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Concept
Feral cat
Summary
A feral cat or a stray cat is an unowned domestic cat (Felis catus) that lives outdoors and avoids human contact: it does not allow itself to be handled or touched, and usually remains hidden from humans. Feral cats may breed over dozens of generations and become an aggressive local apex predator in urban, savannah and bushland environments. Some feral cats may become more comfortable with people who regularly feed them, but even with long-term attempts at socialization, they usually remain aloof and are most active after dusk. Of the 700 million cats in the world, 480 million of them are feral.
Feral cats are devastating to wildlife, and conservation biologists consider them to be one of the worst invasive species on Earth. Attempts to control feral cat populations are widespread but generally of greatest impact within purpose-fenced reserves.
Some animal rights groups advocate trap-neuter-return programs to prevent the feral cats from continuing to breed. Scientific evidence has demonstrated that TNR is not effective at controlling feral cat populations.
The meaning of the term feral cat varies between professions and countries, and is sometimes used interchangeably with other terms such as free-roaming, street, alley, or community cat. Some of these terms are also used to refer to stray cats, although stray and feral cats are generally considered to be different by rescuers, veterinarians, and researchers. The lines between stray and feral cat are diffuse. The general idea is that owned cats that wander away from their homes may become stray cats, and stray cats that have lived in the wild for some time may become feral.
Activists who seek to normalize feral cats in the environment are attempting to rebrand feral cats as community cats. Biologists say that this new term is euphemistic and distracts from feral cats being an environmental problem, and that it has connotations that falsely imply that feral cats exist with the consent of the communities where they live, and that the public has a moral obligation to support them in the outdoors.
Official source
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