Last Saturday I had the great luck of having my fourth experience with the FCA- Feral Cat Alliance- an organization here at the CVM that holds spay/neuter clinics roughly once a month to contribute to TNR efforts in the area. If you are unfamiliar with TNR programs, you're not so different from me, not so long ago. TNR programs and I go way back.
Back in the tail-end of my undergrad days I was approached by a faculty member who wanted to begin a TNR program for the feral cat community living on campus. My response was "Great!"- but what the heck is TNR? We have feral cats on campus? A whole community of them..?
Essentially I was tasked to start an official TNR program (JCats) for the school- solo. I had my work cut out for me, but that's a whole different story. Bottom line is I spent many hours first figuring out what all of these basic concepts were, then researching local laws/regulations/etc that may pertain to these cats and whether or not what we wanted to do was legal. The major resource for our little TNR program was AllieCatAllies- a great place to go if you want to learn more about the particulars and ways you can get involved and help!
The basics are this:
TNR= Trap-Neuter-Return
Feral cats, or domestic breed cats living in "wild" (feral) communities, can be found just about anywhere- from farms to the center of major metropolitan cities. These cats can be considered a nuisance, public health concern, and threat to local wildlife (birds, small mammals, the like) - in some cases. Many people want to simply find a way to remove or kill the community of cats and be rid of them, but that is not the solution. If there are the right resources to support this cat community, and you get rid of it, those resources become available to the next cats that happen upon it (and sooner or later, they will happen upon it!). But if you leave them to their own devices they will continue to breed and that is problematic as well. Now here's where the TNR part comes in- if you Trap these cats (especially the females), spay/neuter them, and then Return them to their community- you will not be opening up new spaces for more cats and you will be slowing & hopefully nearly preventing reproduction. This way, you end up with a fairly stable number of cats in the community and can also clean them up, vaccinate them against disease, check them for serious medical problems like Feline Leukemia-- and ultimately end up with healthier cats that are less of a public health concern.
The great thing about FCA is it is 100% run by the veterinary students (with DVM supervision) and allows you to get in some excellent, precious, valuable hands-on experience! What you do depends greatly on what you are experienced with coming into the clinic, what you are comfortable doing, and the skill level of the other members of your group. There are floating vet techs, Drug officers, Recovery people, and "groups" that do all of the rest. In groups you do some bloodwork, vaccines, surgical prep, surgery, anesthesia, and everything in between. One of the last things you do before you send your cat to recovery is to eartip them. The purpose of eartipping is make the cat easily identified as having been spayed/neutered already. This is actually the exact image we have up in the clinics-- slicing a small tip of the left ear off. (This is common practice and the cats are sedated/well medicated)
Once these cats are recovered they are able to sent back home later that day and re-released to their communities! I think TNR programs are greatly beneficial and there are so many ways you can get involved if it interests you.
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