It's That Time of Year: Time To Spay the Feral Cats

You know those feral cats you see running around the streets? Now is the time of year that they start having babies. Two cats beget six cats who beget twelve, and pretty soon that bag of cat food you're using to feed them leaves a mess of cats hungry.

While I can understand wanting to feed feral cats, doing so without getting the cats spayed and neutered ultimately only leads to even more cats being hungry and miserable.

Fortunately, those who genuinely want to help the feral cat populations have an option: The NYC Feral Cat Initiative offers free Feral Cat Colony workshops. Once you take the class, you become a certified Trap & Neuter Release Caretaker and can borrow traps from the ASPCA.

The next class is this Saturday, March 20, from 9:30 am to 1 pm, at Queens Library. (Info here.) I took the class a couple of years ago -- it's painless and well worth doing, whether you love cats or just want to stop them from crapping in your planters.

This would be a great project for a block association to tackle. It doesn't cost much (the rate for spaying and shots ends up around $7 per cat) and responsibilities are easily divided.

Comments

[Amanda]

Thanks for posting this! I've been interested in TNR for a while but didn't know how to get into it. I'm signing up with a friend :)

[Tim Thomas]

My wife and I have been doing this for the past five years with great results. We're able to "police" the whole enclosed area bounded by Clarkson, Flatbush, Parkside and Bedford by keeping an eye out for intruders to the colony. We take extra-good care of the cats after they've been fixed, and they can live out their lives in comfort. (We provide shelter for rain and cold as well). BTW, they're much less noisy and rowdy and less prone to fight after being fixed.

Join the TNR movement...it's a great project for a family or on your own and it pays a big warm fuzzy dividend when you see the spayed cats sunning themselves on a beautiful spring day. And you get to name them and track them too! (Scrabbles, Corn Cob, Bootsy, Baby Bootsy, Grand Baby Bootsy, Nichols & May, Negroponte...)