The Aztec Cats

The main campus of  San Diego State University  (SDSU) is in the eastern part of San Diego, California. It is situated on Kumeyaay land.

SDSU is one of 23 campuses in the California State University system. Founded in 1897, it currently serves over 37,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

Plus a few cats.

Cats have been living on the SDSU campus for many years, but it wasn't until 2009 that a more organized approach to their care and management took place.

It started on Nov 23, 2009. When leaving work in the Admin building, SDSU staff member John Denune noticed a mother cat (Buddy) leading her four kittens (Crook, Gandalf, Gray1, Gray2) to East Commons to look for food in the trash cans.

This was the first time he had seen cats on campus. John watched them for a few minutes and then went to the grocery store and bought some cat food and took it back to them that evening. He looked for them each night and found the kittens had settled on the east side of the bookstore. He occasionally saw Buddy there as well as a calico he named Gracie.

John started actively looking for cats and found Buddy mostly in the Mediterranean Garden. Additional cats he named Papa and Darcy were usually found around Hepner Hall.

He continued feeding all the cats on workdays. Later in 2010 when he started seeing kittens born (Thumper, Piper, BJ, Orion, Caprica, Gallifrey), he started feeding them on weekends and holidays too.

John knew he needed to do something to help control the increasing cat population. The colony, a loosely connected group of feral cats (also referred to as unhomed or free-roaming) would only get bigger as more kittens were born.

John started researching feral cats, where he learned about Trap, Neuter, Return programs (TNR) and their effectiveness at managing feral cat colonies. These programs humanely neuter and vaccinate cats against common diseases, and then return them to their original territory. The goal is to slowly reduce cat populations and prevent new births.

He discovered the  San Diego Feral Cat Coalition  (FCC), which "is a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing the overpopulation of feral and abandoned cats through free, humane Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR). We believe it is our responsibility, as a community, to care for cats that have been forced, through human abandonment or failure to spay and neuter, to live outdoors."

John was able to borrow a couple of traps from the FCC and started catching cats and bringing them to the FCC to get them spayed/neutered for free.

He says of his long-standing collaboration with the FCC that "it’s been amazing and they have been very supportive. The FCC is composed of some very dedicated people who have done so much for all the feral kitties in San Diego."

In addition to TNR, a key component of a successful cat colony is the human element, aka the caretakers who feed the cats. In the beginning, it was mostly John, with help from the Aztec Shops graphic design staff in the Bookstore basement, who would feed Hermione and Jasmine (two sisters from Buddy’s second known litter).

Occasionally, someone would donate some food and one of the Assistant Vice Presidents would give John PetSmart gift cards each Christmas for food and other expenses. John eventually solicited help from some faculty and staff to feed the cats during the week, while he fed them on weekends and holidays. This feeding arrangement continues to this day.

The goals of the Aztec Cats program have been simple: to stabilize and eventually decrease the cat population on campus, keep the cats away from heavily populated areas of campus (e.g. East Commons), find homes for as many of the kittens and cats as possible and make sure that cats remaining on campus are fed and cared for. As of September 2024, there are currently two cats remaining on campus. Darcy, one of the original mothers first seen in 2010, who is probably 15 or 16, and Genie, a cute tuxedo boy first seen in July 2022. He was probably no more than a year old at the time, so he’s about 3 now.

Early on, John reached out to then Business and Financial Affairs Vice President Sally Roush to get her advice on formalizing the cat caretaking program. Sally was supportive, provided that Environmental Health & Safety didn’t have any health concerns with the cats on campus. They gave the green light and so the Aztec Cats group was born. 

Sally said the group needed a name and that I was free to name it whatever I liked, but she really liked the name “Aztec Cats.”

John also met with the Physical Plant Director to outline the program and get buy-in from the groundskeepers. This was a critical step, as the physical plant team actively maintains SDSU's beautifully landscaped campus.

An added bonus was some positive  SDSU NewsCenter exposure , where John was interviewed about the program.

In the December 21, 2010 article John explained how he started to feed the cats, found homes for several, and was helped by other SDSU employees.

In the Fall of 2012, Sally Roush added some formality to the program by updating the campus  Buildings and Grounds policy  to reference the cats. Having the TNR and feeding practices codified into official policy protects both cats and caretakers.

Things went smoothly thereafter, up until March 2020 when the vast majority of SDSU employees were sent home due to the pandemic. Access to campus was restricted to authorized personnel. Thankfully, the cat caretakers were given permission to be on campus in order to feed the cats and monitor for any newcomers.

In April 2022 John met with several members of SDSU leadership to discuss potential health and infrastructure concerns. As a result of their discussions, he moved the feeding locations from Hepner Hall to the courtyard behind Bernstein Theater and the Communications Building. This courtyard is a quiet, protected area.

When feeding the cats on campus, John would often see students interacting with the cats, taking pictures of them or asking questions. They had no idea there were cats on campus and were really curious to learn more. 

(When feeding Thumper near Hepner Hall, a student saw Thumper and told her friend, “that’s the cat that stole my turkey sandwich!”) 

To help get the word out and let people know more about the cats, John started the Aztec Cats Facebook page in August 2012 and regularly posted cute cat pictures. 

He explained the significance of the clipped ear, which indicates that the cat has been spayed/neutered and vaccinated, and that the cats were being fed and cared for.

Social media turned out to be a useful publicity tool, contributing to adoptions and education about cat colonies and TNR.

Hermione briefly had her own Instagram account, @hermione.cat, with the assistance of several graphic design staff at the SDSU Bookstore.

After she was adopted in 2017, John posted on Facebook and updated her Instagram sign so fans would know.

For captured kittens, John would bring them home, socialize them and then find them homes, usually by word of mouth through family and friends. 

With adult cats from campus who became friendly, it was usually a faculty/staff member who spent significant time with one of the cats who would reach out and ask about adoption.

John has tried to be somewhat selective to ensure it is a good match and that people know what they are getting into as sometimes feral cats don’t adjust well to an indoor life.

John has been photographing the Aztec cats since 2009. A selection of his photographs are available for viewing in an  online digital collection  hosted by the SDSU Library. We've added metadata for each image. This allows you to search the entire collection by a cat's name, by keywords in the descriptions, by location, and by date.

For some of the cats, in addition to having photographs of them, we also know their date of birth, the date they were TNR'd, and the day they were adopted. In other cases, we might know roughly when they were first spotted on campus or last seen before they disappeared.

This section highlights several cats, with a brief description and links to their photos in our  online digital collection .

While the focus of John's photography has been the cats, he's also snapped a few pics of other campus inhabitants over the years. Seems like  skunks , raccoons, and  opossums  appreciate the same things the cats do, such as  pipe holes  leading into buildings and convenient feeding stations.

Cats tend to be territorial, seeking out safe spaces where they can be protected from predators like coyotes or inclement weather (yes, even in San Diego). The SDSU campus offers many attractive spots for cats to hide or find food and water.

Roughly 15% of John's photos have latitude/longitude data encoded within them, which means we can use sites like Google Maps or ArcGIS software to see exactly where they were taken. Based on this data, we can draw some conclusions about a cat's behavior and habits.

Let's take  Papa  as an example. We currently have 44 photos of him in the  online digital collection , taken between 6/28/2010 and 2/19/2012. Of those, 19 have lat/long data.

Metadata from the online digital collection exists in a Google Sheet. We can pull fields from that file and generate an interactive map, such as the "Papa Locations" one below. We can even get fancy and attach an image to the marker, to see which photo was taken at that spot.

Based on the markers, it looks like Papa mostly hung out in the Mediterranean Garden, but also ventured near East Commons and even the Bookstore.

The interactive "Cat Locations" map below has all of the available lat/longs in the entire collection, with color coded markers for each cat. Click a marker and you'll see the digital image, along with some of the metadata such as the description and filename.

We can see at a glance from the spread of colors across campus that the cats chose to be in very specific places, at least during daylight hours when John was photographing them.

Let's try this again using ArcGIS, in the interactive map on the right. As with Google Maps, the markers indicate locations where photos were taken.

Since we have date information on the photos, we can track cat movement over time.

Were certain areas once popular hangouts but aren't anymore? (Not really). Has the Mediterranean Garden always been a prime spot? (Yes).

Time for one more interactive map! In September 2024, John took 49 photos of spots on campus where cats have typically been found. These "reference photos" do not have cats in them and therefore are not included in the digital collection. They do, however, contain visual clues of the landscape for comparison purposes. Click a marker and you'll see the digital image(s) for that location.

Some things to note:

• A majority of John's photos do not have lat/long data because they were taken with a Canon camera without GPS.
• For privacy purposes, we did not include lat/long data for photos taken off campus, such as cats in their adopted homes.
• Lat/long data is formatted in degree/minute/seconds for Google Maps, in decimals for ArcGIS, and in MODS for the digital repository.

There is a great deal of scholarly literature on the topic of feral cat colonies, touching on the efficacy of TNR, analyses of colony management strategies, and exploring the tension between colonies and the local wildlife. Community engagement has become a popular subject, as well as the role of the cat caretaker.

This literature is quite international in scope, and reveals different methods for handling similar problems. For instance, Australia completely outlaws TNR, while Italy points to its effectiveness at controlling colony growth. Research in the U.S. typically focuses on specific colonies, gathering as much data as possible about demographics, changes over time, and so on. While existing case studies can be quite granular in their approach, none of them include photographs of the cats as part of their data-set.

We've assembled an  annotated bibliography of sources on feral cat colonies  organized into topical sections: caretakers, case studies, cat health, colony management, environmental impact, ethics, the Feral Cat Coalition, outreach, TNR debate, and TNR practices. Many of the academic articles have a DOI (digital object identifier) that is hyperlinked to full text. For other types of articles, we've linked to websites when available.

Out of this extensive bibliography, one notable article is "The contested meaning and place of feral cats in the workplace" by Carol Y. Thompson, from  volume 10 issue 4  of the Journal for Critical Animal Studies. Thompson has been doing fieldwork with campus groups conducting TNR and has thought-provoking quotes from caretakers who "struggle to preserve and create space for cats on their university and college campuses." While the article is from 2012, the challenges faced by these caretakers persist.

Another standout piece of scholarship is "Behavioral Ecology of Free‐roaming/Community Cat" by Margaret R. Slater, which is a  book chapter  in Animal Behavior for Shelter Veterinarians and Staff from 2015. Slater provides an overview of feral cats, and points to the need for comprehensive, nuanced solutions that match the local situation.