Cats at inner Cabrillo Beach

Since today is Halloween, it’s the perfect time to talk about black cats. If you want to avoid having a black cat cross your path, definitely be careful walking near inner Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro where several feral cats live along the rocks near the walking path on the pier side. A couple of the cats are all black and some a mixture of black and white.

Now I know there are a lot of cat lovers out there, but the truth is that these cats are invasive species. An invasive specie is any animal introduced to an environment where it is not native, meaning it does not belong there and has no natural predators. And I assure you these cats are not native to inner Cabrillo Beach.

Typical of most invasive species, feral cats can wreak havoc on native animals and in this case native birds. For example, threatened snowy plovers hang out on outer Cabrillo Beach, a fast jaunt away for a hungry feral cat. There are signs all over warning people not to feed the feral cats, but people do anyway.

One suggested solution is to capture feral cats, neuter them and then return the cats to the wild. While it’s definitely better to have a cat neutered, the problem with this approach is by releasing a neutered cat back into the wild, it has many years in an average 15 year lifespan to wreak havoc on the local ecosystem.

Unfortunately, most feral cats are too wild to be adopted. So it seems that the best solution is for some cat fan to create some type of sanctuary that doesn’t house other species where neutered feral cats can live out the rest of their days fed by humans and leave local ecosystems in peace.