Over the last several decades, feral cats have moved from the fringes to the mainstream in animal welfare and sheltering. Although many best practice guidelines have been published by national non-profits and veterinary bodies, little is known about how groups “in the trenches” actually operate. Our study sought to address that gap through an online survey of feral cat care and advocacy organizations based in the United States. Advertised as “The State of the Mewnion,” its topics included a range of issues spanning non-profit administration, public health, caretaking and trapping, adoptions of friendly kittens and cats, veterinary medical procedures and policies, data collection and program efficacy metrics, research engagement and interest, and relationships with wildlife advocates and animal control agencies. Respondents from 567 organizations participated, making this the largest and most comprehensive study on this topic to date. Respondents came primarily from grassroots organizations. A majority reported no paid employees (74.6%), served 499 or fewer feral cats per year (75.0%), engaged between 1 and 9 active volunteers (54.9%), and did not operate a brick and mortar facility (63.7%). Some of our findings demonstrate a shared community of practice, including the common use of a minimum weight of 2.0 pounds for spay/neuter eligibility, left side ear tip removals to indicate sterilization, recovery holding times after surgery commonly reported as 1 night for male cats and 1 or 1 nights for females, requiring or recommending to adopters of socialized kittens/cats that they be kept indoor-only, and less than a quarter still engaging in routine testing of cats for FIV and FeLV. Our survey also reveals areas for improvement, such as most organizations lacking a declared goal with a measurable value and a time frame, only sometimes scanning cats for microchips, and about a third not using a standardized injection site for vaccines. This study paints the clearest picture yet available of what constitutes the standard practices of organizations serving feral and community cats in the United States.

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There have been no long-term field studies of the potential effect of spay/neuter programs on free-roaming domestic cat population sizes. To address that gap via citizen science, we are developing a novel approach to photographic mark-recapture population research that engages volunteers as both smartphone-wielding data collectors and as online data processors in building capture histories from submitted photos. Here, we present a validation study testing the accuracy of cat advocate volunteers at matching smartphone photos of cats, and we compare their success to a reference group of life science university students. We also examine feline photographic identification from two additional perspectives: what makes a volunteer better at cat identification, and what makes a cat photo more identifiable? 151 cat advocates and 17 students completed 37,800 pairwise photo comparisons using our online platform. Cat advocates' matching attempts (n = 34,080) were correct 98.1% of the time compared with students' 97.5% (n = 3,720). Volunteers who reported a pet cat increased their accuracy. Volunteers who held less than a bachelor's degree, or those who volunteered with cats previously, had reduced accuracy. If a cat was a color other than black, its ability to be identified increased. We demonstrated that our citizen science volunteer sample was not only adequate at identifying individual cats in smartphone photos, but performed better than our sample of life science students-a labor pool commonly trusted to organize data from camera trap research. While photographs are the data foundation of many studies of free-roaming cats, we are the first to analyze by-eye visual identification in this species.

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