By Emma Cowing INVASION of the FERAL CATS

It began with a timid meow at the back door – and ended in a feline frenzy in a picturesque Highland village. So if you are ever tempted to feed a stray moggy, herein lies a VERY cautionary tale...

IT WAS on a cold morning about four years ago when Audrey Wallace first heard the miaows. Walking through the Cawdor Village Store, which she runs with her husband John, she realised they were coming from the back door.

‘Here was this little tabby cat,’ she says. ‘I felt so sorry for her so I gave her some food.’

For several weeks the cat, clearly wild and with no owner, continued to appear at the back door looking for food. Then one day Mrs Wallace noticed she was behaving strangely, running back and forth between the door and a nearby hedge. She went to have a look.

‘Under the hedge I saw these five little things shaking and shivering.’

The feral tabby, soon christened Mama, had had kittens.

‘They were scared of human contact but they soon started being cheeky, coming to the back door to ask for breakfast. I got so attached to them I thought “somebody’s got to do something”. So I started rehoming the kittens.’

Yet despite Mrs Wallace’s best efforts, four years on Cawdor, a well-heeled village near Nairn, about 12 miles from Inverness, has developed something of a feral cat problem. Holes have appeared in the bowling green, and unpleasant parcels have been left in flower beds. Cats run wild across roads and through gardens. There are even rumours they have attacked Cawdor’s domestic moggies.

One way or another the cats, and there are still around 30 on the loose, are rapidly becoming the bane of Cawdor.

‘This is a problem that has been allowed to get out of control and it could get worse if we don’t nip it in the bud,’ said Gordon Robertson, of the local community council.

‘They are basically wild animals who roam the village at night and hide out roosting in trees and hedges during the day. You cannot pick them up because they will take your hand off.’

In recent weeks the charity Cats Protection has managed to trap, neuter and return around 20 cats to the area – including Mama – while eight kittens have been rehomed and three euthanised due to ill health. A good deal more however, are still running free.

‘It’s not fair on the cats and it’s not fair on the community, we’re out of balance,’ said Mr Robertson. ‘People have had enough. It’s gone on too long. I’ve seen three killed on the road and this is witnessed by children going to school.

‘Our volunteer gardeners who look after flower beds in the village have to put down sharp slates to stop the cats damaging the flowers and there are also problems at the bowling green.

‘We need to take this matter seriously because it’s dividing the community.’ It certainly is. ‘Some people just don’t like the cats and don’t want to see them,’ says Mrs Wallace, who as well as rehoming ten feral kittens has taken in a couple herself.

‘Someone was feeding them recently and that caused a stooshie. But it was just a bit of ham.’

Cawdor’s feral cat colony is believed to stem back to a single stray which appeared in the village around six years ago.

When that stray had kittens, the population began to grow and despite the best efforts of charities and volunteers, is still on the rise.

YET Cawdor is far from alone. There are feral cat colonies across Scotland, some in rural areas, others in more populated ones. Wild and reclusive, they often only appear at night to hunt or steal scraps and tend to avoid human contact.

‘Most feral colonies in well populated areas often start out as a result of a few formerly owned cats either being abandoned or lost,’ says Scottish animal charity Sunny Harbour, which works to control feral cats in the Edinburgh and Fife areas.

‘They are often not neutered so find a mate quite quickly and before you know it you have two or three generations of now feral kittens and cats running all over the place who have never been exposed to positive handling by humans.

‘The end result is several large colonies bursting at the seams with numbers and food supplies struggling to meet the demands of 20 or 30 cats where once there were five to ten.’

The charity is currently working to help control one colony in the Fife town of Ballingry, estimated to contain around 50 to 60 cats, and another at a recycling plant in West Lothian with a similar number.

Estimates on the total number of feral cats in Scotland are extremely patchy. The last survey, conducted in 1995, suggested there may be as many as 130,000, but that number may well have risen in the past two decades. Cats Protection recently carried out its first ever survey on stray cats in urban areas in the UK, and discovered there are around 250,000 strays living wild in our towns and cities alone. In some areas the average rises to as high as a whopping 57 unowned cats per square kilometre.

Feral cats then, both urban and rural, are here to stay. The Scottish SPCA – which will not take in a feral cat unless there is a welfare issue – says it has investigated 188 cases involving feral cats in Scotland this year so far.

Mike Flynn, chief superintendent of the charity, says: ‘Our official policy is that feral cats are to be treated the same way as wild animals. We should only interfere when there’s a general welfare issue.

‘Where we might intervene is if a cat colony has a caretaker, someone who will go in and feed the cats, but the person is no longer able to do that. Then we might try and rehome them to outdoor spaces such as farms or barns. But if you phone up because you’ve got a feral cat in your back garden there’s nothing we can do about it because it’s healthy.’

Just last month, the SSPCA appealed for people with rural properties such as farms to come forward in an attempt to disperse a particularly large cat colony of 60 which had become dependent on an elderly member of the public for feeding who was now struggling to cope.

Part of the problem is that feral cats are, indeed, wild animals. Unless kittens are rehomed at an exceptionally young age – as Mrs Wallace has done in Cawdor – they do not like to be around humans, and will not be able to live inside.

‘Sometimes I look at Mama’s kittens, snoozing by the fire on a cold night, and then at her sitting outdoors under her hedge, and I feel so sorry for her,’ says Mrs Wallace.

‘But there’s no way she could live indoors.’

One of the reasons colonies of feral cats can spring up so quickly is because, according to Jane Clements, Cats Protection’s head of neutering, they are ‘prolific breeders’.

‘Cats can get pregnant at four months old and, if the best circumstances prevail, can have as many as 18 kittens a year,’ she says.

It means that one feral cat and her offspring can, if left unneutered, be responsible for hundreds if not thousands of cats in their lifetime.

The best system to try to keep colony numbers down is the charity’s programme of Trap, Neuter, Vaccinate, Return, or TNVR. ‘What that involves basically is finding the colonies that exist in the first place, working with communities and residents, working with those caretaking, and then humanely trap the cats, get them to the vet and get them checked, neutered and vaccinated, and

return them to where they came from,’ says Miss Clements.

It’s a sensible system but one that requires both manpower, and money. Cawdor’s local branch of Cats Protection is currently going through a changeover of volunteers, and is unable to carry out any more TNVRs until the new staff are in place.

‘Our co-ordinator and another TNVR volunteer are stepping down, effective immediately, which means the branch will close until someone else can be found,’ Dr Keri Langridge, of the Inverness, Nairn and District branch of Cats Protection, said recently.

In the meantime, she has said she is happy to meet residents to discuss options.

Mrs Wallace meanwhile, is trying to organise a fundraising drive in order to finance more neuterings.

But why not just remove the colony altogether, placing them in a new area, perhaps deeper in the countryside, when they are released?

THERE are a couple of reasons why it’s not possible,’ says Miss Clements. ‘From a community perspective there is a phenomenon called the vacuum effect. What we know is if we remove all the cats then new cats can move in from outside the area.

‘It’s a territorial thing. Then from a welfare perspective, the area they live in is what they know. They know who their feeder is, and where to go for food and shelter.’

The only real possibility for rehoming meanwhile, is in rural properties such as on a croft or a farm, where the cats can earn their keep as mousers.

‘You get certain farmers and crofters who want a rodent population kept down,’ says Mr Flynn.

‘Some farmers are more than happy to let their barn be used for a colony.’

Scotland’s feral cats, more often than not unwanted domestic moggies which have been left to roam, have long been blamed for the watering down of the Scottish wildcat, a different species of feline from the domestic which has been present in Scotland for hundreds of years but which is now critically endangered after extensive breeding with domestic cats.

According to Saving Wildcats, as of October 2019 only two Scottish wildcats found in the wild have passed the threshold for being a true wildcat, meaning 75 per cent of their DNA is wildcat and only one grandparent is a domestic cat, while the current captive breeding programme has 107 wildcats.

At the same time however, removing feral cat colonies from areas where the Scottish wildcat still exists can prove counter-productive thanks to the vacuum effect, as the wildcats could become more threatened were a new group of feral cats to move into the area.

Scotland’s feral cats, it seems, are to be left free to roam.

Back in Cawdor, the slates on the bowling green appear to be having some effect when it comes to deterring the cats from digging holes.

Meanwhile, it is hoped that Cats Protection will be able to continue its programme of trapping and neutering and that in time, the population will naturally dwindle.

‘Hopefully it will mean that the cats who are already in residence will live out their lives here and that’ll be the end of it,’ says Mrs Wallace.

If the feral cats do eventually die out however, there will be some who mourn them. After all, as Mrs Wallace points out: ‘You never see a mouse in Cawdor.’