Mountain View City Council & Water District Election

Thank you for visiting Fat Cat Rescue.

This year's race for Mountain View City Council on November 4th was very important, and the new Council, which will begin its term on January 1, 2015, will have an opportunity to influence the fate of outdoor cats in Mountain View. We are pleased to report that the candidates we endorsed were elected. Thanks for your support.

Elected to Mountain View City Council

Elected to Santa Clara Valley Water District

Did you know?

Did you know the current City Council is heavily lobbied by the Audubon Society and other large, national special interest groups?

These special interest groups:

  • have blocked housing from being built in North Bayshore
  • attribute the decline of birds to outdoor cats (not people, climate change, pollution, or native predators)
  • want to eliminate all outdoor cats even if it means killing them
  • want to ban the feeding of cats on all public and private property

In a nutshell, outdoor cats — be they abandoned, stray, people's pets, or feral — that are being cared for by people are at risk at being removed from areas of Mountain View.

The Audubon Society wants to eradicate all outdoor cats. They don't care if they are people's pets, strays, lost cats, ferals, or abandoned — they just want them gone, in order to protect birds. They believe the solution to reducing the number of outdoor cats is trap-and-kill.

But how to get rid of all those outdoor cats?

The Audubon Society continues to employ Ted Williams (as a contractor) for their national Audubon magazine. Last year, Mr. Williams, then editor-at-large, wrote an article in the Orlando Sentinel identifying Tylenol as an effective poison for feral cats and blaming those in favor of TNR from blocking Tylenol registration with the FDA as a feral cat poison. The Audubon Society quickly suspended Williams' contract, only to reinstate it 10 days later. Williams apologized for sullying the reputation of the Audubon Society, adding that he shouldn't have used the term Tylenol, he should have "used the generic, lesser-known name."

Audubon Society: http://www.audubonmagazine.org/articles/blog/audubon-and-ted-williams
Williams' apology: http://mag.audubon.org/articles/blog/apology-ted-williams
Peter Wolf (Best Friends Animal Society): http://www.voxfelina.com/2013/03/audubon-editor-suspended-pending-further-review/ and http://www.voxfelina.com/2013/03/audubon-editor-suggests-poisoning-feral-cats/

The original Orlando Sentinal article has been saved here.

The current City Council has been heavily influenced by the Audubon Society, and other national special interest groups, who have full-time, paid lobbyists. These special interest groups believe that outdoor cats — whether they are abandoned, stray, feral, or someone's pet — should be eliminated, because they are the primary cause of the decline in bird population — not people, loss of habitat, pollution, climate change, or native predators! We think this is wrong.

At a City Council meeting in April, the Executive Director of SVACA (the City's contracted provider of animal services) stated that feral cats are not a problem in Mountain View. The City's wildlife biologist stated that there was no evidence that lots of cats were wandering into Shoreline Park from North Bayshore, and that cats were not the source of burrowing owls deaths in the Park; current policy is that any cat that wanders into the Park is trapped and relocated. Nevertheless, the Council – apparently disappointed that they couldn't blame cats for owl deaths, and determined to find that feral cats were a problem somewhere in the City — tasked the City Manager's office to form a stakeholder working group and count outdoor cats throughout the City in order to get data to determine if there is a feral cat "problem."

The stakeholder working group has been already been formed and will begin meeting soon; their recommendations will be given to the new City Council in early 2015. The new Council could vote to enact the recommendations — or reject them. Here's where YOUR VOTE will make a difference. We are striving to elect compassionate, pragmatic Councilmembers.

Let's see how this might play out.

Recruit volunteers to:

  1. Scour North Bayshore (and trespass on private property) to find every suspect food bowl, and count every cat. They will not know if a cat is feral, someone's pet, abandoned, or stray. After all, they are not experts on cats. But no matter. Document your findings. Take photos!
  2. Walk the creekbeds throughout the City and comb the area for signs of cat food and count every cat. Train volunteers to identify cat poop, so as to better determine if outdoor cats are in the area. Count cats sitting on fences, or running along the creek. Peer into homeowner's backyards along the creek to look for feeding dishes, to identify who is feeding outdoor cats. Again, they will not be able to tell a if a cat is feral, someone's pet, abandoned, or stray. And creekbeds extend from one city to the next. This is gonna take a long time.
  3. Go door-to-door and ask residents if they know of anyone who feeds cats. If the answer if yes, take note of the feeder's address, go to that home, and ask the homeowner if they feed cats: if they say yes, get information on those cats. Encourage people to come forth and turn in their neighbors to get an accurate cat count. Never mind if the homeowner is feeding a cat he believes to be stray, but actually belongs to a neighbor. Document your findings. Take photos!
  4. Contact every business in North Bayshore and in the vicinity of every creek in the City, and require they identify any outdoor cat near their business.
  5. Provide a 24/7 hotline where callers can leave anonymous tips of sightings of food dishes or outdoor cats. Set up a website to enable residents to report cat sightings.

Once the City has this data, what will they do with it?

Will they display it on a map with pushpins representing the location of each cat? Better yet, since this is Silicon Valley, develop an app that determines one's GPS coordinates and shows cats within 50 feet of your location?

Unfortunately the data they've collected will be meaningless junk, because they won't be able to determine which cats are feral, someone's pet, abandoned, or stray. And they will probably overcount the number of cats, because cats roam their territory and the same cat may be seen at several locations (and fed by several people). Back in 1989, when the Stanford Cat Network was formed, the University overestimated the number of cats on campus by a factor of about 3, because they knew nothing of cat behavior, and were counting the same cat over and over.

Who exactly owns the data? The City? Since the wildlife volunteers will most likely conduct the cat count, how can anyone trust that biased volunteers will not distort or reveal the data, or take lethal action against the cats without anyone knowing?

All the City will actually know is whether there are cats in an area.

  1. Cat Exclusion Zones: If the City Council decided to ban outdoor cats from certain areas of the City (the position of the Audubon Society) they will establish a cat removal (translation: catch-and-kill) program for cats along creeks in the City and on private and public property in North Bayshore. The catch-and-kill program will be done quietly, with little publicity so as not to upset the public. Since the City will know where the cats are, they will round 'em up and take 'em to the shelter. If they are not adoptable, they will be euthanized, because they will not be permitted back to their territory because of the perceived threat to birds. Many tame cats do not do well in a shelter environment — they hide, hiss, or growl — and will be deemed unadoptable, and euthanized.

    But they won't be successful in trapping every cat: people will protect them, close the traps, release cats from traps, feed them elsewhere. And the ones they don't trap — those that aren't fixed — will breed.
  2. Ban on Feeding Cats: If the City Council selects this option, people will be penalized if caught feeding any outdoor cat — even on their own property. People, afraid of breaking the law, will stop feeding any stray — including found pets — and the animals will starve.
  3. Regulations Galore: The City Council could enact legislation to regulate who can trap, where cats can and cannot live, what they can be fed, where they can be fed, where they can be released after being fixed (if they can be released), times of day they can be fed ad infinitum. How will the City enforce all those regulations? Since they'll know where cats are, will they have a crew of volunteers staked out along the creeks and in North Bayshore, smartphones in hand, ready to snap photos of violators and report them to the police? We can imagine the headlines.

The Audubon Society presented City Council with Beverly Hills' ordinance regulating the feeding and care of outdoor cats as a model ordinance for Mountain View. That ordinance is a costly, unenforceable, administrative nightmare, which punishes compassionate behavior. Mountain View is not Beverly Hills.

Banning people from feeding or caring for a cat is punishing them for being compassionate, and will only drive them underground — and prevent the cat from getting fixed, since they will be reluctant to request help. Regular trap-and-kill programs, where trapped cats are taken to a shelter and euthanized do not work because:

  1. cats are territorial, and when cats are removed from an area, other cats move in to fill the void (this is referred to as the vacuum effect)
  2. people who feed become attached to the cat, and if they know the cat will be euthanized, they will not trap it, and the cat continues to reproduce
  3. cats (who are smart creatures) soon realize that a trap = disappearance of their fellow cats, and refuse to go into a trap, and thus continue to reproduce
  4. rescue groups will refuse to trap a healthy cat if they know the cat will be euthanized

We have urged the City Council to opt for a compassionate, workable solution to reduce the number of outdoor cats in Mountain View, a goal shared by lovers of cats and birds:

We support Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR), where unadoptable cats are trapped, neutered, ear-tipped, and then returned to their territory, fed regularly and monitored by caretakers. The population of cats is gradually reduced over time, as no new kittens are born, tame cats are adopted out, and cats that are elderly or ill are re-homed for end-of-life care.

TNR is the only proven effective way to stabilize and reduce the number of outdoor cats because it is humane and rewards compassionate behavior. TNR is endorsed by national humane organizations, such as the ASPCA, Best Friends Animal Society and the Humane Society of the United States. Alley Cat Allies is the best known organization advocating for cats.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Fat Cat Rescue