  Kittens eat from food laid out in a controlled feral cat
colony in downtown Marseilles, Ill., on Sept. 14, 2011. / AP
Efforts to care for abandoned cats could mean more humans will
be exposed to rabies, researchers at the federal Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention say.  For 30 years, the main
domestic animal linked to human exposure to rabies in the United
States has been the cat. In the past 10 years, the number of
feral cat colonies has exploded as animal-rights groups fight to
end the capturing and killing of strays.  Those two trends could
be on a collision course, says Charles Rupprecht, director of
research for the Global Alliance for Rabies Control, who was
senior author of the CDC study.  Dogs were the primary domestic
carrier of rabies until the 1970s, when roundups of strays and
vaccination programs eradicated canine rabies. That hasn't
happened with cats.  "We didn't think it was OK to have (stray)
dogs, but we think it's OK to create artificial cat colonies
where they're exposed to wild