Yes, legislation does come from staff all the time. When it does, it's usually discussed in a work session. The TNR legislation, though, was drafted at Heidi's request. Ordinarily, when legislation originates with the mayor and commission, Heidi assigns it to the Legislative Review Committee, which oversees the county attorney as he drafts it. In this case, the commission didn't talk about TNR at a work session, and Heidi bypassed the committee. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to a vote. It WAS developed outside the public view and not subject to the scrutiny usually afforded to major legislative changes, regardless of whether it was brought up by staff or elected officials. Since the mayor doesn't have the power to tell the attorney to wipe his nose without five votes, we know she and at least some commissioners must have, as the editorial suggests, developed the proposal outside public view. And citizens have no real opportunity to lobby against TNR because, as they usually do with anything controversial, commissioners didn't tip their hands at the agenda-setting meeting, so we have no idea where they stand (usually this means they've already decided to pass it unanimously and they don't want to rile anyone up by talking about it).

But I don't think it's fair to castigate them for not "tipping their hands." I've got a fairly good idea of where at least a few of them stand, because I, you know, asked them.

Martin, There is overwhelming evidence from peer-reviewed articles that TNR will not bring about a overall reduction in cat numbers in the long-run.  You simply cannot trap and neuter enough individuals to make up for the increased fecundity due to feeding all over town.  There is no mechanism in the amendments to deal with cats that venture off a colony site (and they will) onto a property where the landowner doesn't want cats.Think about this, ORCAT in south Florida has been doing this for 15 years with an annual budget of $100,000.  They did get a reduction over time, but they still have 200+ cats and there's no perceived end to that population.  Are we prepared for that?  Do we really think a non-profit will get that sort of budget for such a controversial program here?Jimp.s. we don't outsource traffic safety or the police, why do we want to do that with animal control?

About the Texas A&M Study:Documented examples of dramatic population declines at TNR sites are from programs in limited geographic areas that were implemented with participation of the researchers themselves (e.g., Hughes&Slater 2002; Levy et al. 2003). Programs implemented by researchers are likely to be much more thorough than programs implemented exclusively by volunteers (see also examples in Jessup 2004).http://www.animalsandsociety.org/assets/library/77_jaawshughes.pdf  (your link didn't work).If you read that study there is no estimate of overall population before & after TNR.  Isn't that what is needed to determine if TNR brings about a reduction in  overall population?Athens/Clarke is doing TNR for that purpose, not to make life easier for a few hundred cats.  Not to reduce numbers at a few colony sites.  This is being proposed for dealing with the entire AC feral cat population.Please read this:http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/cats/Management_claims_feral_...From a peer-reviewd article in one of the most prestigious journals of conservation biology (titled, crazily enough "Conservation Biology")Think about it Martin, how can you possibly reduced overall numbers if the number of cats you feed exceed the number you are able to trap.  Feeding GREATLY increases fecundity.  This just doesn't work.  Please find me one study that shows population prior to TNR and then population after TNR (not just colony data from practioners).   

Jim is absolutely right.  The question at hand here is whether or not TNR will reduce the cat population as opposed to no TNR.  Opponents of TNR rightly claim that by feeding cats you'll end up with more cats in a given area than if they weren't fed and remained territorial rather than colonial.  All of the studies you cite and every one I've seen cited by TNR advocates is comparing TNR data vs. TNR data a few years later, not comparing before TNR data to after TNR data.  If you see a feral cat strolling through your yard and start putting out food, the cat becomes less territorial, more cats show up for more food, etc. and you end up with a colony of 12 cats, it's not a success if you show that in 10 years your colony has declined to 6 cats.  You still went from 1 cat wandering through your yard to 6+ cats over those 10 years. Realizing that neutering cats and then feeding them isn't doing them any favors is a hard hurdle to overcome, especially for the folks who have been doing it for years and invested so much time, emotion, and money (sometimes thousands of their own dollars) into the endeavor.  But if what you're doing is actually producing more cats out on the street and also telling people that there is someone out there taking care of cats if they want to abandon their pet, you aren't doing cats any favors.

...if those cats weren't being fed right now. It's fatuous to act as though moving to TNR is going to open up the floodgates for every feral in town to get three squares a day. Unfortunately, that ship sailed a long time ago.

Obviously, I've been getting into this issue, and from talking to folks more involved with the feral issues around town, I'm pretty confident in saying that anywhere there's a colony of feral cats, they're being fed. Unofficially, of course. It's human nature; we see a critter that looks like it's starving, and we try to feed it. It's why I try to keep my bird feeder full, especially in the winter.

So don't make the mistake of assuming that TNR equals a sudden uptick in feeding of feral cats. It doesn't.

What TNR does equal, and here's where the pro-TNR advocates (myself woefully included) have dropped the messaging ball, is colony management. That's really the issue here. How do we manage these colonies, because frankly, kids, they ain't going anywhere.

Let's go back to our three feral options and do the math.

Some flavor of TNR: Cats get fed, some (not all) get neutered, populations decline over time.

Some flavor of T&K or T&E: Cats get fed, government incurs expenses of $75 - $100 per cat trapped and euthanized, populations grow over time, because cats will still knock boots at a rate faster than we can T&K them.

Do nothing: This seems to be the option that most of the anti-TNR crowd seems to be advocating. Cats still get fed (again, illegally/unofficially), populations grow, problem grows, we revisit the issue in five years or ten years, or when cats take over the Commission Chamber and start trying to insert commissioner-defined options into zoning ordinances.

Some dynamics we can change, for example, how we manage feral cat colonies. Some we can't, like the very human tendency to help those critters we see as cute and unfortunate. So, unless you want to hire, say, a couple dozen more CPD officers to patrol feral cat colonies and enforce this sort of pie-in-the-sky forced starvation policy, then we should probably be talking about colony management.

Remember that old saw about the definition of lunacy?

Assuming that the majority of ferals in Athens are currently existing in colony situations is false (many are, but the vast majority aren't). And making the assumption that the legalization of TNR won't result in an uptick in cat feeding across Athens is a mistake.  The people who do TNR don't only do it where there existing large colonies of cats; most of the colonies in the campus cats program start as one to three strays.  If TNR is legalized and widely promoted, it sends the message to citizens that A) it's perfectly alright for cats to live outside on the street as long as we feed them and B) if you dump off your pet, someone will take care of it for you.  If the proposed legislation said you could only TNR where there is an existing colony of cats it would be one thing, but it currently makes all TNR caregivers self-governing in that regard.  It's also naive to expect that this won't lead to a lot of well-meaning folks who love the idea of doing this to try it in their own backyards, establish a colony, and not have time to put in the work to neuter all of the cats or give up on it when the job gets to be too much.  The best thing we can do to control the stray population overall is to educate folks (and enforce laws as best we can) to not feed strays, not start a 'colony' of cats in the first place, not abandon their pets, and spay/neuter their pets.  TNR is directly antithetical to 3 of those 4 goals. 

A little misleading to call it a forced starvation policy as well.  Other free-roaming mammals like raccoons, foxes, skunks, rats, etc. aren't forced to starve just because we don't feed them.  Yet somehow most of the public is educated enough to know that it's a bad idea from a public health perspective to feed them.  They're educated enough to know that they'll get more of them around dwellings if they put out food for them, and there will be more human/animal conflict of interest as a result.  Cats are actually non-native, invasive species and yet they get subsidized?  Hardly seems fair.  And it certainly seems unfair to throw your hands up and say that the public can't be educated not to feed feral cats when we already have an understanding of why it's bad to do so with everything else. 

Martin,Let's put aside the efficacy of TNR.  What do you say to the homeowner that has created a backyard bird habitat and a stray cat takes up residence in his yard.  He watches this cat swat down and kill a Magnolia warbler that just made a perilous journey from central America and is on it's way to a breeding ground being gobbled up by development.  Animal Control will tell him (before and after the amendment) "I'm sorry, you can trap the cat, but you will have to get a colony to accept it and you will have to let it go stalk warblers somewhere else".  That doesn't seem right nor humane.  I know you are very dedicated to animal rights, but do you really put no extra value on native wildlife whose populations are at risk?  Cats will never go extinct.  But some of our birds may.  Don't we want to help them survive for other generations to marvel at?

@Baxter: Heh. I knew "forced starvation" would push some buttons. But, seems to me that you've made a pretty good argument for the TNR aspect of colony management, since "they'll get more of them around dwellings [or feeding sites in the case of TNR] if they put out food for them." Seems like that would greatly improve the efficiency of the TNR process then.

WRT to educating the public, the difference to me is most people don't know anybody who keeps a pet raccoon or fox. Cats are perceived differently than those other critters. I think you can throw a bunch of money we don't have into a "don't feed stray cats" education initiative, but people are still going to do it, because a) cats are perceived by most people as being companion animals, not wild animals; and b) there's more than likely going to be an element of "well, just this one little cute kitten isn't going to hurt anything."

Finally, I'm going to take some issue with your use of the word "subsidized." Ferals aren't subsidized under TNR, not in the traditional sense. Not a dime of taxpayer money would be spent on this, as opposed to your other two options, which would either initially or eventually require a lot of taxpayer dimes. So, this might be an overly semantic argument, but to me, that's not subsidization.

@Jim: Actually, making the backyard a little more bird friendly is on my list of summer projects; I like to have something to look at out the window when I'm working in the home office.

This is going to sound really mercenary and callous, but you've got to sort of run the odds, and I wonder if the overlap is going to be particularly significant. For me (and to be clear, it's a personal decision for me; I don't want to push anyone into this line of thinking), once my project gets underway, the sudden appearance of a bunch of feral cats is not going to be desirable, but on the other hand, I'm not certain that I get to make the ethical choice that critter A (say, a hypothetical warbler) is somehow more deserving than critter B (say, a hypothetical feral cat).

Of course, there are a number of other animals that could be swatting the hypothetical warbler right now, including the non-feral outdoor cat next door.

For a lot of backyard birders, the colony management side of TNR might be a godsend in a way, because it's going to reduce the roaming of ferals, and do more to centralize them around feeding locations. (As long, of course, as someone doesn't create a feral colony next door to you.) I think that what you'll find is that most of the people who want to get involved with TNR, if it becomes policy, are not just cat lovers. That's what I've found, anyway. They're animal lovers in genera;. In more practical terms, I think we'll see them being sensitive to concerns like that, and doing everything they can to mitigate those concerns.

You've gotten close to the one significant piece of heartburn I have about TNR, although it doesn't seem to be an issue in Athens - the effect on endangered species. If we have a case where feral cat colonies collide with endangered species, then I'm going to be on the wildlife conservation side, no question. However, there's only one endangered non-plant, non-fish species recorded in Clarke County, the gray bat. I'm not a wildlife expert, and I don't even play one on TV, but that doesn't appear to be a problem right now. (Caveat: ESA listing is not the only indicator of a threatened species, or even the best indicator, for reasons I won't get into.)

Bottom line: If TNR passes, this should not be carte blanche for rescue groups. They're going to need to be highly respectful of other species, and mindful of the need to mitigate, whenever possible, their effect on other wildlife. Personally, I wish there was a mechanism for that in the proposed ordinance, but I'm not sure how we could that. I'm open to suggestions, though.

"Seems like that would greatly improve the efficiency of the TNR process then."Wow, please tell me you don't actually believe that once cats are drawn away from their territories that there aren't other cats waiting to take their place.  The staunchest TNR advocates in town have no qualms with the science behind studies that show you have to neuter 75-90% of cats for it to have an effect on the the population that isn't made up for by the remaining 10-25% of breeders.  They counter that evidence by saying that they aim for 100% neutering in their colonies.   This ignores that the TNR colonies don't exist in a vaccuum; there is always a supply of kittens from the remaining thousands of fertile individuals in town waiting to fill territories voided by cats sucked into TNR colonies, and no matter what percentage of cats within a given colony you neuter, there will always be enough immigration to offset the attrition rate of the colony (which itself is greatly slowed- by a factor of 3X or more- by vaccination, feeding, watering, etc.).  The net result is a much higher density of cats in colonies and an unchanged density of cats elsewhere in town.  If any new colonies are formed that didn't already exist or if any additional food is provided by TNR caretakers than was there before (and this is very likely, since their 365-day a year feeding is generally more dependable than whatever food source was there before they took over), the overall population of cats will increase relative to what it is now.  Plain and simple. Feral cats are, indeed, subsidized relative to other wildlife no matter from where the funds come.  And speaking of subsidization in the traditional sense, as of yesterday evening, an amendment to the mayor's TNR proposal was released making government subsidization of TNR official as well.  The mayor and commission plan to give $10,000 to the TNR advocates.  To promote a method that will increase problems with feral cats. As for endangered species, since you seem to like birds and since cats are most notorious for their effects towards them more than other small wildlife, I'll focus on them.  Below is a list of birds currently on the Audubon watchlist.  These are imperiled species that have been recorded for Clarke Co. in the past 3 years whose decline is precipitous enough that if unchanged will eventually land them on the threatened and endangered species list.Swallow-tailed Kite, Red-headed Woodpecker, Wood Thrush, Blue-winged Warbler, Golden-winged Warbler, Bay-breasted Warbler, Prairie Warbler, Cerulean Warbler, Prothonotary Warbler, Swainson's Warbler, Kentucky Warbler, Canada Warbler, Dickcissel, and Rusty Blackbird.  Clarke Co. is one of few places left in the piedmont to find nesting Swainson's Warblers, and densities of Rusty Blackbirds in our county rival any in the state- this species has declined by over 98% in the past 40 years by most estimates, and our county is one of the last strongholds in the state for them.  Both Swainson's Warblers and Rusty Blackbirds do all of their foraging on or near the ground, and Swainson's Warblers are low-nesting, putting both of these species at particular risk where there are high densities of cats around.  Additionally, although not on the watchlist yet, Northern Bobwhite are practically extirpated from this county where they were once common.  So, yes, Clarke Co. might not have many species that are on the endangered species list now, but we harbor many that are on their way and that will get there that much faster with more cats.  The goal of conservation isn't just to keep endangered species from going extinct, it's to keep things from getting to that point in the first place. Since you seem to be an advocate for wildlife of all types, one last point to consider is that the folks most staunchly opposed to TNR are population biologists and wildlife management experts.  They want to see fewer cats, and they don't have they bias of having fed colonies for years and having invested thousands of dollars and hours into the process.  They just want there to be fewer cats, no matter what method works.  And it isn't that they were given a choice and are simply choosing trap-and-kill over TNR.  They are saying if we enact this legislation as currently proposed, it will lead to more cats than what we have now.  They're scientists with a specialization in the field, have thoroughly reviewed the science, and are unanimous in their opposition to TNR.  That should tell you something.

An advocate for wildlife, and also for TNR. Doesn't that just make your head spin around and around?

Ok, but seriously folks, let's not turn this into bird people versus cat people, which this comment comes dangerously close to doing. We've avoided that so far, and I think it's a false choice. At least it'd better be, because there are numerous examples where the two sides have reached some sort of useful relationship that protects both sides. That's what we need to be endeavoring to do here.

I'm not someone who has, "fed colonies for years and [has] invested thousands of dollars and hours into the process." Nor am I a wildlife biologist who has spent years studying that field with all the biases that come from that side. it's fine if you bring it up, but I'm in no way shocked that wildlife biologists are opposed to TNR in the same way that I'm not at all shocked that the biggest opponents of factory farming tend to be vegan/vegetarian.

It doesn't make my head spin, it just means that you don't understand the true outcome of TNR. There are many of us opposed to it who own pet cats and love cats. But we recognize their place is in loving homes, not out on the street. TNR leads to both more total cats out on the street and more damage to wildlife. I am curious what the biases on this issue are that you think come from being a wildlife biologist. Are they the same biases that come from being a veterinarian specializing in public health? Or that come from being a population ecologist? Because all of those groups agree in their unanimous opposition. How the biases of a group whose aim is the welfare of the cats they feed could affect their ability to neutrally approach the issue of feral cat control, which is the issue supposedly being addressed by this legislation, is tangible. How the biases of wildlife professionals could bias them against reducing the cat population escapes me. I think the reason they are unanimously opposed is because it really just doesn't make sense when you boil it down to the basic biology behind it. Neutering is inconsequential on the scale they it can conceivably be implemented it in Athens, while any increase in resources is consequential to increased population size and public health risk. Think about whether this would work or not to control the roach population on your front porch. Wouldn't you expect more roaches than you started with as the end result? And don't you think that neutering those roaches in your porch colony and removing any roach-kittens you see at the food would have minimal impact on the rest of the roaches in your neighborhood, much less in Athens? Cuteness of the animal involved doesn't affect the efficacy of the method. It really doesn't make sense from an animal control perspective. As far as compromise between the two sides, I'd love to see legislation that instead legalized all the parts of TNR we know are beneficial, or at least neutral (neutering, vaccinating, socializing and re-homing of feral kittens) and kept in place the ordinance against feeding any stray animals that are free to wander off your property. Eliminate the one aspect that tangibly increases public health risk, infringement on the private propery of others, and leads to more animals and you'll eliminate all the opposition. Furthermore, if the donations and resource used to feed cats 365 days a year instead went to neutering, vaccinating, and re-homing kittens, you'd be able to reach a whole lot more animals, TNR advocates could still constantly work closely with the animals (and make even more of a difference in reducing the number of cats out there suffering), the proposed amendment should hypothetically be much more effective, and the opposition would be fully on board to working together on education for spaying/neutering pets and against abandoning pets and feeding strays. Right now TNR is counterproductive to any educational initiatives to address the latter two. If TNR folks are really interested in reducing the cat population and not just interested in finding a way to legalize their feeding of stray cats, they should jump at that suggestion. All week the anti-TNR people have been lambasted for being against this because, supposedly, TNR is better than doing nothing. Look at the above proposal. It's a lot better than the current one at controlling the cat population, and certainly a lot better than doing nothing. And I don't see anything there about killing/euthanizing en masse either. So why not do that instead and make both sides happy?

Martin,Does it bother you at all about the $10,000 going to TNR groups?  If I said I could lower the poverty rate in Athens by Dianetics, would you be for it?  What if I said, I have some studies done by Scientologists that show it will work.   (Of course there are studies by sociologists that show it won't, and every major professional sociology group has policies against it ).  What if the mayor was a Scientologist and decided to give $10K to the group to do the work?  Then, in an attempt to make it more palatable said that after a year we'd take the data from the Scientologists to determine if the program was effective or not.   

I'd try really hard not to smirk, but I'd say the same thing I said about TNR. Show me your studies and let me use my own brain and evaluate them myself. I made my decision about TNR in general when I got more involved in animal issues a few years ago, and specifically on this proposal when it came out.

But, my grandfather always warned me about buying a pig in a poke, so I guess I'll check out Dianetics from the library?

Just wondering why you're bringing it back to wildlife vs. cats again.  It's legislation that's supposed to reduce the cat population, so the bias you mention, being passionate about wildlife, should actually be a good thing in this regard, yes?  And again, what about public health veterinarians and population ecologists who have no wildlife component to their jobs?  What's their bias?  Again, since we're talking about reducing the number of cats on the streets, so a group whose main purpose is to help street cats live long and healthy lives has a major conflict of interest.  Humane societies and shelters who don't want to accept ferals as part of their duties, or who want fewer of them, also have a conflict of interest.  The more cats being fed and cared for out on the street, the fewer they have to deal with.  That in no way means the cat population is less than what it was before, which, again, is supposed to be the point of the legislation.  Painting this as something that will reduce the cat population is selling us a bill of goods.  And the price tag is not only $10,000, but also increased public health risk and  increased imposition on our property rights.