Edmundson Feral Cat Colony Is Ongoing Experiment
A feral cat colony is now being studied and monitored at Edmundson Park. (photo by Ginger Allsup/Oskaloosa News)
Feral Cat Colony helps bring balance to ecosystem.
Oskaloosa, Iowa – Many cat owners think of their pets as soft and cuddly creatures, but inside of them is one of the top predator’s mother nature can provide.
In Edmundson Park resides a pack of predators, all feline and closely resembling your ordinary house cat. Ordinary house cats they are not, as the pack more closely resembles a lion pack than anything else.
The feral cats that reside within Edmundson Park force you to deviate from the mindset of seeing them as ordinary house cats. The pack has a pecking order, which determines which animal is the leader and gets to use resources before another.
“They are wild animals,” says Lindsey Sime, Director at Stephen Memorial Animal Shelter. “They’re part of the ecosystem.”
Sime, along with Christy Smith, has been documenting the pack for over a year now. There are a total of 15 cats that make up the pack or colony.
In the early part of 2014, Smith and Sime started the process of working with the feral cats, and Sime helped to write a grant through the ASPCA for the feral or cat colony. The grant covered having the animals trapped, spayed/neutered, and vaccinated. The grant also helps to cover ongoing needs like food.
In November, Sime and Smith trapped the cats in live traps and transported them to the vet to be spayed and neutered. Those surgeries took two mornings for the staff at Mahaska Vet Clinic.
The most common question is, why not just remove the cats from the environment? According to Alley Cat Allies, “removing animals from an area creates a vacuum.” The process in place now is to trap and return the animals back to their territory. With the feral cats now spayed and neutered, the population is stabilized, which results in fewer animals ultimately being euthanized and reducing costs for animal control.
The common practice of many animal control programs was to catch and euthanize feral cats. According to Alley Cat Allies, that process may temporarily reduce the number of feral cats in a given area, but the survivors continue to breed while other cats move into the available territory.
“When I think of feral cats, I think of them as any other wild animal,” says Sime. “They are part of the ecosystem and they are not to be messed with. Take them away and that’s going to disrupt the ecosystem.”
Feral cats are not a new phenomenon, as they have been living in close proximity to humans for nearly 10,000 years.
If you are at Ednumdson and see a cat staring at you from the tree line, you might look for a notched ear on the cat. If you find one of those, you will know it’s from the colony of feral cats at the park.
“Never ever try to abandon your own cat at the feral cat colony,” says Sime. “The cats that are a part of that colony will chase the intruder cat off because they’ve got enough cats for the resources and they don’t want to share.”
