this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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Okay, weird to bring that up in this context.
My thinking was that, if we have an unmanageable population of cats, why don't we solve the problem the way we solve all biodiversity- by eating it?
I'm not saying we should, I'm just saying it's a possible solution.
Is it even meat we'd want to eat though?
Also the easier solution is more TNR and more education and resources to help prevent dumping unwanted cats.
I worked with a shelter for a bit which specialized in feral cat populations. They would work with local landowners and municipalities to trap feral cats and engage in both TNR and they would separate out friendly cats to adopt out. They also worked with a local community college's vet program to run an annual spayathon, with low cost spay/neutering services available, giving veterinary students valueble experience and helping reduce cat populations.
With enough funding such projects can be successful, but its ultimately a numbers game since one mother can have a litter of 5+ kittens every year, and those 5 kittens can have litters the next year and so on, so it takes a lot of hands on work trapping, spaying/neutering and releasing and maintaining that progress indefinitely to make a dent in the local popupation. There's always going to be a few cats you never catch who keep the population going, so you have to limit their impact on the overall population
If we're past the moral point then let's talk! I mean Chinese eat birds nests, I'm sure we can accommodate cat in some cuisine. If not for flavor or texture then for the good of ecological balance. It would be weird if we only ate everything except cats and end up with 600 million cats. There are 600 million cats in the world by the way.
They breed fast, they're lean, and apart from the presumptive ethical consideration it just makes good economical sense.
Its an interesting prospect, but realistically it would be comparable to eating wild boar and maybe comparable to wild fish?
Livestock populations that are bred and raised for human consumption are heavily monitored for health while they're alive, mostly by the farmer and companies they contract with (and the USDA and Farm Bureau has some involvement in the farms overall production process), and at the meat processing facilities the USDA (and CFIA in Canada) are heavily involved with actual staff on site every day monitoring the health and safety and with the power to stop production if they observe a single thing out of place that poses a danger to food safety. Plants don't want to have production stopped so they will invest heavily in mechanical and workforce resources to maintain an acceptable standard of cleanliness and limit the potential for contamination. We've really already got a pretty dang solid understanding of the risks and tolerances in our existing food chain of beef, pork, poultry and fish.
Wild animals need to be tested for disease before they can be safe for consumption. Deer hunters know this all too well, especially during Chronic Wasting Disease and similar outbreaks. We also don't have the industrial scale apperatus yet for processing felines for human consumption. I'm sure small butchers can work with the meat since they rely on humans rather than machines and assembly lines, but it would also take time to ramp up demand. Of course the real challenge is trapping thousands of feral cats per day for human consumption. With cattle you know where the herd is, you can load 30 head onto a truck in just a few minutes (assuming none of the cattle get crafty and escape) and be off.
At a scale of thousands or tens of thousands per day (and this is a really small number in the scope of meat production just in the US. The company I work for has individual meat processing plants as clients that kill tens and hundreds of thousands of cattle per day!), you're looking at farming cats, not just culling feral populations. So ultimately you're trading farming one animal that's been selectively bred for centuries to be the perfect meat source to another that's been selectively bred for centuries to be good companions and good vermine catchers
You literally used the word "should" in your previous comment 😉
Look I'm saying we could.
Or we might.
It's a hypothetical proposition.