Mt. Prospect to study its feral cat population

Feral cats are leaving a mark on at least one Mount Prospect neighborhood.

Now village officials are examining whether they have power under home rule to control the situation.

Assistant Village Manager Dave Strahl said village staff is expected this week to discuss the situation.

Residents from the 300 block of south Pine Street and the 300 block of South Elmhurst Avenue attended Saturday's Coffee with Council, a monthly informal exchange between residents and local officials.

One of the residents, Carol Tortorello, said feral cats are widespread.

"This is not unique to our neighborhood," she said. "We have had them around here for a couple of years."

The problem is that someone on Elmhurst Avenue is feeding the cats, apparently with the blessing of Cook County.

"A dozen cats come over there," she said. As a result, she said, "They have been turning our lawns into cat toilets."

The problem is so bad, she said, that children can't even play in their own yards.

"It's like walking through a minefield when you go out on your lawn," she said.

Strahl said there appears to be a colony or two registered with Cook County.

In the section of the Cook County code that governs managed care of feral cats -- cats born in the wild or are the offspring of such cats -- feral cat colonies are allowed to provide food, water and shelter provided that they are registered with a Cook County-approved sponsor.

The sponsor is responsible for reviewing and approving caretakers, resolve complaints over the conduct of caretakers and their cats and maintain records of vaccination, microchipping, spaying and neutering.

The caretakers are required to register the colony with a sponsor (a local humane society, for example), vaccinate the colony population for rabies, have the population spayed and neutered by a licensed veterinarian, eartipping the left ears of colony cats and making sure cats are equipped with an electronic monitoring device.

Donna Alexander, head of Cook County Animal Control, said the ordinance has been effective in limiting feral cat populations, citing one 18-square-block area of Chicago in which the population dropped from 88 to 17 cats in two years.

Alexander said capturing and killing has not proven the answer to the problem. "Capturing and killing them has proved to be completely ineffective," she said. To say the problem can be solved by killing them, she said, "would be like saying we can eliminate all the pigeons in North America" by killing them.

Alexander said vaccination is especially important, since feral cats are competing for the same food as skunks and other animals that could carry rabies.

Rather than taking the problem into its own hands, a community, Alexander said, should take complaints to a sponsor, which can address the situation through remedial training of a caretaker, finding a new caretaker or relocating the colony.

Strahl said there is some question about whether the caretaker in Mount Prospect is following the rules, because the cat population does not seem to be dropping. He added that the food left out by the caretaker seems to be attracting skunks as well.

Strahl said the village staff has talked to the caretaker.

Now, he said, the village will discuss how the colony ordinance and registration program is supposed to work and how it affects Mount Prospect as a home rule community. Also, the village will assess whether it needs to or can craft rules to address the situation.

"One of the problems we're going to run into is if, say, the colony needs to be disbanded, then what do you do? Because we don't have the capability of trapping," Strahl said.