against disease, and returned to their original location. While TNVR is now generally viewed as a humane practice by most of the animal protection community, it faced criticism when it was first introduced in the United States. Some advocates argued that it amounted to abandonment and, therefore, was illegal. There were even a few instances where local humane societies were threatened with legal action by national animal protection organizations because of their TNVR efforts. In response to these concerns, some states have amended their anti-cruelty laws to eliminate potential legal threats against TNVR programs.

The Community Cat Program at the San Diego Humane Society, which is based on the Return-to-Field (RTF) concept, was the subject of a lawsuit filed by two other animal protection groups in California: the Pet Assistance Foundation of Long Beach and Paw Protectors Rescue of Newport Beach. These groups argued that the San Diego Humane Society’s program, which involves returning outdoor domestic cats to the areas where they were found, constituted illegal animal abandonment. Although the San Diego Humane Society called upon Professor Hurley to testify to support their community cat program, the judge was unconvinced and ultimately ruled that the program was unlawful.

The judge’s ruling has sent shockwaves throughout the animal shelter community. Ed Boks, author of an animal politics blog and former Executive Director of major municipal animal control agencies in New York City, Los Angeles, and Maricopa County, Arizona, commented that the ruling “has sparked a wave of concern among advocates for Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs, with many questioning how this decision will impact their efforts to humanely manage outdoor cat populations.”

Merritt Clifton, publisher of the online news magazine Animals 24/7, noted that both sides of the case support TNR. However, he clarified that the parties who initiated the lawsuit advocate for “true” TNR programs for colonies of wild or feral cats, but not for return-to-field programs for friendly, healthy, adoptable non-feral cats. In other words, the lawsuit explicitly addresses the type of cat involved in an RTF project.

Identifying the cat type subject to various management approaches has become a global issue. ICatCare, an international organization dedicated to cat protection, has created a dedicated section on its website to address unowned cats. They have introduced the term “inbetweener cats” to describe one of four categories of cats, the other three being feral, street, and pet cats. In the past, animal protection organizations have successfully developed compromises and approaches to resolve disagreements over how animals should be treated and managed. Unfortunately, the legal action in San Diego represents a significant escalation in the cat welfare debate and will most likely consume considerable financial resources.

There are more effective ways to resolve disagreements than going to court. For instance, the animal protection community collaborated to create definitions for “healthy,” “treatable,” and “unhealthy & untreatable” as they pertain to shelter animals. These definitions helped reduce tensions among different categories of animal shelters regarding how to classify the animals in their care and how to handle the sensitive issue of euthanasia.

Now, it seems that the US animal shelter community needs to repeat the process that led to the Asilomar Accords, focusing on how to approach cat rescue and sheltering. This would result in a new agreement on acceptable methods for ensuring the welfare of domestic cats. The cat welfare situation is complicated because domestic cats can reproduce successfully and thrive without human assistance, despite high kitten mortality rates.

Video by Semyon Polyanskiy, iStock