The Fiscal Impact of Ferals

March 19, 2010, 6:17AM MT
By Sandy Miller, Best Friends staff writer
New calculator looks at the cost savings of trap/neuter/return programs

If you really want to get something done, recruit your friends to help you.

And that’s just what Best Friends Animal Society is doing by giving
feral cat advocates the tools they need to show their local leaders how
much of their taxpayers’ money they can save by implementing
trap/neuter/return programs (TNR) in their communities.

Best Friends' senior legislative analyst Ledy VanKavage calls it “the
Tom Sawyer approach.”

“It was a lot easier for him to get other people to paint the fence than
to paint the fence himself,” VanKavage says.

Best Friends has unveiled its Trap, Neuter and Return Cost Savings
Calculator <http://www.guerrillaeconomics.biz/communitycats>, a tool
that compares the costs of TNR with the costs of trapping and killing
cats in cities, counties and states across the country. The study,
commissioned by Best Friends and funded by a grant from PetSmart
Charities <http://www.petsmartcharities.org/>, shows that TNR programs
are much less expensive to implement than trap and kill policies.

Take California, for instance. The study, titled “The Fiscal Impact of
Trap, Neuter and Return Policies in Controlling Feral Cat Populations in
the United States,” conducted by the New York City-based John Dunham and
Associates, estimates there are more than 70 million cats in the Golden
State, and about 38.5 million of them are feral — or “community” cats.
The study estimates that trap and kill programs cost the state $250 per
cat (for trapping, enforcement, sheltering, food, supplies, laboratory
tests and euthanizing), while TNR programs cost the state $220 per cat
(for trapping, enforcement, neutering and spaying, physical exams and
vaccinations). Discounted TNR programs cost the state just $100 per cat
(for trapping and a packaged TNR procedure). If the state did away with
trap and kill and replaced it with discounted TNR — in which
veterinarians and community volunteers offer their services to keep
costs down — it could save California taxpayers a whopping $5.58 billion
a year.

In these tough economic times, cities, counties and states are looking
for ways to trim costs. So there’s no better time than now for community
cat advocates to approach their government leaders to let them know how
much money TNR programs can save them. Now, more than ever, city
councils, county commissioners and state legislators are paying close
attention to dollar signs.

“Cities are laying off firefighters and animal control officers,”
VanKavage says. “They’re looking for ways to save money and now is the
time for feral cat people to organize.”

Nationwide, TNR results in a huge savings for taxpayers. There are about
168 million cats in the U.S., and about half those cats are community
cats, according to the study. It costs about $16 billion to trap and
kill community cats, while discounted TNR programs cost taxpayers about
$7 billion a year, according to the study. Replacing trap and kill with
discounted TNR could save American taxpayers almost $9 billion a year.

*Crunching the numbers*
For John Dunham and Associates, counting up community cats and comparing
the costs of trap and kill with TNR was no easy feat. The numbers were
estimated by sampling a pool of reliable population data of community
cats from four states, 12 cities and 13 counties in the U.S.

“There is very limited data on animals in this country,” says John
Dunham, president and managing partner of the economic research firm. “I
can find out more details on how much celery is grown in every part of
this country than I can find on feral cats.”

Dunham found it was especially difficult to find data on community cats
in small towns operating on shoestring budgets.

“Smaller communities are worried about making sure the streetlight
works,” Dunham says.

In most American communities, homeless cats are a familiar sight. For
more than 10,000 years, community cats have lived beside humans. With
the growing population of community cats, there has been much policy
debate on how to handle the situation. Some argue for eradication, but
this doesn’t curb population growth because unspayed and unneutered cats
will simply take their place and continue to produce more cats. The
humane solution is TNR, a cost-efficient, no-kill means of reducing
community cat populations.

When cats end up in shelters, they rarely make it out alive. Seventy-two
percent of cats who end up in shelters are killed, and 80 percent of
those cats are deemed to be feral, according to Focus on Felines, one of
four Best Friends campaigns
<http://network.bestfriends.org/Campaigns/Default.aspx> aimed at
reaching the goal of No More Homeless Pets. Only 10 percent to 20
percent of pet cats are adopted from shelters, and only 2 percent to 5
percent of lost cats are reunited with their owners.

“Cats make up the majority of animals euthanized in shelters,” says
Shelly Kotter, campaign specialist for Focus on Felines. “TNR is one of
the main components to a successful no-kill movement. This calculator is
an awesome tool to help cities embrace TNR. It’s not only the most
humane thing, it’s the most economically sound thing.”

For more information on how to use economics in lobbying, click here
<http://www.msba.org/sec_comm/sections/animallaw/docs/MidAtlanticAnimalLawfinallvjd.pdf>.

*How you can help:*

Read more about Best Friends’ Focus on Felines campaign
<http://network.bestfriends.org/campaigns/felines>.