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.
Two useful tags. Click either to see the articles:- Toxic to cats | Dangers to cats

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.

Follow Elisa on Facebook and Instagram.

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”

    • Counting shelter intakes of feral cats to prove TNR efficacy is yet another deceptive and manipulative lie. Would there be less rusting cars on all the roadsides if recycling-centers were turned into “no kill” sites for cars and no longer accepted cars for trash-compaction?

      Would there be fewer dirty clothes on a child’s bedroom floor if less of their dirty clothes were found in the dirty-clothes hamper?

      Spread the word for everyone to not take their unwanted cats to shelters (that it’s better to abandon them into TNR colonies) so their won’t be killed and watch the shelter-intakes plummet, while doing nothing to actually reduce unwanted cat-counts.

      That deceptive and manipulative TNR lie is so blatantly obvious I’m surprised that TNR promoters haven’t been laughed off the planet yet for still telling it and thinking they’ll be believed.

      Reply
    • Oh, wait. I didn’t check your PDF link. That is the study by July K. Levy. The one she tried to defend and was laughed off of her own forum for presenting that as proof, and never returned to her own forum. LOL

      Would you like me to repost some of the comments that caused her to run away and hide in shame? (Hear anything from her since that globally public display of stupidity of hers?)

      I thought that PDF was the one using shelter-intakes as proof. Equally laughable.

      Reply
      • You seem to be a master at criticising TNR but have no alternative. Mass killing is not an alternative for several reasons: politically unacceptable, widespread condemnation from animal advocates, inefficient, unworkable, impractical.

        TNR would work more efficiently and on a larger scale if it was supported by government and not reliant upon volunteers. Common sense dictates that it works.

        Don’t criticise unless you have a better alternative.

        Reply
        • 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.

          Reply
          • 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.

            Reply
    • (Sigh), by now you should know better than to quote Levy, Gale & Gale, 2003–unless you LIKE being embarrassed.

      Here’s how that 66% breaks down (and this is what you get for just reading the abstract):

      47% were kittens Levy took from the colony and conned local households into “adopting”. Firstly, this does NOTHING WHATSOEVER to demonstrate the efficacy of TNR–recall that the “R” stands for RETURN, not ADOPT. Secondly, Levy didn’t even demonstrate efficacy of adoption, because she did no follow up. For all she knew those people could have redumped the kittens as soon as she turned her back.

      Levy euthanized 11% of her “subjects”. Again, euthanasia is not at issue here. This in no way substatiates TNR “success”.

      6% of Levy’s subjects disappeared. For all she knew they moved to another location to be someone else’s problem.

      Subtotal, 64%. But TNR sure took care of that remaining 2%! All it took was 11 years…

      Reply
      • Look mate, you seem to be a master at criticising TNR but have no alternative. Mass killing is not an alternative for several reasons: politically unacceptable, widespread condemnation from animal advocates, inefficient, unworkable, impractical.

        TNR would work more efficiently and on a larger scale if it was supported by government and not reliant upon volunteers. Common sense dictates that it works.

        Don’t criticise unless you have a better alternative.

        Reply
      • Present a better alternative. For the reasons stated killing is a worse alternative which is why TNR is supported by gov and killing is not.

        Reply
        • Killing is supported by the Australian Govt., not TNR. And the reason it’s a better alternative is, quite simply, that sustained eradication WORKS and TNR doesn’t. Mate.

          Reply
          • The Aus gov does not support TNR because they are Aussies and Aussies like to kill stuff. They are basic bastards. No that’s rude. It’s just that they are a bit like Texans.

            Reply
        • The Australian govt. supports killing. Why? Because TNR doesn’t work, not to put too fine a point on it.

          What else you got, “mate”?

          Reply
          • The Aus gov have tried a range ways to kill feral cats but none have been adopted on a national level. Some shooters hunt them but this is ineffective. What have u got? Nada.

            Reply
  1. A better way to do this would be to rewrite the law forcing the Police Chief and every City Council member which supported this travesty to be required to keep a colony of at least 12 cats in their own yards.

    Let’s see how long it would take their neighbors to complain about the stench of cat urine pervading the air and cat-crap in their gardens.

    Reply
  2. Interesting comment, “The whole idea is to decrease the feral cat population, regardless of who the cats are being cared for by.”

    Please tell us of just one community, anywhere on earth, where cat populations were actually reduced by the use of TNR. A sixty-year-old practice that still hasn’t lived up to your claims–anywhere on earth.

    Don’t go citing Peter Wolf’s “research” that he published on a non-peer-reviewed pay-to-play site to make it look like official research. Count how many times he used the phrase “no data” in that “research” of his for a good laugh. On top of that, he has no credentials of any kind in any field of study pertaining to this issue. That too is beyond laughable.

    We’re still all waiting for you to prove that TNR reduces cat populations, instead of only increasing cat populations by encouraging abandonment of unwanted unfixed cats everywhere. So they can then suffer and die of your loving and humane TNR attrition. Becoming road-kill, fight to the death for territory, or be eaten from the inside out by parasites. Should we wait another half-century of you torturing cats to death to try to prove to us that you are telling the truth about TNR?

    You sure do “love” cats–and all other animals that cats torture to death for cat-toys–don’t you.

    Reply
    • There are a number of pages on this site recording effective TNR programs. Is it a question of how effectively the programs are conducted. Common sense dictates that if enough resources are in place and if TNR is widespread enough it must work. Take it to an imaginary extreme. Every community in the US has a big TNR program. Within ten years there’d no no feral cats.

      Reply
      • Please post links to all those pages of yours that are irrefutable proof that TNR reduces cat-populations in their respective communities. You know, not just the ones where some lying cat-hoarder said this is true and you blindly believed them. NO TNR practitioner anywhere on earth has managed to trap and sterilize more than 1% in their communities (as noted by Bushmaster). Of that there is VERIFIED (peer-reviewed) SCIENTIFIC PROOF. So while they’re busily trapping a maximum of 1% of the cats in their area, the other 99% are breeding out of control. That sure is helping, isn’t it. More cats in any community will be born in ONE DAY than all the cats a TNR program can trap and sterilize in ONE YEAR. How is this reducing cat populations by forcing all outdoor cats to suffer and die as road-kill and worse? You know, your “humane” way of killing cats with TNR to reduce their populations.

        Your “imaginary extreme” is just that–imaginary. TNR DOES NOT WORK IN THE REAL WORLD. Less than 0.0007% of all humans on earth support TNR ideology (of that there is absolute proof). You will never get everyone to support TNR enough to make it work. Only 0.0007% of humans believe the TNR LIE. All cats in a whole township or county would have to be sterilized in less than 1 breeding-cycle for TNR to work. Do you care to put up the money and pay people to sterilize the average 100,000 cats per county (at an average cost of $140 per cat, for man-hours, transport, supplies, vets, etc.) so they can sterilize them all in less than 4 months? Put-up or shut-up, as they say. How much money have you spent this year sterilizing unwanted cats? Enough to sterilize even ONE?

        It is also true that 100% of all cat-owners that allow their cats to roam free don’t care at all if their cats die humanely. The fact that they let them roam free is 100% irrefutable proof of that. So why should anyone else care?

        Reply
        • Well, all you are saying is that TNR programs need to be better funded and operate on a wide scale. It also needs to work in parallel with other programs such as educating cat owners and their kids. There needs to be a massive injection of commitment. Then it will be more successful. Locally it does work.

          https://pictures-of-cats.org/marin-feral-cat-population-is-being-managed-properly.html

          TNR is reliant on decent-minded women volunteers. Governments should get involved on a large scale if they really want to achieve results and manage feral cats humanely.

          All you can advocate is killing them on a massive scale which is definitely impractical and there would be uproar if you tried it. It would not be possible politically. At least TNR is humane. You idea is bad on all levels.

          Reply
          • But one of the main selling points of TNR is that it will always be 100% funded by the volunteers that support it. Asking for money from taxpayers who don’t support TNR is off the table. Otherwise they’re just caught in yet another of their many manipulative and blatantly deceptive lies. You know, like the main one about TNR reducing cat populations.

            Please explain how euthanizing any cat by running it over with a car, cut in half from a car-engine’s fan-blade, being infected with incurable and deadly diseases, eaten from the inside-out by parasites, being torn in half by predators, having their eyes gouged-out during a territorial TNR cat-fight, or being shot or poisoned to death (the ways that ALL TNR cats die) is “humane”. You, and all just like you, seem to keep avoiding that reality of this TNR folly that you incessantly promote.

            Reply

Leave a Reply to Michael Broad Cancel reply

follow it link and logo