Yeah, we had 'em in our city when I was growing up. Only they weren't called "feral." Well, at least I didn't know the word. We called them "strays." Or "alleycats." I began feeding one cat on our open-air front porch. Wisely, though I didn't think so at the time, my mother found out and put a stop to it.
One of my old cats [he is dead now: brain tumor] was an abandoned pet. Not quite a feral cat. He moved in under a friend's porch after his owner moved and left him out in the street to fend for himself.
My friend's two daughters were feeding him tuna fish. He was getting beat up by the other strays in the neighborhood. And that is how Chopper came to live with me and my [then] three dogs. Chopper fit in very quickly. And once he found the couch and the bed were acceptable places to lounge upon, he was content. He never wanted to go outside. I think his three days in the wild cured him of that. My cats these days are all indoor cats whether they like it or not. My home is not a democracy.
Speaking of 'not a democracy," husband sort of agreed to come with me to a garage sale this morning. Only the garage sale was a village-wide sale. We stopped at one place where there were seven or so kittens. The woman there was trying to give away the kittens. She didn not want them to goto a friend's barn where "they would become feral" is what she told us. Having reached our own limit of three cats with a kitten adopting up on a walk last week, we respectfully declined.
My grandparents had barn cats. The barn cats never came into the house. They didn't seem to wander in that direction. For a bowl of fresh mild at every milking, the cats patrolled the barn and hayloft-- keeping the place relatively vermin-free. The cats never got fixed or went for shots. But they certainly were tame enough to like us and to know that we liked them. Perhaps it would have been better for them if they had the opportunity to get spayed or neutered. My grands didn't have the money. And we didn't have a feral cat program in the county back then that could have helped. Instead, the cats lived relatively healthy lives for many years. I don't remember them ever getting sick although I suspect that they could not have all been worm-free or flea-free.
There is a rest home up the street where the staff people were feeding cats who genuinely were feral. The folks living in nearby apartments used to complain mightily. The cats seemed to enjoy hanging out in the complex. And sometimes there was that musty odor about that betrays the hormonal wish of a tom looking for a female in heat. One time, a cat climbed up into a friend's truck engine. She didn't know it and neither did I. I was there when she started her engine. We both heard a loud "THWACK." An orange tom fell out and convulsed to death. Shortly thereafter, some caring folks from a feral program came around, trapped the cats, and had them fixed.
The link above and below is from a chat I thought was interesting. The topic of feral cats comes up briefly at the end of a discussion about "how many are too many."
~sapphoq
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06222/712565-338.stm
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