Need Help With a Colony?

The easiest way to request assistance is to contact us via email or Facebook. You can also use our Contact Us form. This will give us the opportunity to talk to you about the colony, its cats, what assistance is needed, and what you and/or the colony caretaker can do to help.

Given the small scale that our organization operates on, we can rarely commit to doing the actual TNR work ourselves. Most likely, we will provide the information you need to trap the cats yourself, and can sometimes loan traps and other supplies. If there no one else who can or will do the TNR work, we can add your colony to our waiting list, but it can take up to several months for us to have the availability to start on a new colony.

Tips to Get You Started

Work Together

If you live in a densely populated area (e.g., apartment complex, mobile home park), a good place to start is talking to your property management company and your neighbors. You may find several people willing to band together to help the cats that several of you have been feeding. You can coordinate transporting the cats to and from their appointments, setting up shelters for them to protect them from the weather, getting kittens into rescue programs, etc. If you can form a group, you may have more sway with the management company when you demand they take action to help the four legged residents.

Start Now

Cats typically begin mating in February, which means that by March several of the females near you may already be pregnant. They will continue reproducing regularly until winter – we usually see a break in the kitten production starting in October. However, there have been several winters that were not quite cold enough for the cats to take a break, and breeding continued year round. The earlier you start working on the colony, the less kittens are going to be born throughout the year.

Ask for Help Early

If you see a single pregnant cat, that is a great time to reach out and be connected with resources. You don’t have to wait until there’s 10-30 cats in a colony to ask for help, and you don’t have to wait until that stray/feral cat is sick or injured. So often we get contacted by people only when their colonies are completely out of control, and it would be a lot less stressful for the cats AND the humans to deal with the problem before it’s overwhelming.

You Don’t Have to Wait For the Kittens to be Born

Ending a pregnancy is always very controversial topic. But cats are not humans, and they are not emotionally attached to their pregnancy or their offspring. Their behaviors and reactions are based purely on instinct. The vast majority of cats do not notice if they go to sleep and wake up no longer pregnant, regardless of how far along the pregnancy is. Also, getting pregnant is not a choice they made, or something they enjoy. Being pregnant is stressful on their bodies and the instinct to protect their young causes some pretty severe anxiety. Nursing kittens is exhausting, and unlike people they do not find it rewarding or enjoyable. It is just Something They Do. You are not causing harm to the mother cat when you allow the pregnancy to end prematurely. What you ARE doing is preventing the suffering those kittens will endure by being exposed to disease, predation, and inclement weather. You are also preventing the deaths of kittens that are already here and needing to be adopted into loving forever homes. You don’t have to wait for a pregnant cat to have and raise kittens before trapping her and getting her spayed.

(side note: I promise no one in cat rescue is out here gleefully performing cat abortions. It is part of the sad reality that is cat rescue, and looked at simply as something that must be done to prevent suffering and harm).