Educating the Community
When you see free-roaming cats, don’t assume that they belong to someone. They may be lost or abandoned and in need of care, shelter, or medical treatment. Paws Patrol can loan box traps that can be used to capture feral and frightened cats humanely. These cats and/or kittens can then be taken to a reputable open-admission shelter, and those who are lost will have a chance to be safely reunit with their guardians or be placed for adoption.
Stop the overpopulation crisis and the suffering of cats on the streets by always spaying and neutering your feline friends.
Community cats can live in clean, peaceful colonies if you take the right precautions. Managed colonies defy negative stereotypes associated with feral cat colonies, as TNR prevents the colony from growing. You can identify a spayed or neutered community cat by a tipped left ear.
In unmanaged colonies, where animal control traps and kills cats who are not spayed and neutered, numbers fail to dwindle because new, unspayed or neutered feral cats make a home in the space left behind. It is a heartless, endless cycle as cats succumb to diseases that could have been prevented with simple TNR, and it allows feeders to keep a better eye on smaller populations.
If you would rather not go out into the field and trap cats yourself, there are still steps you can take to spread the benefits of TNR to others. You can speak to co-workers about TNR if they ever mention feral cats in their neighborhood. Even if you’re not a cat person, you still have a vested interest in TNR.
If you are a grant writer, you can volunteer for rescue organizations and help them apply to grants. Or, if you are good at taking photos and want to help out with adoptions, you can support rescues that way. You can discuss TNR with your peers, which is an easy way to inform people who may be unfamiliar with TNR, such as the program at Green Valley Paws Patrol. According to Patti Hogan, Founder of Paws Patrol, “A lot of our volunteer efforts are cat rescue related, and sometimes you need to spend more time expanding that circle.”
If you’d like to support our TNR efforts and our rescue, please donate so we can continue helping as many cats as we can. While it may not seem like spaying or neutering one cat at a time has a small impact, those numbers add up and make safely managed colonies achievable.
Fostering and Adopting Resources
Click on the Image for Additional Resources for Fosters and Adopters from Petco Foundation!
Posters and Images
Sourced from AniMeals
Sourced from Red and Howling
Sourced from Alley Cat Allies.
Sourced from ASPCA pro.