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After a life threatening, drug-related, incident, his support worker, Val, in an attempt to get him off the street, gets him into a council flat, and prescribes him on methadone. This would ensure cats are properly fed and a policy of neutering could be implemented easily by catching the cats when they come to feed.James Bowen is a homeless man and former heroin addict, living on the streets of London, and down to his last bits of change. "This can be achieved by setting up feeding stations in agreed-upon locations and by prohibiting feeding in other public areas," Klement said. To negate the rebound effect, Klement suggests controlling cat food resources in parallel to the TNR campaign. The ideal, according to the Israeli study, is to ensure that 70% of street cat populations are neutered continuously. Once they move into a neighborhood with neutered cats, they tend to thrive and take over," explained Klement.
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"Intact cats are more territorial than their neutered counterparts. In the third wave, a 7% annual reduction of cat population was achieved, but a rebound increase in the number of kittens was noted, probably due to an increase in their survival due to lack of competition with the neutered, less aggressive cats. The researchers attribute this unexpected finding to the immigration of unneutered cats into the area. The study found that neutering in only half of the city zones did not reduce the cat population. In the third period, neutering was applied to the entire cat population of the city. In the second, the researchers organized an intensive program of neutering of cats in half of the fifty zones of the city, while the remaining zones served as a control group in which the cats were left without any intervention. In the first, there was no population intervention. The study focused on one Israeli city (Rishon LeZion) and tried out different population-control methods over three 4-year periods. Their findings show the importance of implementing a policy of continuously and intensively neutering cats throughout a city, and were published in the PNAS journal. "Although this method has been implemented in various parts of the world, there was controversial evidence regarding its effectiveness for reducing cat populations and no hard evidence regarding its effectiveness in reducing cat- related nuisances or improving their welfare," Klement explained. Idit Gunther of the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) is the first time that a controlled study has investigated the impact of different protocols over a period of 12 years. Research led by Professor Eyal Klement and Dr. Currently, the most popular population-control method is called TNR in which cats are Trapped, Neutered and Returned to the same location.
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