Wichita City Council delays ordinance allowing residents to keep feral cat colonies in their yards

The proposal in Wichita, Kansas allowing residents to keep feral cat colonies in their yards has been delayed until December or January pending some changes, the San Francisco Gate reported November 29.

Feral cat pictures
By Chriss Pagani under CC license.

The Wichita City Council advisory board says the Wichita Police Department would have to develop a plan to trap stray cats in the city, take them to be spayed or neutered then return them to the area where they were trapped.

Wichita Police Lt. Brian Sigma stated in an interview with KWCH

“Our number on euthanasia with cats remains high and so a goal of mine and the (Wichita Animal Shelter)…this is one way we’re trying to see if we can reduce those numbers.”

Tom Ewert, president of the Wichita Audubon Society, is fighting back. Bird supporters have accused Wichita City Council of feral cat favoritism. Ewert would like feral cat colonies banned from the 15 parks and open spaces that are bird habitats.

The delay of putting a feral cat TNR plan into place involves providing rules as to where and where not feral cats can be trapped, returned and fed without too much of a negative impact on the bird population. The number of cats in a colony is also being debated. Right now the city code allows a person to own two cats or four with a permit.

The TNR ordinance currently drafted would allow a resident to have four “owned” cats and up the eight strays on the property. Assistant City Attorney Jan Jarman is drafting the ordinance and set aside time last month to get advice from Best Friends Animal Society attorney Katie Barnett who has help other communities get a feral cat ordinance.

TNR is already being practiced in Wichita because resident caregivers see there’s a problem with overpopulation among city cats. The whole idea is to decrease the feral cat population, regardless of who the cats are being cared for by.

One rule in TNR is to spay/neuter any cat trapped, regardless of whether it’s the cat the trapper meant to catch. TNR is designed to reduce the number of cats and programs encouraging spay/neuter/vaccinate benefit the community more than catch and kill.

If anyone close to the Wichita feral cat ordinance has additional information, please leave a comment below.

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Additional source (this is a good read and offers more information) here.

20 thoughts on “Wichita City Council delays ordinance allowing residents to keep feral cat colonies in their yards”

  1. The author of the best comment will receive an Amazon gift of their choice at Christmas! Please comment as they can add to the article and pass on your valuable experience.
  2. Mass killing would politically unacceptable and it would not work + immoral and inhumane. The UK government is no good. They should fund TNR programs but that can’t even do the basics right.

  3. Is your government in the UK paying for all your TNR colonies? (Which only more than doubled your feral cats during the 60 years of promoting TNR in the UK.) If your government is not paying for all TNR programs, how do you expect the population of any other country to do what you refuse to do? (All the while proving that TNR doesn’t work, just as it has failed throughout all of the UK.) And, according to you, you’re the most cat-loving culture on earth! Only 30% of all households want cats anywhere in their lives. You’re in the minority. The vast majority could care less what happens to your cats (as proved in the UK too) and wouldn’t donate even one penny to the lives of your cats–unless that penny is in the form of a bulk-purchase of .22s.

    Now tell us how hunted-to-extinction is less humane than flattening their back halves under the wheels of cars so they drag themselves to die in a culvert or ditch somewhere many days later. One of the many ways all TNR cats succumb to your “loving and humane TNR attrition”. Do you want me to list all the other ways your TNR cats die? When I do, I guarantee you that you’ll wish that they were all humanely shot to death, dying in under 3 seconds, instead of slowly suffering and dying from your heinously INHUMANE TNR practices and hopes.

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