Are You Feeding Neighborhood Kitties?
If you are feeding stray kitties, or even if kitties are coming to your house to eat your kitties’ food, then it is your responsibility to see that they are spayed or neutered. Even though they aren’t your cats, they are relying on you to survive.
The Facts About Forgotten Felines
Feral Vs. Strays
Often people confuse a truly feral cat with a stray cat. A feral cat is a wild animal that has never had any human contact, and doesn’t want any human contact. A stray cat was once someone’s pet who–through some awful circumstances–has ended up roaming the streets in search of a place to call home. Both feral cats and strays need help to survive: Food, shelter, vet care, etc.
Pawprints On Your Windshield?
Cat poop in your garden? Cat spray on your front door? Cats fighting and howling at night? All of these things happen when you have unaltered cats in your neighborhood. While it may not stop them from walking across your car at night, spaying and neutering the neighborhood cats will stop the fighting, the howling, and the spraying. It will also do the most important thing of all…stop them from reproducing. This year you may see four or five cats, but by the end of the summer you’ll be seeing 15 or 20. It will only get worse until you decide to take action.
Trap / Neuter / Release
While you may insist that these outside cats are “not my cats,” you cannot simply ignore them and make them go away. Animal Control will not alleviate this problem, because they do not trap cats. If you want to limit the overpopulation problem in your neighborhood, take action and start a Trap / Neuter / Release (TNR) Program.
Trap / Neuter / Release is the only way to effectively control over population. Remember this: the cats are there for a reason. Someone abandoned them at some point. Simply moving cats from this environment will not solve the problem, as other cats will come in to take place of the cats removed. A Trap / Neuter / Release program will sterilize all the cats so that those cats well not reproduce, and those existing cats will protect their territory from new, unaltered cats.
Trap / Neuter / Release is easy, and it saves lives. For every unaltered female cat and her offspring on your street, you can count on up to 50 more kittens in the next year. And that is a lot of cats!
Please note: Although we care for community cats (strays) we do not offer medical care for any cat that is brought to us. We can offer advice on these issues only–not medical services.
We feed about 15 feline colonies (anywhere between 2 and 22 cats in a colony) roughly about 20 stops a day. That’s about 700 cats!
TNR: Trap, Neuter, Release. We have seen HUGE reductions in cat colony populations, and limiting costs and sick kitties.
Hopefully, we will continue to assist and feed these cats in need. We are always looking for help–whether that is in a form of a donation, volunteering, working with us, or just spreading awareness about FFF. We have seen a drastic reduction in the cat population, so hopefully that will continue to occur, as well.