|
09/03/09
Cats, like their humans, are naturally drawn to Las Vegas. The promise of easy riches, free-flowing catnip and the bright lights can be irresistible.
But the outlook is grim for the unlucky few who lose it all and don’t have bus fare back home. They end up begging for handouts at the all-you-can-eat buffets, and seeking refuge during the day from the brutal desert sun.
Fortunately, Best Friends Animal Society has teamed up with a Las Vegas casino to set up a trap-neuter-return program to help Las Vegas ferals. Here’s the story from Best Friends’ staff writer Sandy Miller:
Vegas hotel-casino to have trap/neuter/return program
By Sandy Miller, Best Friends’ staff writer
 They aren’t looking to win a seven-figure jackpot that would set them up for life. They aren’t wishing for a lucky turn of the dice. And they couldn’t care less about all those slot machines.
All they’re looking for are regular meals and a safe place to live out their lives. And thanks to Best Friends Animal Society, along with some help from local volunteers, the cats at one large Las Vegas hotel and casino are getting just that.
Like a number of businesses, the hotel-casino has discovered that the best way ― and indeed the most humane way ― to deal with the feral cats on its property is to set up a trap/neuter/return program. So Best Friends staff and local volunteers are setting up feeding stations in areas of the property that don’t have tourist traffic.
“The hotel has done the right thing,” says Shelly Kotter, campaign specialist for Focus on Felines, one of four campaigns aimed at reaching the goal of No More Homeless Pets. “It’s a long-term solution that will have benefits for the hotel and the cats.”
Kotter said she doesn’t want to reveal the name of the hotel-casino because people might abandon their cats there.
Best Friends staff and volunteers will humanely trap the 15 to 20 cats living on the hotel property and take them to a Las Vegas veterinary clinic that has agreed to provide low-cost spaying and neutering.
“Volunteers will be a big part of it,” Kotter says.
Feral and shy cats account for a large percentage of the five million animals that are killed in U.S. shelters each year. But it’s been shown that trapping and killing feral cats does nothing to keep their numbers down. Once those cats are gone, other unaltered cats will simply take their place, bringing nuisances like spraying and late-night mating calls with them. And it doesn’t take long for their populations to grow.
What does work is trap/neuter/return, or TNR. The cats are humanely trapped and taken to a veterinary clinic where they’re spayed or neutered and vaccinated. While under the anesthesia, a small tip of one of their ears is taken off to identify that they’re part of a managed cat colony. Then  they’re returned to the area from which they came where caregivers continue to feed and watch over them. Spaying and neutering takes care of all the nuisances associated with unaltered cats.
Best Friends is launching a Las Vegas chapter of its Focus on Felines campaign and hopes more Las Vegas residents will get involved in helping the city’s feral and stray cats ― or “community cats.” Best Friends will hold a free workshop for feral cat caregivers and others interested in learning how to help community cats from 1 to 3 p.m., Sept. 5, inside the Findlay Chevrolet Community Room at 6800 S. Torrey Pines Dr., in Las Vegas.
Among other things, the workshop will cover:
- The basics of TNR
- Understanding relocation
- Working with your neighbors on nuisance concerns
- Working with your local vets
- Working with your local government and animal control
To learn more, e-mail Kotter at shellyk@bestfriends.org.
Read more about Best Friends’ Focus on Felines campaign.
Photos by Molly Wald, Best Friends’ photographer.
[LINK: Best Friends Animal Society; TOP PHOTO: icanhascheezburger.com]
Don’t forget! You can leave a comment on this post for an entry in The Cat’s Meow’s giveaway of a custom oil painting of your cat by Linden Alley.
See related Cat's Meow entries:
04/21/09
In Eugene, Oregon, members of Lane County Veterinary Medical Association will donate their labor to spay and neuter 500 feral cats this year. Plans are to sterilize 10 to 15 cats weekly at the Greenhill Humane Society, with the shelter, the city and Lane County Animal Services supporting the efforts.
“As we head into spring, spaying and neutering is a critical part of limiting unwanted pets in our community and ultimately reducing the number of homeless animals that enter our shelter,” said Tom Howard, supervisor for Lane County Animal Services. “We recognize that feral cats play a significant part in pet overpopulation.”
Volunteers will place traps near large feral cat colonies, capture them and bring them in for sterilization. Sterilized cats have their ears notched to indicate that they’ve been altered, and are returned to their capture site.
To learn more about feral cats, visit The Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon.
See related Cat's Meow entries:
03/28/09
In Georgia, the Athens Area Humane Society will stop accepting feral cats next year, and local officials may turn to Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) to manage the thousands of wild cats that roam the city.
The society has a philosophical difference with the county with respect to the way in which they deal with feral cats. Executive Director Crystal Evans feels that keeping unadoptable feral cats — wild animals — in cages for a week before killing them is cruel and futile. “We would argue, for a truly feral animal, that’s inhumane,” she said. “These are cats that have had basically no human contact, so basically what you’re doing is scaring them to death for seven days and then killing them.”
Evans explains that the approximately 120 aggressive feral cats taken to the humane society each year occupy space that could be used for adoptable pets, forcing more cats to be euthanized and upsetting donors. They’re also a danger to employees, she adds.
This philosophical difference conflicts with the way in which the city of Athens would like the feral situation to be addressed, so the society is backing out of its $100,000 annual contract with the county.
Athens-Clarke officials now have a year to figure out how to control the feral cat population, estimated at 8,000 to 20,000.
They might turn to an organization like the Campus Cats, a volunteer group that traps feral cats, spays/neuters them, vaccinates them and returns them to the area in which they were trapped. Currently, TNR is illegal in Clarke County, but not on University of Georgia-owned land. Advocates are lobbying county commissioners to change the local law to permit it.
More and more local governments are allowing TNR, and a few, such as Jacksonville, Fla., are turning over feral cat management to TNR groups.
Legalizing TNR could be an uphill battle. TNR is not without its detractors and for every cat lover who feels that TNR is a humane practice that should be a legal alternative to trap-and-kill, another will argue that TNR does nothing to reduce feral populations and disrupts the environment.
TNR should be legal but not the sole means of managing feral cats, Athens-Clarke Commissioner Kelly Girtz says. “I don’t think anybody thinks of it as the silver bullet, the be-all end-all. It’s something that’s useful, but not in all circumstances.”
“The simple fact is neither is a perfect solution, but what we want to happen is for individuals to be able to choose,” Evans says.
[PHOTO CREDIT: David Manning, OnlineAthens]
See related Cat's Meow entries:
03/26/09
Imagine enjoying a beautiful bike ride in glorious Spring weather and coming across a foreclosed home in which you learn that nearly 60 cats were abandoned without food or water?
If you’re Gail Silver with Silver Bells Rescue in Ohio, you mobilize immediately and do what needs to be done to keep those cats from being picked up by animal control and immediately euthanized. That included getting other rescue groups involved.
Lynne Heldman with Save Our Strays (SOS) immediately assisted by placing the easiest cats to catch, as well as trapping the cats that had the most urgent medical issues. Janet Corbett with Wildwood Pet Network interviewed potential fosters and adopters. Anita Barron with Pet Alliance worked to find fosters, resources and funding for this very large and expensive initiative.
In cooperation with the Cincinnati SPCA, several veterinary hospitals offered discounted services; Fannie Mae, the lender that owned the house also assisted; neighbors who live on the block where the cats were found came to their aid; fosters and other volunteers who heard the story showed up to help, nearly 60 cats were rescued or accounted for, including six cats and kittens who did not survive. Many of the rescued cats required extensive veterinary services to bring them back to health. Click here to read more about the rescue.
 A group of artists from around the country created original art from images of the foreclosure cats and donated their work to raise money to fund the rescue efforts through the Foreclosure Cats Art Project. The work is dazzling, and although the originals have been successfully auctioned, you can purchase a calendar and other products with the images through the Foreclosure Cats Online Store.
The Foreclosure Cats Art Project was so successful that it spawned another rescue effort of a feral colony in an abandoned factory. The Factory Cats Project is raising money for TNR efforts at the abandoned factory, which also includes fostering, socializing and adopting out adoptable cats within that colony.
If you live in Ohio and can provide a home to one of the five remaining foreclosure cats or one of the factory cats, click one of the links below. Don’t live in Ohio? You can help by making a donation on the site or buying from their online store.
See related Cat's Meow entries:
Categorized Adoption, Rescue, Shelters, Animal Activism, Spay/Neuter and TNR.Tagged Adoption, Feral Cats, Happy Endings, Ohio, Rescue, Shelters, TNR.
02/07/09
As both a cat lover and avid birder, it’s difficult for me to reconcile the not-so-peaceful coexistence of birds and cats. In Gilbert, Arizona, at the Riparian Preserve Water Ranch, bird lovers are demanding that a feral colony — whose numbers have exploded as the economy has imploded — be terminated. Don Bloom, caretaker to the colony’s 40 or more cats, feels differently, as described by azcentral.com:
Donald Bloom climbs a little hill in the Riparian Preserve Water Ranch, dragging a cart of food on squeaky wheels.  “Sawyer!” he calls out. “Freckles! Ginseng!” As he parks the cart beneath a mesquite tree in the embankment and takes out the food, a dozen cats of all hues and temperaments scamper toward him from the undergrowth.
They could well be his pets, but they are mostly abandoned domestic cats dumped by their owners in the Gilbert preserve.
“People have been releasing animals in the preserve – it’s a major problem,” Bloom said. “The cats are pretty friendly, but the feral cats take a longer time to be domesticated.”
The animals are as much the victims of the economy as their onetime human masters. Foreclosures and job losses are prompting many people to abandon the cats in the preserve, especially with shelters filled to the brim.
They’re also dumping other domesticated creatures, including geese, ducks, roosters, tortoises, rabbits, doves, even goldfish.
It’s a tough situation. Desert Rivers Audubon claims the cats kill an average of two birds per day (this seems extraordinarily high to me) and are destroying the habitat. Bird lovers want the cats removed.
But removal means almost certain death. The Arizona Humane Society refuses to take the cats. An alternative is to trap and remove them to the county (Maricopa County Animal Care and Control) which will euthanize them or “arrange adoption according to the temperament of the cat.” In a shelter with limited resources, adoption is extremely unlikely.
Meanwhile, Bloom is convinced that his population stabilizing program, recommended by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, is the best way to help both the cats and birds.
The daily feeding keeps the territorial cats in one area of the 110-acre preserve, and helps keep them domesticated. Only newborn kittens are feral.
“Cats will stay in and not expend energy if they have food coming to them,” he said.
Funds are low for the group and volunteers are scarce. But Bloom plods on.
“I’m trying to undo the injustice to these animals,” he said. “I’m trying to give them a second chance at life because domesticated animals belong with humans.”
Mr Bloom, thank you for your dedication. We hope bird and cat lovers can reach accord soon.
Read the entire article here.
See related Cat's Meow entries:
01/01/09
The San Jose Mercury News reported yesterday that Sadie Malone (San Jose, California’s “Cat Lady”) has died of congestive heart failure:
For nearly 16 years, rain or shine, Sadie Malone would pack up her battered carryall bag, grab her cane and head out for the theater — the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, that is, where she fed the likes of Slow Joe, Tiny Tim, Ali Baba, Fannie Mae, Sugar Plum, Bernie and Mickey in the ivy along the Guadalupe River behind the center.
She fought off threats of arrest and a temporary seizure of her meager bank account by the IRS to fulfill her mission of making sure her babies had at least one good meal a day.
“She had such an impact on so many people downtown,” said Jennifer Smith of Mountain View who first met Malone in 1996. “She was so much more than a friend and caretaker of homeless cats. She was a friend and caretaker of homeless men as well.”
Malone, 76, was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in November and placed under hospice care. She died the day after Christmas at Regional Medical Center in San Jose. Smith and another friend of Malone’s, who asked to remain anonymous because she has assumed the feeding duties for the Cat Lady’s outdoor cats, had taken shifts being by Malone’s side.
Along with life and death and family and friends, “we talked about the cats and where they’d go,” Smith said. “She couldn’t get around anymore but she was still Sadie.”
Smith and the woman who has taken over Malone’s cat-feeding duties hope to raise enough money to place Malone’s beloved indoor cats — Mario, Miko and Trevor — in the Cat House on the Kings, California’s largest no-cage, no-kill lifetime cat sanctuary in Fresno County.
Boston, a cat Malone adopted from outside her building, had to have an eye removed and will remain with Smith.
Because the three cats will be allowed to live out their lives at the Cat House on the Kings, Smith and Malone’s supporters need to raise $1,000 for each cat. Donations should be made out to Cat House on the Kings and mailed to Sadie Malone’s Cats, P.O. Box 59633, San Jose, Calif. 95159-0633. The checks will be delivered to the sanctuary when the cats are delivered there.
“Mario, Miko and Trevor were never socialized to other humans besides Sadie,” Smith said. “You’d never see them when you’d go to her apartment. I promised Sadie I’d take Boston home and that made her very happy.”
Click here to read the full article on Sadie’s life and work.
See related Cat's Meow entries:
11/20/08
The following article on the ground-breaking new program in Jacksonville that has already saved 650 lives was written by Jennifer Hayes, a member of the Best Friends staff. We can only hope that one day programs like this will be available in every community.
Go directly to jail, do not pass go, and do not collect $200; that is what happens when you select the wrong card in Monopoly. However, it is no game when a feral cat is captured by most animal control officers. Fortunately, thanks to the new Feral Freedom program, the outdoor cats residing in Jacksonville, Florida have essentially received a “get out of jail free” card – which makes everyone winners.
 What started out as discussions to microchip all the cats being sterilized at First Coast No More Homeless Pets (FCNMHP), exceeded everyone’s expectations when Ebenezer Gujjarlapudi, the Jacksonville Director of Environmental Resource Management, offered to send all feral cats to the clinic instead of the city shelter where they would face certain death.
Instead they are spayed or neutered, vaccinated, ear tipped, treated for ear mites and fleas, microchipped, and best of all, returned to where they came from, without ever having had to step a foot into the shelter.
Thanks to a six month grant funded by Best Friends Animal Society, the pilot project officially began on August 1 and has already saved approximately 650 cats.
In the past, the only option for trapped ferals was euthanasia. Now, Rick DuCharme, founder of FCNMHP states, “Every surgery we do is a cat saved; it’s a cat that is going to live, instead of one who will die in the shelter.”
Working collaboratively
 The City of Jacksonville Animal Care and Control (ACC) educates the public about the new program, loaning out live traps to residents, and picking up the captured cats to be brought to a protected area outside the shelter. FCNMHP collects the cats twice daily, to be housed overnight for surgery the next day. They are then returned to where they were originally trapped the following day.
“We’ve always thought that feral cats were the biggest problem we would have to face in animal welfare in getting to a no-kill community. And it seems like this has possibly turned out to be one of the easiest solutions we have, if in fact all we have to do is fix them and put them back where they come from,” noted DuCharme. He went on to say, “It’s certainly easier than finding 12,000 dogs and cats homes every year. These cats in reality already have a home. All we’ve got to do is fix them and put them back, so they’re not causing problems with anybody.”
Program expansion
 While the vast majority of cats through the program are returned to where they were caught, occasionally one is found to be unsuitable for re-release. Monroe (pictured to the right) is one example, when it was discovered that she was blind due to a viral infection. Those cats are placed with local rescue organizations to find loving, indoor homes. In fact, Monroe is currently available for adoption from Lucky Cat Adoptions and despite her disability, has proved to be a daredevil who does not require any additional medical care.
While the program was originally intended to only fix cats who had proved to be a nuisance to the point where ACC was called, they are finding more and more people with colonies in need of their service. In fact, FCNMHP Program Manager, Cameron Moore, says “It’s kind of like a cat soap opera every day.”
Just recently, a woman captured one cat to be fixed. However, when he was re-released, eight more felines were seen in her yard. Though she did not consider herself a “cat person,” she could not bear to see the neighborhood strays go hungry, so planned to utilize the program further, to prevent her nine from reproducing to become 100.
This is not an isolated incident and while a wonderful resource for the community, funding is needed to help finance the additional sterilization surgeries of those unanticipated felines.
Pioneering live-saver
 Nikki Sharp, Campaigns Manager for Best Friends, is very enthusiastic about this innovative new program. “I’m hoping that people will see that this is ground-breaking, not just because feral cats are not being killed in the shelter, but because the shelter is actually one of the partners that’s doing the trapping of the feral cats.” Of course Jacksonville benefits as well, saving money that had previously been spent on euthanizing and disposing of the cats. Plus, fewer animals being brought in to the shelter reduces the likelihood of disease transmission among the adoptable residents.
“We do believe this has definitely raised the bar in terms of getting us closer to expecting homeless, stray, and feral cats to be seen more as community cats that need our protection,” commented Sharp. She hopes that once all the data collected during the six months is analyzed, it will prove to not only save the lives of those cats who went through the program, but will translate into significantly reduced euthanasia at the shelter.
For now though, every cat through Feral Freedom can truly be considered a life saved.
“Not only are we doing 3,600 cats a year, but we’re doing the most effective 3,600 cats a year because now those cats that are yowling, fighting, and spraying; they’re not doing all that any more,” summarized DuCharme. “It seems like it’s a win-win all around.”
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
1. The best way to support the Feral Freedom program is to donate. The program is costing about 50% more than anticipated, due to the additional colony cats who need their services. Any contributions will be very appreciated and will help toward their life-saving mission.
2. FCNMHP truly values their volunteers and has plenty of available opportunities to help:
Article courtesy of Jennifer Hayes, Best Friends staff
Photo credit: photos courtesy First Coast No More Homeless Pets
See related Cat's Meow entries:
10/16/08
 Today is National Feral Cat Day! Please take a minute to learn more about the nature of the feral cat problem, especially as it relates to our nation’s animal control and shelter system. You can drop by the Alley Cat Allies (alleycat.org) website for additional information.
Our backyard opens out onto open space, so we’re no strangers to feral cats. There’s one that we feed regularly, a black spayed female, and my hubby (who is “not a cat person”) spent three months last Fall coaxing her into the garage and getting her to sleep in a heated cat cup so that she would be safe, dry and warm during the winter months. She is wholly feral; she will talk to us and sometimes we can get close enough to sorta-kinda pet her, but there’s never any doubt that she prefers her wild ways to the lap of luxury. She only tolerates her proximity to us because she recognizes a food source when she sees one.
 We were more successful in socializing our “psycho stray cat,” Tripper. He was about six months old when he started showing up, and although my intention when we captured him and delivered him to the vet for a hooha-ectomy and shots was that we would release him and leave him be in the wild, Tripper had other ideas: he wanted to live in the house. It didn’t help that I fell in love with him. A wild thing still stirs within him, but he’s all housecat. And he knows exactly one trick: on command, when I say “Kiss me, Trip!” he enthusiastically licks my hand.
Traditionally, I thought of feral cats as housecats I just hadn’t tamed, yet. But the truth of it is that, although feral cats are the same species as companion cats, they aren’t socialized to people, and so they are fearful of humans and usually are not adoptable. They live healthy, natural lives on their own, content in their outdoor home. Well-intentioned citizens might think they should call animal control when they spot a feral cat, but here’s the catch: In the current animal control system, the only happy ending for animals is adoption. Animals who aren’t adopted are killed. This includes most every adult feral cat who enters a shelter. Quite simply, feral cats do not belong in the shelter system.
Feral cats live outside, but are killed in pounds and shelters, so think twice before you call your local animal control, and educate your friends and neighbors about the best course of action in dealing with a feral cat colony.
Tripper was lucky. We were able to socialize him as a kitten, before he became irreversibly feral and treated to a one-way trip to the animal shelter through the actions of a (perhaps well-meaning) neighbor. Trip was a rare Trap-Neuter-Return case who elected to bid adieu to the feral life (perhaps lured to domesticity by the siren call of tuna), but still, TNR is an excellent option for feral colonies, allowing ferals to lead happy, un-reproductive lives.
Through education on feral cat management, many communities are learning to deal humanely with feral cat populations. You can help! You can donate your time (even just a couple of hours each month) to caring for feral cat colonies and/or setting traps. You can TNR any feral cats you encounter rather than calling animal control: many communities offer free spay/neuter services for feral cats. For example, here’s what they’re doing in Chicago:
At the PAWS Chicago Lurie Family Spay/Neuter Clinic we spay and neuter feral cats for FREE all year round. Rabies vaccine, ear tipping, a dose of penicillin, Droncit dewormer and Revolution flea and tick preventative are included for only $17. (If you live in one of our targeted twelve zip codes or are on public assistance there is no charge.)
To Celebrate National Feral Cat Day all Ferals will be Fixed and Receive the Complete Feral Package for FREE on October 16, 17 & 18!
Check your local shelters to see if they offer similar services — either on National Feral Cat Day or year-round. If every cat lover in the U.S. donated an hour of her time each month to either trapping ferals or caring for feral colonies, we’d be very close to eliminating the number of feral cats needlessly killed in shelters each year.
Learn More:
See related Cat's Meow entries:
10/05/08
In 1969 a black cat pranced in front of the Chicago Cubs dugout at Shea Stadium. The Mets went on to beat the Cubs for the National League East division title and won the World Series. The Shea strays have long been part of the stadium’s lore, sometimes scampering across the field during games.
Now, Bryan Kortis of Neighborhood Cats, a Manhattan rescue group, wants the Mets to transplant “Shea Stadium’s feral felines to their new home at Citi Field. They’re part of Mets lore, so why not keep them around?”
A spokeswoman for the city Parks Department said Shea staff believes only a couple of cats live at the ballpark. Once captured, they are taken to shelters. Anthony Rizzo, the parks department coordinator at Shea, said yesterday he’s never seen cats at the stadium.
 But Kortis estimates that the stadium may be home to 20 to 40 cats. Its proximity to Flushing Bay makes it a haven for rodents. “When they take out a tarp and roll it and a cat pops up … it’d be unlikely there’d only be one or two,” Kortis said.
The parks department says there is no plan to move the cats to Citi Field. Kortis said cats could be useful at the new ballpark. “They’re right near the water, and if they don’t have them, they’re going to be overrun with rats,” he said.
The Neighborhood Cats organization is dedicated  to helping feral cats in the New York area. They are advocates of TNR — Trap-Neuter-Return — as the most effective method to end the feral cat overpopulation crisis faced in the United States. Their mission is to “make TNR a fully understood, accepted and practiced method in every community.” They’ve created award-winning educational materials, including books, videos, and online training focused on feral cat management. Click here for information on how to order their TNR kit and other educational materials.
See related Cat's Meow entries:
|
|
|
