How local communities are working to educate the public in hopes to manage and care for neighborhood feral colonies.

By Skyla Rogers

A cat prowls the streets, howling in sorrow in search for her lost kittens. She had left them in a nearby home and upon return they were nowhere to be found.

Concerned neighbor and cat owner, Devon Wood, made calls to neighbors and, eventually, to the local police department. Her neighborhood had a known feral cat population, and she had a feeling she knew who was behind it all.

A frustrated neighbor had made his complaints known in the past. He had claimed the cats destroyed his property and had even threatened to drown the distressed mother’s kittens after trapping them in his garage. The disappearance of the one-month-old kittens was urgent.

Wood eventually discovered the neighbor had dropped them off at a nearby park and was able to get them safely to theHumane Society, however, she is not alone in her experience.

Feral cat populations remain high in the Tampa Bay area, with an estimated population of 6.3-9.6 million in Florida alone, according to The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Concerned cat lovers have dealt with the struggle of protecting and controlling these populations at the dissent of some few but very vocal and extremist neighbors. 

Wood first dipped her toe into the world of feral cats after discovering a small community in her own neighborhood. Her family discovered the process of Trap, Neuter, Vaccinate and Release known as TNVR.

“When we started feeding [one cat] and the other cats started coming along,” she said. “I was trying to reach out to organizations that helped feral cat communities and of course, especially during kitten season, they were unable to help because we didn’t have a large colony.”

She turned to the Humane Society, renting traps and spending months of trial and error to catch the cats for the TNVR process. The trapping process, she explained, meant making the cats comfortable and finding the right foods to attract them before bringing them into a local shelter. 

The Tampa Bay Cat Crusaders is an organization in the city that offers free TNVR. The president, Terese Locash, said the process is “very tedious, physically hard and mentally hard to process.” 

Locash explained that feral cats are very different from common strays or house cats. It is important not to approach a feral cat for a person’s safety, she said. Not because they are maliciously aggressive, but because they are scared of humans.

“You can’t touch a feral cat,” Locash said. “It’ll try to claw you. If you tried to hold it, it would be as scared of you as you would be scared of a lion.”

The Tampa Bay Cat Crusaders does not offer trapping of feral cats due to lack of resources, however, TNVR is paid for entirely by the organization. People like Wood are able to safely trap feral cats in less aggressive communities on their own, however resources do exist for more highly trained individuals to do so as well.

Supporters of the TNVR process believe it is the ideal way to control feral colonies, however, people lack critical education that contributes to the increase in neighborhood cat populations. Locash said that when deciding whether a home is fit for a cat during the adoption process, all other animals in a home must be spayed and neutered to prevent more litters. 

“There’s too many cats and not enough people that want them,” Locash said.

This affects the organization in ways beyond deciding who can adopt. Locash explained that the situation has gotten so dire that pregnant cats who are brought to the shelter must have their kittens aborted to prevent further rise in populations. Kittens who are born while their mother is awaiting treatment, Locash assures, do not receive euthanasia. 

Locash and Wood both emphasized the importance of education in controlling the growth of feral cat colonies. 

“Feral cats take a lot of work and care,” Wood said. “It takes a lot of patience and education on the community’s part.”

Patti Gardner is a Lutz resident who has worked with feral cats periodically over the last eight years until this past year, when she noticed and established care for a colony in her own backyard. 

“In some cases,” she said. “Cats fighting over territory presents a danger. Constant hostility between cats is scary and noisy. It can be dangerous for young people and adults to approach these animals in active standoff. And these cats are right outside my door and in my yard.”

Feral cat colonies do have the potential to cause harm. There are ways to minimize this through education, as recommended by those involved with the colonies. If someone is worried about these communities, there are routes they can take that do not involve harming the animals.

“[Reach] out to a local organization who provides help,” Gardner said. “Report the cat population to the Humane society or… with a call to the Pet Resource Center, or [you can] allocate a trap and begin the TNVR process on your own.”

The city of Tampa has over half a dozen organizations with missions to aid the community in addressing cat populations. Among the most popular is the Humane Society, which rents out traps and offers TNVR services by reservation on Mondays as well as providing educational resources for those just getting started.

“[People] don’t want to get involved,” Locash said. “They don’t want to take care of the problem. And for a lot of them, part of it is education.”

Organizations like Best Friends Animal Society focus on creating “no-kill” cities. This means that a majority of a city’s shelters practice euthanasia less than 10% of the time and instead use education and implementing processes like TNVR to control the populations of stray and feral animals. 

According to Best Friends Animal Society, 52% of animal shelters in the United States are classified as “no-kill” shelters. The number of these shelters is climbing, however, there is still a lack of education in many neighborhoods that are impacted by feral colonies. 

“I think people have little understanding and find cats more of a nuisance,” Wood said, thinking back to her own experience with her neighbor. “But to me it’s about educating people on controlling the actual population.”