Fact Sheet| Cats and Wildlife

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Origins of the Domestic Cat



Cats Travel the World


  • In ancient Egypt, cats were worshipped, mummified, and sometimes even dressed in golden jewelry to indicate the status of their owners.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned a cat door in The Canterbury Tales in the 1380s.


Catering to Cats: Inventing the Indoor Cat



Cat Food


Kitty Litter


Spaying and Neutering

Until spaying and neutering pets became available and accessible around the 1930s, keeping intact cats indoors was messy business during mating season. Techniques had been developed for sterilizing livestock, but American households would have had a hard time finding a veterinarian trained to safely neuter pets before this time.10 Just as cats found their own food and litter areas outdoors, 20th century cats bred and gave birth outdoors as they have done since their origins in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago. While some of those cats’ offspring can – if brought into human contact when they are young enough – successfully be socialized and integrated into human homes, many cats remain outside, living the same outdoor lives they always have, with or without human contact. Although adult feral cats—cats that are not socialized to people—cannot become indoor pets, neutering and returning them to their outdoor home improves their lives.

Cats are Part of Our Environment

In the thousands of years that cats have lived alongside people, indoor-only cats have only become common in the last 60 or 70 years—a negligible amount of time on an evolutionary scale.



Feral cats deserve a chance to live their lives outside just as they have for thousands of years.  Indoor homes are not an option because they have not been socialized to live with humans. They would be scared and unhappy indoors. Their home is the outdoors and—just like squirrels, raccoons, and birds—they’re well suited to their outdoor home.

Accepting and acknowledging this simple reality is key to understanding and helping these animals. TNR is an act of compassion society can extend to them.

Just as many, many kind people place bird feeders, suet and bird houses in the gardens to help increase the odds of birds living through cold winters, many kinds people feed feral cats and build outdoor shelters for them.

Through TNR, we further help cats by spaying and neutering them and having them vaccinated.

This is not only good for the cats, but also does a nice job of balancing needs and concerns of the human communities in which many feral cats live.  People don’t want cats rounded up and killed.  They do want to see cat populations stabilized and often appreciate when some of the behaviors manifested by intact cats are brought into check.  TNR makes great public policy – it is a well considered, balanced approach to helping improve co-existence between outside cats and humans in our shared environment.  This is why so many cities are adopting it. TNR stabilizes cat populations, greatly reduces the number of calls of concern about cats that municipalities receive, decreases euthanasia rates at shelters, and saves municipalities money.

  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Weir, Harrison. Our Cats and All About Them. Fanciers’ Gazette, London: 1892.
  7. Stall, Sam. 100 Cats Who Changed Civilization. Quirk Books, Philadelphia: 2007.