Cats can't be traced back to people here. Farms are everywhere, cats are everywhere, and it's probably been several generations since anyone claimed ownership of more than half of them. Cats are close to being wildlife and they do survive wild on their own for more than long enough to reproduce. A lot of farmers train their dogs to kill them as pests so they won't spread disease and they still have kittens born on their place. You know they aren't feeding them or giving them any care as well as trying to kill them off and yet they continue to hold their numbers. You choose to go get a dog and bring it home but cats appear out of nowhere all the time. It's a weekly event and no one has the resources to deal with all of them. Most of the spay/neuter programs have been run in to the ground from the sheer number of cats and lack of funds. I know we hauled in 20 at once when our vet offered SNAP at $5 for males and $10 for females. That only lasted a year. Most shelters are packed end to end particularly as kitten season comes to a close and can't home any of them because everyone is getting them free off farms as the farmers try to cut their numbers down again. My sister went to get kittens from a shelter to be indoor only for her apartment and I literally mean they are packed end to end. There are cages lining the hallways, cats sleeping loose on top of those cages, and entire rooms of cats wandering around. Very few of those kittens came from cats that anyone claimed, wanted, or had the money to neuter even if they wanted to expend the effort. It would take something monumental to turn the state cat population back in to pets with owners. Which is why cats are not a choice. Very few people choose to take on another cat. It just comes down to whether you can kill them or not since no one is going to come get them for you and even if you catch them no shelter can take them. So most people ignore them. You can't track down an owner to hold responsible, you can't give them away to any organization, and not everyone has the means to kill them. Unless they start doing damage to livestock and property they are left alone. Only a handful of people are feeding cats that they don't neuter because if you feed cats and don't do something about their potential population you'll have 50 by next year. Only people in larger towns go pick out a kitten/cat since most have the problem of trying to get rid of one or 10 instead. I know a few people who were paid by organizations just to go around killing cats. From that you get the relaxed attitude of letting a cat do what it wants since you don't control cats around here.
Most people here are also quite thrilled when their dogs set off killing wildlife.... People will proudly announce what wild critters have wandered on their property and been killed by their dog or talk about a past dog who wiped out a family of raccoons, took the rabbits down a knotch, or ran off the deer from the fields. Truly the only difference I see between the attitude towards cats and the attitude towards dogs is that of which one is dangerous to livestock and humans.
