OK. I’ll try to tackle this without making this the longest post ever. I think you mentioned your awareness of Alley Cat Allies upthread. If you haven’t joined the Feral Friends Network, you may find it a valuable resource. Also, they have educational materials available for purchase, fairly inexpensively, that include how-to handouts, door hangers for neighborhoods to give a “what’s up,” and videos. My shelter is in the network, and Chicago has a pretty large caretaking community. Getting people to start doing their own trapping is tricky. There are, in my experience, doers and donators, and they don’t really usually switch! I don’t do any trapping myself, while other people at the shelter do, plus an army of volunteers and just individuals who want to trap one or two “problem” cats and just need a little help and advice.
We’ve really ramped up our TNR program in the last few years. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Maddie’s Fund, but it’s a program in which all the shelters in a municipal area get together as a unit, where they all agree on the goal of making their area a no-kill city. Chicago is in the midst of this, and with the help and guidelines and grant funding from Maddie’s Fund, has started a 10-year plan toward making Chicago a no-kill city. Getting the feral cat population under control is #1 on the list of what needs to be done, on top of the shelters all working together toward education and legislation that will help reach that goal.
Municipal codes have already been changed, and the Animal Control units no longer pick up reported strays or ferals. Instead, people who call about nuisance cats are directed to the TNR network, where the people are educated about TNR and instructed on how to do it, or volunteers are scheduled to try to go to the location to help. Many shelters and alderman’s offices now have traps for people to use as loaners so they can trap and have cats TNR’d in their neighborhoods.
It’s still an uphill battle, we’ve really only just started, but it’s progressing rapidly and we even have a part time staff person who only works on the TNR program.
No one I know aside from veterinarians are vaccinated against rabies. Our particular shelter has the resources to house a cat if it should bite someone. Since we have cages and isolation areas, we can have a feral do the 10-day observation period if it should bite someone. So the issue doesn’t really come up for us. Luckily, it’s really rare, since we do require ferals come in traps. If someone brings a “feral” in a carrier, we will do a quick test (i.e. look a the poor thing through the carrier door!) to determine whether the cat may be removed safely from the carrier. For the most part, we will assist the person in an exam room (small, no where to hide) in moving the cat into a loaner trap (this is where the guillotine doors and transfer traps come in VERY handy! We rarely turn someone away.
The majority of our funding comes from wonderful individuals who are kind and generous! A few long-time donors also have trusts set up such that our shelter becomes the beneficiary. Such amazing people. We do have a grant-writer on staff, and she finds individual and corporate grants for us (usually for specific equipment or projects - never “free” spending with grants). We get no municipal or government funding of any kind. We do also get lots of donations of supplies (some of those may be corporate in the form of hotels giving us sheets, or Target letting us take opened items like ripped bags of litter, and hospitals giving us expired suture material), usually from people giving us stuff like their old towels, and sometimes computers or printers and such. But mostly, it’s just nice people giving what they can, and we have fundraising events at least twice a month if not more often. We have a couple of people who do nothing but development, community outreach, and events to keep our name out there and keep the awareness of shelters and animal adoption at the front of people’s minds when they want a pet.
We like to think information on low-cost spay/neuter is readily available. There hasn’t been a whole lot of resistance from regular vet practices about promoting low-cost options. I think there’s been enough education in the area, and there have been some low-cost programs around for long enough that vets in the area get it, and have figured out they’re not going to lose business because of it. There are different low-cost tiers, depending on the shelter/clinic people go to. One requires strict proof of low income (I believe less than $10,000/year), and that’s a full-service clinic for people who qualify. Another full-service clinic in the area offers their services on a sliding scale according to income. TNR services, of which there are 2 main clinics, one North and one South, are discounted and offered as a package that includes the surgery, flea treatment, ear tip, 2 vaccines, and microchip. Then there are low-cost spay/neuter services for regular owned housecats, which are broken up into regular pricing (pretty cheap), and low-income (cheap, but not as low as TNR) for which people need to produce proof of being on social security or food stamps.
Personally, I would do the same thing! Legally, I think it depends on your municipality’s laws. If there are leash laws in place, and cats are usually part of those laws even if they’re not specifically spelled out, then I believe that people who let cats out to roam at-large get what they give. They shouldn’t be surprised if the cat comes back with a broken leg, nor should they if the cat had a bit of surgery while he/she was out without a leash! They should be grateful the cat came back at all.
Now, if you’re in an area where there are no leash laws or other codes in place that make people responsible for the pet population in some way, then I guess you run into some ethics issues. But if the worst you expect is to get yelled at by a neighbor who then does the same thing again, well, I’m having a hard time imagining her having a different expectation this time around! Sounds like a lazy mooch who knows you’ll take care of it at no expense to her.
The last thing to talk about is testing. In our area, we stay away from doing it if we can. The moral and ethical obligations that come up from finding out a feral is FeLV or FIV positive is too great. Ethically, as medical staff in the clinic, we would feel obligated to euthanize positive cats. Morally, we’re a bit against putting down what would end up being a helluva lot of cats. Once spayed/neutered, they’re so much less likely to fight, roam, mate (ha!), or otherwise be that much of a detriment to a population that’s already exposed (the rest of the colony), that we really operate on a kind of don’t ask, don’t tell policy. If a cat is a possible TNA, then we’ll test. If that cat is positive, then it’s a matter of maybe it would do better released anyway, or finding a foster home from which the cat can be adopted. If a TNR cat is obviously sick, we may recommend testing and euthanizing in that case, as the cat may not survive surgery anyway. For the most part, if the cat is going back outside, we don’t test it. Have a happy life, kitty!
Whew. It’s been a long couple of days. I hope this post is useful for anyone who reads it!
