Atwater City Council wrestles with feral cat issue, but proposed law fails

Atwater city officials view the feral cats overrunning the city as a public nuisance and a potential safety hazard, but that’s not what Andrea Vidales sees.

“They give me happiness. I’m blessed,” Vidales said as she fed seven cats at an Atwater park Tuesday afternoon. “It gives me gratification to know that I’m serving these innocent little animals who didn’t ask for this to happen to them.”

An ordinance introduced at Monday’s City Council meeting would impose a barrage of new rules for people like Vidales, who feed and water the community’s homeless cats.

The proposed ordinance – which was unanimously tabled by the City Council – would have made it illegal to provide food, water or other sustenance to feral cats without a signed agreement requiring caregivers to meet a number of requirements.

Some of those obligations included registering as a caretaker, cleaning up after the animals, trapping, spaying and neutering them, testing them for disease and giving them rabies vaccines. The city would provide no financial assistance.

Violators would be fined $100 on the first offense, with penalties increasing to $1,000, a misdemeanor and six months in jail.

“It was absolutely overburdening,” Vidales, 63, said of the proposed ordinance. “That’s ridiculous. I feel like I’m being punished for doing some good by helping these animals.”

Vidales, a home care provider, said she has been feeding and visiting the feral cats twice a day for more than two years. She looks after about 20 cats – nine of them from her deceased 94-year-old neighbor’s home – and the rest living in public locations throughout Atwater.

Vidales spends about $12 a week out of pocket on food but credited Last Hope Cat Kingdom for providing cat food. A number of Last Hope volunteers, including co-owner Renate Schmitz, were among nearly a dozen animal advocates voicing their criticism of the ordinance Monday.

Although the City Council voted to continue the item and direct staff to work with the local nonprofits to brainstorm ideas, council members agreed the feral cat population needs to be controlled.

Councilman Larry Bergman said the city does not have the money to address the problem. “I know there is a problem out there with these cats,” Bergman told the group gathered at the meeting. “You are very vocal against this, but we need to do something. We don’t have the funding to do this. You need to help us.”

Katie Lisnik, director of cat protection and policy with The Humane Society of the United States, said a number of municipalities across the country have tried addressing the problem with new laws, but enforcement and penalties rarely work. “We want to incentivize people to help those cats, not penalize them for trying to do the right thing,” Lisnik said. “Plus, there’s not enough time, energy, money and staff power to enforce a lot of these ordinances.”

Lisnik told the Merced Sun-Star a more successful approach might be for the city to partner with a “sponsoring organization” to provide oversight and resources to caretakers of feral cats. The organization might provide food banks, access to spay-and-neuter services, track caretaker information, and help with trapping and transporting cats to be sterilized.

“It’s a very different tone for caretakers working with a nonprofit that supports what they are doing, rather than being regulated by a municipality,” Lisnik said. “If the town is dead set on regulating them in some way, we find the sponsoring organization is a happy compromise between a number of parties.”

Another challenge is that low cost spay and neuter services are hard to find in Merced County. The county offered a low-cost program, but it excluded feral cats. New Beginnings for Merced County Animals provides spay and neuter vouchers to feral cats that are being cared for.

President Sharon Lohman said she does not believe Atwater’s proposed ordinance is unreasonable, but that the city needs to limit the number of cats allowed per household. “If you live within a home within city limits, the ordinance should limit how many ferals can be fed,” she said. “More than four or five cats at a home can be a nuisance to your neighbor.”

Lohman also questioned why some requirements, such as testing for feline AIDS and leukemia, aren’t required for domestic cats that are kept outdoors.

As for Vidales, she said a law would not have stopped her from helping the cats.

“I would have gotten citations and incarceration,” she said. “No one else cares about them; people just walk by them like they don’t exist. I can’t do that.”

This story was originally published November 11, 2014 at 4:38 PM with the headline "Atwater City Council wrestles with feral cat issue, but proposed law fails."