community cat
- noun
- /kəˈmjunɪti kæt/
- US
:
gato comunitario
- The volunteers spent the afternoon helping to trap and neuter community cats in the area.
Examples
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In our neighborhood, several families work together to provide food and shelter for the local community cats.
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Maddie's Fund seems to have jumped on the idea of advocacy through confections and has this tip for those wanting their local shelter to stop killing community cats:
Blog text (20) -
If you want to save the community cats currently being killed by your local shelter director and he refuses to even reply to your emails or take your calls, you should definitely run right out and get a couple boxes of Krispy Kremes to personally deliver to the pound.
Blog text (20) -
Many residents believe that community cats play an important role in controlling the rat population in the neighborhood.
How Socialized
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun phrase 'community cat' is compositionally built from 'community' (people in a locality) + 'cat', so its basic meaning — a cat associated with or belonging to a community (often outdoors and cared for by locals) — is directly inferable. This follows a common noun-noun/adj+noun pattern found across languages, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will very likely understand the core sense, though some administrative nuances (ownership, TNR practices) are not predictable from the words alone.
Etymology
Community cat comes from neighborhoods where a cat lives outside and many people in the community feed and look after it. So the phrase means a cat that 'belongs to the community' rather than to one family.