# What does Feral mean?



## BabyKitty (Jan 14, 2005)

Please dont make fun of me for posting this for I have only had 1 cat my whole life, and I have only had her for a year. I tried searching the site and googled Feral but I just dont know what it is? Could someone nicely explain to me ?


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## BabyKitty (Jan 14, 2005)

http://www.catforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=16702


Is that all?


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## coaster (Dec 1, 2004)

Feral is basically a fancy term for "wild animal". With respect to cats, it would be any cat living in the wild. Some of these cats were born wild, some are former pets that were abandoned or lost. That's OK, no need to apologize, it's a good question.


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## Feral Fan (Feb 9, 2005)

Don't be embarrassed! The term feral when being used to describe cats can be kinda complicated, mostly because people use it in different ways. My three are or were feral. Generally it means the kitties that have grown up with little or no human contact. Most of the friendly little housepets you see know that people are good and won't hurt them because they learned that when they were kittens (from their moms and from their experiences with humans). If they have no experience with people or bad experience, or if they have a feral mom that teaches them to be scared of people then they grow up to be, well wild for lack of a better term. They never learned how to be housepets. Cats would have been feral or wild before people started domesticating them when they lived in a natural state, but now feral cats are a problem because people have not spayed or neutered their pets, have abandoned these pets to fend for themselves and done this all over, sigh. 

So the cats have kittens and because they are unwanted and grow up without the human contact and keep breeding (often living in colonies) they become a problem in that they add to over population, live often very terrible little lives subject to predators, disease, weather, starvation, etc. They are also a problem as even if you want to help the ferals they are hard to find homes for because of their lack of human contact. They show their fear of humans by being shy and agressive. It is very possible to teach them that humans are not bad (and generally the younger you start "socializing" them the easier it is) but teaching them to trust humans can take a long time and a lot of petience (cats change their habits slowly). So there is a very common thought that feral cats can be handled in only two ways (this is starting to change now some) they will either be euthanized (by most 'kill' shelters) or TNR'd which is trap, neuter, release. TNR is common and helpful in many ways because there is such a population problem, and as mentioned not many people are willing to put in the time and effort needed to turn these kitties into housecats. (Plus not every home would be appropriate for such scared cats, little kids with ferals would not work well in most situations). 

The rescue organization I vplunteer with (the organization my two girls came from) has had a lot of success with feral cats. We call them "shy" cats and though they take a lot longer to adopt we have been slowly finding homes for many of these animals. I love the ferals. Mine have been socialized (which I could also write a novel on techniques for soing this) and they are wonderful pets. They are very devoted to me and are so quirky! They are not big on strangers but are so easy to look after (they never run at the door, if they do anything wrong all I have to do is say NO loudly once and they never do that again!!). I love them and it is so great to see them change from scared little balls of fluff into happy loving little critters!

Hopefully that somewhat answers your question... thanks for asking as I (clearly :roll: ) love to educate about ferals! Feel free to visit the site of the organization I volunteer with... they have lots of great info on the shy cats... there are currently 34 up for adoption... we've been doing quite well this year!

http://www.meowfoundation.com/ourcats/s ... intro.html

PS- Babykitty your kitty looks a lot like my kitty (yes feral!) Esprit... right down to those proper little mittens!


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