Kitten Paparazzi

On Feb 20th, I was already resigned to the fact that there would be little celebrating for me. Between trapping the previous night, teaching the TNR class and trapping that night for the monthly feral clinic, I knew I wouldn't have time for a usual birthday celebration. Sleeping late on Sat seemed to be a good compromise to having a full-on party and doing nothing at all. Around 0930 my phone rang and I decided I had better see who was expecting me to be out of bed. It turned out to be Tricia to report and seek advice for how to deal with a sticky situation. At the location where they were trapping, they had discovered three tiny 2-4 day old kittens in a storage closet. The momma cat was around but Tricia wasn't sure of how to proceed. Should she scoop up the kittens? Should she leave them alone? Or attempt to use them as bait to trap momma?


Each decision seemed fraught with possible bad outcomes. If she took the kittens on, someone was going to be stuck nurse maiding them and they would have little hope for survival. If she let them be, there was no guarantee that we could trap momma or that momma would not move them to another location. If we moved them, momma might abandon them! Tricia's initial instinct was to leave everything alone and give the kittens a chance to grow. I called Bobbi K. and she advised using them as bait by placing them into on trap, and butting that trap up against a second trap so that momma would have to walk through the trap to get to them. I explained what to do and Tricia gamely moved the little ones into a small box and placed them into a trap. At the same time, she made a grisly discovery, a mummified kitten carcass!

As soon as I got off of the phone with her, I regretted having her move the kittens. What if we couldn't trap momma? What if she wouldn't nurse the kittens after being trapped? I called Trish back and told her of my plan to go teach the class while she and Trudi finished trapping at the site. She asked me if I would come by to help them out first and I said that I did not have the time. Hearing the disappoint in her voice, and I decided that it was unfair for me to expect them deal with this new and frightening situation without being involved . I started working the phones to see if I could find someone who was willing to foster the kittens. Darci from All Fur Love Society agreed to take on the huge responsibility of caring for momma and kittens. I called Bobbi to see if she could come down later and decided that I would go by the site on my way to the training class and help however I could.

I quickly packed up and headed out. When I arrived, Trudi and Trish we're staking out a number of traps in the front and back yard and anxiously looking for momma to see if she would enter the storage closet through the cat door that the caretaker had installed. They had trapped 6 or 7 cats already. Momma watched us warily and would not go into the closet. I decided to take a peak and make sure that the trap with the kittens was setup correctly. I entered the closet and noticed that two cats were hiding in the corner. I inspected the trap setup and found that it was incorrect. The small box containing the kittens was inside of the trap meant for momma. Had she entered this trap, the tiny kittens would be in danger if a panicked, trapped mother trampled them in an attempt to escape.

Moving as calmly and as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the cats who were hiding out ( I planned to wrangle them with a net or noose pole) I rearranged the trap setup. Trish made a commotion at the door and one of the cats ran out. I indicated for her to be quiet and continued setting up the trap. Once I was satisfied that the new setup would work, I retrieved the noose pole from the truck. Trudi used a trap to block the only escape route, and I used the noose pole to prod the cat into the trap. Once trapped we went back to waiting for momma.


I left to teach the class and later received a call that Bobbie was able to trap the mother by having Trudi block the cat door with a trap while Bobbi shooed her out. Bobbi delivered the kittens and momma to Darci who set them up in a large kennel. Hearing the news, I thought, "What a great present! Saving three kittens, and successfully capturing the mother."

Over the next few days, joy turned to disappointment as two of the three kittens died because momma had stopped caring for them. Darci took the final kitten away from momma and began bottle feeding it herself. Despite the heartache, Darci gamely continued to care for the little one she named "Miracle". Yesterday I got to see him play with him, and I thought, that despite the losses, it still turned out to be a good, if belated birthday present!

In Nov 2008, I got bitten by a dog named Scratch. I usually joke that it's ironic, or maybe moronic! Here's the notes from my journal about that day.

1. 
   
   Should have never let him barrel out of kennel. (claiming territory).
2. 
   
   Should have scruffed him to control head and body.
3. 
   
   Should have backed off when he whelped.
4. 
   
   Should have protected extremities to prevent bite.

When Scratch got released from quarantine, I felt terrible. The staff now feared him and his profile was updated to indicate that he had bitten someone. I told the dog manager Dwayne that I understood the mistakes I had made and that I wanted to continue working with Scratch. He told me as long as I wasn't afraid, he had no problem with me walking Scratch. He is still at the NSPCA, and he is still one of my favorite doggies! I would so much like to get him a forever home!

Last Oct. I placed a left a trap in what I considered to be a secure area. Surrounded by a fence and a locked gate, I was sure that any trap I left there would be undisturbed. After about 45 minutes of trapping at other sites nearby, we checked the trap and I discovered a pissed-off soaking wet feral kitten. A nearby sprinkler had drenched him and the trap cover. We transferred him to a dry trap and Joe took him home to warm up. What might his fate have been had I decided to leave the trap out all night? At best he would have been sick, at worst he could have died from hypothermia!

I often use this as a cautionary tale about leaving traps unattended for long periods of time. Unfortunately, now I have an even more convincing story. A few months ago, I warned a trapper about leaving traps even in a "secure" area, as I told her we can never anticipate what might happen while we are away. She assured me that she had done it lots of times and that there was enough physical security to prevent the traps from being disturbed. On sun morning she checked her traps to discover a cat  that had been killed by dogs. If you arm a trap and leave it somewhere, what happens to the cat is your responsibility! Helpless inside the trap, I can only imagine the terror the cat went through while being killed. Do yourself and the cats a favor and don't leave traps unattended!

A couple of days ago there was an accident at Keith's house. One of the cats got out of it's trap. It dashed out the door when Debbie opened the garage. I had one escape in my garage a couple of months ago. The poor cat leaped onto anything and everything, including a mounted boar head that belonged to my dad! My wife thought it was a great adventure wielding my net like she was on safari.  Heart racing and me shrieking at my wife to watch out, I managed to wrangle her with my noose pole and get her back into the trap. Since that time, my loose policy has been to never open the garage door until I've verified that everyone one is there. Of course, it helps to make sure the traps are really latched shut in the first place :-0

I found out about this event when I trapped some cats at the Enterprise Library. I applied for a table (the price was right $0) and when she heard about what we do, she immediately agreed to make sure we got a space. The weather forecast was dicey but I loaded up the truck with the drop trap, 4 traps, a trap isolator, class fliers,  a donation jar, and all of my trapping junk for show and tell. I stopped by Keith's and grabbed a couple of his saw horses. The library had plenty of young people to help me roll the trap dolly and all of my stuff to the table.

 Wendy showed up and helped talk to people and took some great photographs. The majority of people there had dogs, and most of the vendors were dog oriented but overwhelmingly people were sympathetic about the number of cats being euthanized annually. I got a few email addresses and chatted up the ordinance and the class, and chatted down trapping and euthanizing cats.  A brief but intense rain shower drove most of the attendees and vendors away around 12:30. I decided to pack up call it a day. A few people donated a little cash and one of our patrons cut us a nice check which I appreciate immensely! I look forward to doing more events like this to spread the word about community cat overpopulation and to empower more people to help themselves!

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein, (attributed) US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)

 Someone recently commented on another posting that I wrote. Their comment and my response follow.

 "Most if not damn near all feral cat supports refuse to listen to reason much less acknowledge all the environmental damage feral cats do. They do spread all kinds of diseases and parasites, kill native wild life, push out native predators, dig in gardens and sandbox were kids play and leave behind cat crap that carries all kinds of pathogens.

Feral cats are pests, nuisances, and a danger to native wild life and feral cat colonies shouldn't be support. They need to be wiped out." - Anonymous

These are all valid concerns and should not be ignored, but when you say they need to be wiped out, you propose something that is clearly not possible! If you want to change the law so that it's legal to shoot or poison or do whatever it is you want to wipe the cats, go ahead! Until that time, we will continue to use the only legal and proven method to reduce the cat population.

Even if you could implement some fantasy solution it would not work. You could poison, shoot and trap them but you will never get them all. People will always find ways to feed cats and in a short period of time, you'll be back to being overrun by cats!

You can complain all you want or you can actually do something effective to control the population! Wishing for the cats to go away or bemoaning the fact that they kill wildlife will not help get rid of them. Trapping and killing them may reduce the population at one place temporarily, but as long as cats are reproducing in others it's like trying to empty a bathtub with a teaspoon while the faucet is running

So what is the the solution? Solving the problem with mass eradication techniques like poisoning, trapping, using dogs, etc. would only be effective in a small isolated geographical area like an island. Trying the techniques anywhere in Las Vegas would be too expensive, politically unpopular, and for the most part illegal. Once you've cleared an area of cats, new ones will simply move in. So instead of any organized, concentrated effort to deal with the problem, we have citizens trapping nuisance cats all over the city and having them destroyed at taxpayer expense. Some 18,000 plus cats were euthanized in Clark County in 2008. Imagine if 12,000 of these animals were nuisance community cats. With a population of 200,000 community cats in the valley, how long does it take for the remaining 188,000 cats to replace those 12,000 through breeding? A couple of weeks?!?!? Show me the neighborhood, business or area in town that is free from feral cats because of trapping and having them removed.

What if instead of destroying these animals, we sterilized them and returned them to the streets? Combined with the 7000+ Trap Neuter Returns being done by local volunteers and non-profits, there would be 10% of the population that was sterilized. We'd start to reach the 20,000 to 25,000 community cat sterilizations needed to really start to curbing the free-roaming cat population growth. The alternative? Continue to dump money into an endless pit and continue to drown in cats! Destroying these animals is waste of taxpayer resources!  If the approach had any hope of working, stray/feral intakes at the shelter would not be continuing to rise at the alarming rate that they are!

The concept behind TNR is simple. Trap and remove the animal, and unsterilized animals will breed and replace that animal easily because there is less competition for food, shelter, habitat etc. Trap and sterilize an animal, and now the remaining unsterilized cats have to compete with the sterilized one for resources. Sterilize a significant portion in one area and the growth rate will slow. Sterilize enough animals in one area and the population will decline over time. Any unsterilized newcomers have to compete with the sterilized cats. I tell people that have a lot of cats around that they are going to be there anyways. Would you rather have sterilized ones that don't fight, spray, yowl in heat etc. or have kittens? Or would you rather have unsterilized cats moving into the habitat you conveniently provided for them by removing their competition?

Between Mar 2009 - Jul 2009 there were two approximately two dozen new litters of kittens born near the shelter where I volunteer. Many people were feeding the cats but few of them were sterilized. These kittens found there way into the shelter by people who had found theme. Many were sickly, many died, but many made their way into an already overburdened adoption program. Many were added to the existing cat population. I quickly made the connection between these feral cats breeding out of control, the mountain of cats at the shelter, and the embarrassing euthanasia and return rate this city has for cats.
 
Everyone in the area complained about the cats and the large number of kittens, but no one wanted to take responsibility for them. Property owners were victims and could do nothing but ask to have the cats removed and complain about the pests like bugs and birds which feasted on the food left by sloppy caretakers. Clark County Animal Control has neither the staffing nor mandate to trap cats. Caretakers had all manner of excuses. They were too busy, too poor, didn't have traps etc. to properly manage them. I learned about the county's 10.06 ordinance and decided to TNR the cats myself. I methodically cataloged the cats, where they were being fed and made contacts with the caretakers, property owners, and people who work and see the cats each day. Between 4 different sites, nearly 90 cats roamed and fed from an ample supply of food provided by caretakers who in many instances did not even know other people were feeding the same cats!

Borrowing traps and using spay/neuter slots paid for by donations or county grant money,  I trapped and sterilized 3 cats at the monthly July HCWS feral clinic.




In Aug, I trapped 11, and followed on with 4 or 5 cats in weekly slots. In Sep, I trapped 22 for the clinic and followed on with another 9 that week. In Oct. we delivered another 14. At this point we had fixed nearly 60 cats and a significant percentage of the cats, 66% had been sterilized or removed to be adopted.

We have continued to trap the holdouts over the intervening months at this point have TNR'd nearly 70 cats and removed 7 for adoption. Since Oct. Only three kittens have survived and all three have been sterilized and returned. There are still viable male and female cats in the population, but they must compete with the 60+ cats that have been sterilized! This spring and summer we will see, but my trapping partner and I notice that there are visibly less cats than there were last year. There is no magic cure all for this problem but removing the cats provides only a very temporary fix. I must continually monitor and trap newcomers, but the same would be true if the cats had been removed. At least now, I can be assured that these newcomers have to compete with all of the fixed cats in the area for food!

Clearly I would not have invested the time and effort into this project, if the cats were going to be removed and destroyed? Nor would any of the people that helped me. We do a service for the community and save the taxpayers lots of money. How many kittens have we prevented from needlessly ending up at Lied to be euthanized at taxpayer cost? Support Trap Neuter Return, because whether you love them or hate them, we all want less cats!

When I woke up in the morning, Tommy Boy had eaten all of his food so I loaded him up again. After feeding, watering, and changing paper for 15 cats, I found myself late to go meet Kristina at a mini-storage near the Palms hotel. We got there around 3:30. I setup the drop trap on one side of the complex while Kristina put traps out on the other side. I had my camera and tripod so I setup the camera where I could see the display while hiding from the cats by standing around a corner. It took nearly 15 minutes for the first one to work up the nerve to enter the drop trap. Emily had TNR'd a bunch of cats (15+?) here so many of them were previously fixed. I could see that he was not one of the four I was after on this side. After a few more minutes more of the cats started to appear. A small black cat appeared, and I slowly peeked around the corner with my binoculars to see if it was the one I was after. It was! Now there two cats eating the bait. A second ear tipped cat entered the trap. Fortunately some sound spooked her and she bounded away. I started thinking about spring the trap when I saw one of the grey and white cats checking things out. I decided to wait and he too entered the trap.

Preparing to pull the string I accidentally dropped the plastic reel and it clattered on the ground. I thought for sure the the noise would scare the cats but they sat there unperturbed. I sprung the trap and knabbed all three. We released the previously trapped cat and put the other two into traps. I reset the drop trap, but 30 minutes later there was still no action. We trapped one more from the other end and left four traps behind to be checked later.

Moving on I met Susan, David and Erika at Nathan Adelson Hospice. They had managed to catch a couple and when we finsihed up there, we had five more bring the total so far this location up to 10. A minor SNAFU occurred as I was convinced that we had left a trap somewhere at NAH, when in fact I had never counted the traps which were left at the storage place!  Tricia and Trudy helped me at the White Sands and we manged to trap three more cats. Bobbi stopped the storage place and delivered two more cats.  Jean, Denise and Joe had managed to trap 4 more at the NSPCA, including three that I had specifically targetted! Yeah! The total for the night ended up at 14. We staged these cats at the Humane Society.

The last month and a half I've really struggled to be productive at trapping. Bad weather, poor planning, and uncooperative caretakers have all taken their toll on my ability to deliver cats. The final straw came during the trapping for the Jan feral clinic. I had access to nearly 50 traps and a half dozen trappers. We delivered 11 cats and that was only because Angela trapped 8! I spent nearly 12 hours to catch a measly 3 cats. GRRRRR! I was determined that this week, I'd be prepared to fill the 30-40 cat quota we're expected to deliver each Tuesday.

Despite the poor weather and the fact that several large projects did not come together for C5 as planned, 274 cats were signed into the clinic with 98 coming in under C5.  265 surgeries were performed with 156 males being neutered and  109 females being spayed. 6 were "Already Been Spay/Neutered  (ABS/N)" and  sadly 3 had to be euthanized. The check in process went fairly smoothly considering that Debbie, the largest cog in the wheel was unable to be there. Caretakers were lined up as early as 6:30 to drop off their cats. Most people cooperated with the new check in policy, and lined their vehicles up for drop off. Printed labels were provided for those who did not have them and for the most part the check in went smoothly. As a reminder, please don't get to the clinic before 7:00 AM. There are no prizes for being first, and as a practical matter, even if you're first in line, you'll never get checked in before the cats Emily trapped the night before! Besides, you'll probably end up behind Keith with 40 traps or Trudy with 80 and have to sit and wait anyways!

The day started off with a bang as a poorly balanced trap fell off one of the first carts. I saw it tipping off and watched in horror as it flipped over and landed on the ground upside down. No longer secured by the rings, the trap door started to fall open. I rushed over and blocked the door closed with my hand. Quickly grabbing the trap with my other hand I flipped the trap over in one motion averting disaster.

This was the first month that non ring-door style traps were not allowed at the monthly clinic. Seven non-conforming traps and two carriers contained cats that had to be transferred into allowed traps. Fortunately for the folks who brought these cats in, I had exactly the number of traps needed to trade out carriers/traps for them. I learned my lesson this month, and next month I won't be bringing any extra traps with me! Transferring the cats and keeping track of who needed to be transferred back after the surgery was a pain and gummed up the check in process!

During the second or third transfer, a cat managed to escape. Without even thinking about it, I tossed a towel on top of him and we got him into the trap without any further problems.


Harold was happy to have a good number. Keith was happy he didn't have to take any heat for any of the cats brought in under C5. I'd like to thank Tricia, David, Susan, David, Matt for helping with the checkin.

I took just enough pictures and video to cut together this little diddy on video. Bonus points if you can name the composer and the musical though really it should be quite obvious ;-)




Finally, even though there were a large number of cats, the clinic went so smoothly that Dr. Henderson  and Harold had enough free time to dance to hip hop songs with me while Joanie taped the entire incident.  I shudder to think of  that video making it into public! Next month, barring more bad weather, the monthly clinic sign-in number will break 320, I'm sure of it!