Uptown Feral Felines Snatched for Surgeries to Control Population

Little Wanderers NYC and other trap-neuter-return groups devote time and money to sterilizing and caring for feral and stray cats.

Share

By Maggie Green

Just before dawn on a Saturday morning, artist Susan Carlo dots a metal cage with small globs of gourmet cat food. She puts the trap outside a junkyard on 12th Avenue underneath Riverside Drive, then moves away.

“She’s pretty cagey,” says Carlo, 72. She has tried to catch the cat before, a mother of at least three litters.

A white cat slides into view. It’s not the animal Carlo wants, but one of her kittens. Another kitten with gray stripes enters the trap after the white cat, but the trap door won’t release. When Carlo takes a few slow steps towards the cage, the white cat bolts and the door finally falls, trapping the gray kitten.

Courtney Chandel, co-founder of Little Wanderers NYC, a cat rescue group in upper Manhattan and the South Bronx, helps Carlo cover the trap and put it into her Toyota.

Little Wanderers, founded in 2014, practices “trap-neuter-return” (TNR), a program that sterilizes feral and stray cats to prevent overpopulation. The group also finds foster homes and helps arrange adoptions for more sociable strays and kittens.

Feral cats grow up outside and away from people, while some strays or kittens are friendlier and can go into homes, says Faith Reber, 36, a Little Wanderers volunteer.

Tens of thousands of stray and feral cats live in New York City colonies, says the NYC Feral Cat Initiative, run by the Mayor’s Alliance for New York City Animals.

Little Wanderers manages 13 such colonies, feeds 200 outdoor cats a day and supports 150 cats and kittens in foster homes, Chandel says.

“We really were concerned about the level of homeless cats on the street,” she says. “There’s only one way that can stop—if they stop having babies.”

The idea of TNR is that if feral cats don’t give birth, the population cannot grow. As adult cats die, no kittens will take their place, Chandel says. But it is helpful to keep some cats on the street to help control rodents.

Cats who are not spayed will fight, spray and yowl, annoying the human communities around their colonies, Chandel says.

“When it’s cold in the winter, there’s not a lot of places they can go. They starve, get hit by cars, get diseases,” she says.

Courtney Chandel holds the recently captured gray kitten, later named Tiger One. (Photo courtesy Courtney Chandel)

In a managed colony, not only can Chandel check cats for illnesses or injuries, she can also make sure the colony doesn’t expand.

Studies  of TNR, however, show varying degrees of success.

Three reports published by researchers Dan Spehar and Peter Wolf in the journal Animals concluded that TNR successfully reduced feral cat populations in Massachusetts, Chicago and Albuquerque.

“To our knowledge, no other method of managing these cats has reduced kitten intake,” Wolf says.

But another study, published in the journal Conservation Biology, suggested that trap and euthanize programs eradicate colonies more quickly and cost less than TNR programs in the long run.

“Animal management is a numbers game.” Dr. Cheryl Lohr, a research scientist for the Department of Parks and Wildlife in Western Australia, says in an email. “More than 80 percent of females need to be sterilized before the size of the population will decrease, or stray cats need to be captured and turned into indoor cats.”

Feeding cats in a colony also helps spread diseases through the cat population, Lohr says, because they share bowls.

Moreover, not everyone wants cats inhabiting community courtyards, gardens and vacant lots.

“I want them to disappear,” says Olga Martinez, 65, who lives in East Harlem’s Edward Corsi Houses. She is allergic to cats and hates the colony near her home.

Cats can pose health risks to humans, the Centers for Disease Control says. They transmit several bacterial and parasitic infections to humans, including cat scratch fever, tapeworms, salmonella and toxoplasmosis, which can be very dangerous for pregnant women.

Dr. Cathy Ward, 52, a pediatrician who fosters kittens for the New York City rescue group The Animal Project, says the most common diseases cats bring into homes are ringworm and roundworm.

“We can’t get their colds, AIDS or leukemia,” she says. “But we try to make sure they’re healthy before they go into someone’s home.”

If a cat requires medical attention, Little Wanderers will provide medicine and surgery. But the vet bills can be pricey. One cat’s jaw surgery cost $20,000, Chandel says.

Most of the group’s budget comes from online donations, but it also gets grants through AMC to the Rescue and the ASPCA.

Tiger One was a young female cat with no kittens. (Photo courtesy Courtney Chandel)

After trapping the gray kitten, Carlo and Chandel fill out forms on the ASPCA transport van for the newly named Tiger One to be spayed and vaccinated, services the ASPCA provides free to rescue groups. Crates soon fill a third of the truck, each housing a cat in need of spay-neuter surgery.

On Saturdays, one ASPCA transport van can take up to 60 animals; on weekdays, two trucks can collect around 35 each, says Chris Fagan, a transport coordinator for ASPCA.

Chandel says the rescue process is worth the trouble to keep healthy cats from being killed in overpopulated shelters.

Animal Care Centers of NYC had 641 cats in its custody as of July. While 1,692 cats arrived at the shelter then and 1,412 left with rescue groups or families, ACC says it euthanized 130 cats.  In 2017, the ratio of euthanasia to cat intake was 5.6 percent, a steady decline from 11.2 percent in 2016 and 15.6 percent in 2015.

Instead of bringing cats to shelters, volunteers usually return cats to colonies after spaying or neutering, Chandel says. Cats know they will be fed daily and can find insulated shelters in colonies.

“They’re safe back here,” says Reber, a volunteer, gesturing around an Inwood colony of nine cats in an apartment building’s courtyard.

Along a two-block stretch of East 117th Street, Chandel points out five cat colonies. Little Wanderers manages one, home to 10 cats.

Inside the colony, five cats watch cautiously as Chandel puts down a plate of food. All the cats have the telltale ear tip. When a feral cat is sterilized, the surgeon will snip a portion of the cat’s left ear as a signal that the cat can no longer reproduce.

About 12 hours after dropping Tiger One off, Carlo and Chandel pick her up from the ASPCA van. Tiger One is a good catch, Chandel says: a young female with no kittens.

“We’re trying to do the best we can,” Chandel says.

(Featured photo courtesy Faith Reber)

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

* Copy This Password *

* Type Or Paste Password Here *

56,100 Spam Comments Blocked so far by Spam Free Wordpress