Agreed, the weak and sick would die off, but in the colonies I've dealt with,
oddly enough, I've seen no weak or sick, and none have died off. We even
have one colony behind a Burger King where the one tame cat among them turned
out to be FIV positive (we don't normally test the ferals, to save money, but
my friend Faye decided to keep Thomas because he was a biter and she was
afraid that, being friendly, he'd come up and bite someone's kid and they'd
send A/C out to trap and kill him, so she took him to her vet and tested him,
and he came up pos. He has his own double enclosure in her garage, complete
with cat tree and heated bed, in which he spends much of his time -
absolutely no symptoms, healthy as a horse (he's a big tuxedo). Since some
of the other adult males we fixed from this colony had bite wounds and had
been fighting, we assume others may be FIV-positive, but more than two years
later so far no-one is sick.
