Would you ever consider moving away and leaving your cat outside to fend for him- or herself? I’m guessing that most of you would answer a resounding “no” to that question.

Yet for some reason, some of the same people who would never dream of abandoning their own cats have no problem with consigning homeless ones to a perilous life on the streets as part of so-called “trap-neuter-release” (TNR) programs, which are more accurately termed “trap-neuter-abandon.” These cats do not live “happily ever after.” Their lives are daily battles against speeding cars, deadly contagious diseases, parasites, extreme temperatures, and both four- and two-legged predators.

“PETA’s files are bursting with cases in which cats who were put outdoors without supervision, including those in ‘managed colonies,’ have been shot, poisoned, drowned, bludgeoned, or even set on fire by cruel people who view them as easy targets or ‘pests’ and don’t want them climbing on their cars or defecating in their yards,” writes PETA Senior Vice President of Cruelty Investigations Daphna Nachminovitch in a recent essay for National Geographic. “People who consider themselves ‘cat lovers’ … don’t mean to consign cats to such ghastly fates, but in leaving them outside to fend for themselves, they do.”

On top of being inhumane, TNR isn’t effective at reducing homeless-cat populations, either. “TNR programs are doomed to failure because of basic population dynamics,” writes Nachminovitch. “Even if all of the cats in a ‘colony’ are eventually spayed and neutered (which is nearly impossible), the food set out for them will always attract ‘new’ cats. And feeding cats also promotes abandonment, since people are more inclined to abandon their cats if they believe that someone else will ‘take care of’ them.”

So if TNR is not a viable option, what can be done about homeless cats? “The answer is to require that all cats be spayed and neutered, licensed, microchipped, and kept indoors,” Nachminovitch writes. “Cat abandonment is illegal because it’s inhumane, and it’s not the answer to the homeless-cat crisis.”

Read Nachminovitch’s entire essay here.