Neighbourhood Cats

Neighbourhood Watch works because it is not run by the police. The same insight applies to community cats: instead of a small charity attempting to service an entire metropolitan area, the people who live on a street take responsibility for the cats on it. This page describes how that is done properly.

The problem it solves

The life of a stray cat is short and hard in any season. Food is scarce in built-up areas, where natural prey is limited. Traffic, dogs, disease and human interference all take a steady toll. Winter adds one more challenge: finding shelter from wind and freezing temperatures, which in Southern Ontario is the difference between a difficult few months and a fatal one.

And because most free-roaming cats are unaltered, all of that misery reproduces itself. This is where well-meaning intervention most often goes wrong. Someone notices cats and starts feeding them — which is decent, and which without sterilisation increases the colony's reproductive success. The kittens get removed and rehomed, litter after litter, while the unspayed mother stays in place producing the next one. Removing kittens is commendable and, on its own, is a treadmill.

The method

Keep it simple, because anything complicated dies the moment the volunteer running it moves house.

1. Survey before you act. Count the cats. Note who is owned, who is a newcomer, who is visibly pregnant, who is sick, who is friendly and who will not approach. Do it over a couple of weeks at consistent times. You cannot manage a colony you have not counted, and you will not know later whether you are winning.
2. Talk to the neighbours. One household rarely resolves a colony; four or five almost always can. You also need to know who else is feeding, because uncoordinated feeding at three addresses makes trapping much harder.
3. Line up the clinic first. Book the surgery slots before you set a single trap. A trapped cat with nowhere to go on Saturday morning is a serious welfare problem and the fastest way to lose a volunteer.
4. Do the females first. The adult females are the entire engine. Every week of delay is a potential litter, and sterilising five toms before one queen achieves almost nothing.
5. Return, and keep managing. Feral adults go back to the territory they know, ear-tipped so nobody traps them twice. Friendly strays and young kittens go into the rehoming route instead.
6. Recount at six months. Enthusiasm is not a metric. A colony that is not shrinking means cats are still arriving from a source you have not identified — an unaltered indoor-outdoor pet nearby, or a second colony a block away.

The best current step-by-step treatment of all this is the Humane Society guide to helping community cats.

Trapping, done properly

Trap-neuter-return is not improvised. Done badly it separates nursing mothers from dependent kittens, injures cats in unsuitable equipment, or returns animals to a location nobody is maintaining.

Done properly it involves humane box traps of the right size, food withheld for a day beforehand so the bait is worth taking, a trap covered with a towel immediately on capture because darkness calms a panicking cat, transport to a clinic that is expecting you, ear-tipping performed under the same anaesthetic, and a recovery period in a warm, quiet, secure space before release — commonly overnight for males and longer for females, on veterinary advice. Alley Cat Allies on trap-neuter-return is the standard reference and should be read end to end before anyone buys a trap.

Two things to know before you start. Kitten season concentrates the work — trapping a heavily pregnant or actively nursing female needs a plan for the kittens, and that plan should exist before the trap is set. And a cat that has been trapped once and released without surgery becomes markedly harder to trap again, which is another reason not to start until the clinic is booked.

Winter shelter

For a returned colony, shelter matters as much as food, and most homemade attempts fail for the same few reasons.

• Small is warm. A cat heats its own shelter. A large box never gets warm; one just big enough for two or three cats to curl up in does.
• Straw, never blankets or hay. Straw is hollow and sheds moisture. Fabric and hay absorb it, then freeze. This single substitution is the commonest fatal mistake.
• Raise it off the ground on blocks or a pallet, and put the entrance on the side away from prevailing wind. A second small exit prevents a cat being cornered by a predator.
• Keep the doorway small — big enough for a cat, too small for a raccoon or a coyote.
• Water is the harder problem. Deep, dark-coloured bowls in a sheltered spot freeze more slowly; refill twice a day in a cold snap. Never use a metal bowl a tongue can stick to.

Why colonies persist, and what actually ends one

Removing cats from a location does not keep the location empty. Where food and shelter remain, new unaltered cats move in and breed up to the resource — the reason removal campaigns tend to produce a temporary dip followed by a full recovery. Sterilising the resident population in place, and keeping it sterilised as newcomers arrive, does not have that failure mode: the colony ages out and shrinks without a vacuum being created for the next one.

Ending a colony therefore means dealing with the resource as well as the cats — securing bins, closing crawl spaces, coordinating feeding to one supervised station — while sterilisation runs. Cats plus resources, together, or neither works.

A note on this page

This is a written description of a method. There is nothing here to join, nothing being collected, and no programme being run. If you want to do this where you live, the guidance above and the two references linked from it are enough to begin, and a local trap-neuter-return group will usually lend traps and share clinic contacts. See also cat rescue for the intake side, and fostering for the part that always turns out to be the bottleneck.