San Diego — 'Pst psst. Kitty kitty. Tsk tsk tsk."

"Not so loud! They'll hear...." It's 2:00 a.m. The only time we can feed our

illicit colony without alerting the neighbors. "Dzit dzit dzit."

At the bottom of the stairs, the lamps appear. Three pairs of eyes. As my wife Lita spoons out the cat food, the six lights bounce upwards, nearer and nearer. Our feral cats.

Except tonight they're acting strange. While Minou the tom hangs back, Phoebe and Chili, mother and daughter, come right into the kitchen. They seem unsteady in the light, but Chili, the scuzzy tortoise-shell, rubs against our legs, uttering short meows.

I feel uneasy. "Something's up," I say.

Our love affair with feral cats started two years ago with Sylvia, a black-and-white with a broken tail who'd been left behind when her owners moved. We first noticed her from the cries of her kittens in the neighbor's bamboo forest. We couldn't help admiring Sylvia's dedication to them. The way she endlessly hunted for food, leaping into alley Dumpsters to scour for leftovers. Hovering for hours, waiting to spring at a careless sparrow. For the sleek, lazy housecats around her, hunting sparrows was fun. Not for Sylvia. She took all the food back to her family. One day, she deigned to present her two surviving kittens to us, a sort of Elsa the Lioness proudly showing off her family.

Then Bob, in the apartment downstairs, decided Sylvia'd had enough roughing it. He adopted her and took her north with him to a new life of domestic bliss in Eureka.

We worried. We didn't know how Sylvia's kittens (whom we named Phoebe and Minou) would fare. We wanted to help. The trouble was, the kittens lived under the deck belonging to our neighbor, Mr. Chandris (not his real name). Mr. Chandris didn't like cats - especially feral cats. And our own landlord had a "no pets" clause in the rental contract.

We started leaving tidbits out. Not for anybody in particular. But who was fooling whom? Within weeks we had become food-source number one. Minou and Phoebe, and soon their love-child Chili, were installed. Part of the family. We started talking to them and about them as if they were children. Like so many atomized urban families, we joined in the anthropomorphic jive, needing someone to love, secretly hoping to break them, make them need us, yet attracted by their very wildness.

But then Phoebe had an affair with Big Daddy, the block's orange-coated bully. That produced the marmalade twins Genghis and Khan, and a tortoise-shell sister Shadow. It was beginning to get crowded at the top of the steps. And noisy. Cats meowed and hissed indiscreetly at 2:00 in the morning. We started worrying. How long would the neighbors let this go on?

"Shhh," says Lita. "What's that?" We wake up with a start. Voices, coming from the patio next door. We lift up the venetian blind and peer down through the bamboo forest. You can just see: the neighbor and a guy in some uniform, talking, gesticulating. Every second word seems to be "cat" or "trap."

"Oh God," says Lita. "They're going to take our cats away!"

Now, 18 hours later, our worst fears seem realized. The food bowls remain full. No lamp eyes appear after our surreptitious calls. We wait another night to see if they'll come. They don't. Next morning Lita goes down to Animal Control. Yes, they tell her, cats have been removed from that address. They've been transferred to the animal shelter in San Diego. They didn't look like candidates for adoption as domestic pets. Too feral. For sure, they have been put down by now.

Put down. Euthanized. Killed. Lita is devastated. "Even my little Chili?" she sobs. Chili had lain outside her bedroom window during eight long weeks when Lita was sick with bronchial pneumonia. "How could they do this?" Lita finally blurts, "Feral cats are just as human as other cats."

It's not just us. Coronado, it's safe to say, is passionate about its feral felines. Who can forget the battle of the playhouse cats? Eight of them, ferals all, lived among the sets behind the Coronado Playhouse theater for five years. Artistic Director Thom Rhodes loved them, looked after them, had them spayed and neutered, gave them names to match their personalities: Barry More, Olivier, Barbra Streisand, Eartha Kitt, Bojangles, Clawed Raines, Bette Midler, and Boots. They became so interwoven in Playhouse culture that patrons were used to seeing them wander across the stage in the middle of a play. "One of the best evenings I remember," Rhodes once told a local reporter, "was a play in which a husband and a wife stood at either end of the stage arguing. Barry More came out, looked at one, looked at the other, and shook his head. The audience roared."

Rhodes viewed them much as Coleridge's Ancient Mariner saw the albatross, a good-luck boon. In programs Rhodes would print "our extra special thanks" to "Barry More, Olivier, Barbra..."

So naturally, when the board of directors decided to get rid of them, all hell broke loose - especially after Barbra Streisand (so-called because she had slightly crossed eyes) was found shot through the heart with a speargun. The other seven had been lured into cages. Nobody knew who killed Barbra. Somebody offered a $500 reward for the murderer.

"Mrs. Eddy, what a truly evil person you are," said one of dozens of angry letters to the theater board's president, Vivian Eddy. "You must not have much of a life if all you have to do is make bad decisions about the fate of some of God's innocent creatures.... I and a number of my friends will never give another dime in support of the Playhouse.... You are truly a dreadful person."

"The whole episode was emotional. Just terrible," says Eddy. "But something had to be done about those cats."

"Even now, I can't talk about it," says Thom Rhodes, who left the theater shortly after the incident. "It makes me too emotional."

The trouble with cats is they're not supposed to be feral. Like horses and dogs, they've been forced to cast their lot with humans. Ever since the Egyptians and Indians domesticated them sometime before 3000 B.C. and Phoenician sailors brought them west, cats have had no ecological niche other than the sofa and the kitchen. And like overzealous Dr. Frankensteins, we've made them too successful. It's estimated that over a six-year period, one male and one female cat and their offspring can produce 420,000 cats. They have overtaken dogs as the number-one pet in the U.S. Census data shows the number of house cats grew from 30 million in 1970 to 60 million in 1990. An estimated ten million of them live in California.

Cats are also the number-one pet abandoned by Americans: 5.8 million are put to death annually. And more and more of those that aren't euthanized are being jettisoned - tossed out of cars at beaches, in forests and alleys. Three and a half million feral and abandoned cats live in California. The resulting half-wild gangs become hunters. In coastal areas like San Diego's sloughs, feral cats are blamed for the depredation of ground-nesting birds, rodents, lizards, frogs, and salamanders. In the city's canyons, where native habitat persists, cats are becoming a serious problem for native birds and animals.

"In many of these small canyons, it's almost too late," says Kevin Crooks, who studies wildlife populations in San Diego's canyons for his Ph.D. in biology at U.C. Santa Cruz. "I'm not saying that the extinctions are solely due to cats. But they are certainly one of the major disruptive factors."

Crooks quotes a University of Wisconsin study of rural cats in the Wisconsin-Illinois area. It claims they alone kill "between 7.8 million and 220 million birds and 47 million rabbits a year." A British study concluded domestic and feral cats in England kill about 70 million animals annually.

And Crooks says people who think they're helping wildlife by feeding ferals couldn't be more wrong. They exacerbate the problem. "Kindly folk," he says, "are largely to blame for the major damage cats do. Once food starts appearing regularly, large colonies of feral cats form. And they become marauders of the most lethal kind."

He calls them recreational hunters.

"They're also called 'subsidized hunters,'" he says. "Since nearly all domestic and feral cats' diets are subsidized to some degree by humans, they can afford to be down in the canyons hunting all the time and in huge numbers. In one of the [city] canyons I study, you might have a pair of coyotes or a couple of pairs of foxes. And in that same-sized canyon you might have 50 cats roaming around. And half the time they're hunting for fun."

Ironically, the only hope Crooks sees to control the feral hunting-cat explosion is coyotes. "Coyotes will eat rats, mice, game birds, berries, seeds, and fruit...and cats. The feral cat explosion is a bonanza for them. I find cat paws, collars, skulls in the canyons all the time. They're easy prey for coyotes. Which gives us the idea that maybe we should use coyotes to patrol canyons and sloughs and other vulnerable native-wildlife habitats to keep the feral-cat population down."

His advice: "If you love wildlife, stop feeding feral cats."

Coronado's law agrees. "The law says a cat's got to be licensed," says Don Carney, Coronado Police's animal-control officer. "It must wear a collar and cannot roam free. Except on a leash. Same as a dog. And regardless of anyone's feelings or their heartfelt emotions, there's no room for feral cats."

Two mornings later, I finally meet Mr. Chandris, our neighbor, coming out his gate. "I know you fed those cats," he says. "I know your wife liked them. But I have asthma. Bad asthma. I used to have cats, too, but it is their dander. I just can't take it. I love cats, but if it is a choice between their lives and mine, I'm sorry."

Could feral-cat dander be lethal to an asthma sufferer like Mr. Chandris?

"It's extremely unlikely," says Dr. Robert Wood, associate professor of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical School, a specialist in allergies. "Although the dander problem is a very, very potent trigger of allergic and asthmatic problems. There's one protein, fel d-1, that cats produce that people are particularly allergic to: that protein is made both in glands in the skin and in their saliva. But if the cats in question are feral, his level of exposure will be at least 100 times lower than what he'd be getting from [domestic] cats living indoors. Still, the ideal cure is to get rid of the cats."

Of course, the question is academic now, right? Our little colony is dead and gone.

Midnight, two days later. I'm doing the dishes. At the back door I hear a long, soft, pained meooow. I open the door. Genghis and Khan stand there, with Minou hovering behind them, thin, hungry, haggard, but alive. Alive! They must have survived the baited-cage dragnet. My heart leaps, then clenches. Oh, Lord. I know I have to make a decision. Tell Lita? Tell Mr. Chandris? Tell Officer Carney? Get the cat bowl out?