Email to Buddy

Sent: Monday, August 27, 2007 4:43 PM
To: 'Melvin.M.Wiggin@NHMCCD.edu'
Cc: 'GWY01@nhmccd.edu'
Subject: Feral Cats at the college

 Hi Buddy, this is Harold—we spoke earlier today about the cats at the college. I promised to send you some information you can use with your manager.

 My organization:

I’m with Tomball SOS (Save Our Strays) (www.TomballSOS.org). a very tiny organization in Tomball which is dedicated to helping the stray, feral, and otherwise homeless cats on the streets of Tomball. We’ve helped other businesses and restaurants in the city to develop a plan to work with the cats which are drawn to the dumpsters, people, or shelter, near their businesses.

 Our organization is a member of the Feral Cat Assistance Program (FCAP), a group which helps caretakers to manage their feral colonies by providing help with trapping and spay/neuter surgery. FCAP is sponsored by the Citizens for Animal Protection (CAP) shelter. Cindi Shaw, director of CAP, used to teach at the veterinary technician school at Tomball College, so the circle comes back around.

 The campus cats:

We became aware of the cats on the campus about a month ago, and have since been trying to find someone at the college to work with. We notice that although 90% of the cats we saw were feral, there are a few cats coming in from the housing near the college. In fact, this is probably a significant source of the original colony. We did not see any altered animals, so unless the people feeding the cats are not getting their ears “tipped,” the colony is still reproducing. We noticed open bags of cat food laying around, which attracts wildlife and creates a mess. We’ve cleaned up the areas where we saw the most litter, and have come by twice a week to continue to keep the areas clean. That’s when we noticed the traps from the company you’d hired.

 Our goal:

We have a twofold purpose in contacting you: Since we’ve seen the traps, we’ve been contacted by several students and an employee about them, thinking we were the ones trapping. We want to avoid unfortunate publicity for the college, and we want to work with you to keep the cats alive and healthy. We understand your main purpose is reducing the wildlife attracted to the cat food.

 Our plan:

We have drawn up a quick and dirty plan for accomplishing all three goals. We would need to interact with college administration to get permission for the long-term part of this, but you and I can work on the short-term, immediate plan.

 Short-term, immediate plan:

Our immediate concern is to stop killing the cats. We understand the wildlife is the main problem, although the cats provided the avenue for the wildlife, since irresponsible feeders are leaving open bags of food laying around in several spots on the campus. If the cats continue to be trapped, we’ll have a difficult time convincing the feeders, be they faculty, students, or members of the community (who originally alerted us to the presence of the cats on campus), to change the way they are feeding.

 We would like your permission to talk to your trapper and have him turn over any trapped cats to us. We will get them checked out to ensure they are healthy; we’ll get them altered, vaccinated against rabies, and treated for internal and external parasites. This is free of charge to the college, and rather than creating bad publicity, it creates good publicity. Other colleges (I admit, with bigger budgets), have done similar things, and it does create a wealth of good publicity for the college. We can either hold onto the cats for a couple of weeks, until the skunk, possum, and armadillo population is decreased, or we can return them once they are recovered. We would work with your trapper to see what would be the best for him.

 Intermediate plan:

For the intermediate solution, we need to find out who is feeding by posting signs, making inquiries, and watching. We can, perhaps, enlist your security people to help us watch. We need to educate the feeders that the wildlife is nocturnal, so to help the cats and reduce the threat of wildlife, the cats should be fed only during the daytime, with the food taken up by dusk. We need to ask them to feed only at a few established feeding stations, and stay near the food until the cats have finished eating, then clean up the remainder. Feral cats can be trained to come to a signal to eat. We’ve done this elsewhere. This is an excellent website discussing how to avoid feeding wildlife while you feed feral cats: http://www.tnr-plus.protectrwildlife.org/feralcat.htm

 Along with this strategy, we will continue to try to get an accurate count of the number of cats at the college, and to get them altered and vaccinated.

 Long-term plan:

We would like to talk to administration (and your department can help us with identifying the person we need to talk to) about building and setting up feral cat feeders similar to those on the webpage I sent you. These feeders offer shelter to the cats as well as absolutely preventing wildlife (and the stray dogs we saw) from getting into the food. If students or faculty want to feed during the day, a sign on the front of the feeder invites them to feed, but to clean up any remainder once the cats are done. We can raise money and have the feeders built, or the college may want to do this to make them in line with the college décor. We can help you identify three places on campus at most to put the feeders. An alternate cat feeder is this one designed by Alley Cat Allies, an organization dedicated to the welfare of feral cats: http://www.alleycat.org/pdf/feederplans.pdf

 Advantages:

The Alley Cat Allies website (http://www.alleycat.org/) offers a wealth of information about feral cats. After you peruse the site, you’ll see that trapping and euthanizing the cats diminishes your current population, but does nothing to address the problems the college currently faces. For instance, unless you trap every cat on the campus and every outside-access cat in the nearby homes, unaltered cats will continue to find the college an attractive spot to hunt in and “hang out.” They will multiply, and within a few months, you will have a new population of cats. By trapping, neutering, and releasing the cats back to the campus, volunteer caregivers (those currently feeding or members of Tomball SOS) can monitor and maintain the population. The existing cats will drive out newcomers, since there will be no urge to mate with the newcomers, and your cat population will remain relatively stable.

 The caregivers will monitor for people dropping off cats at the college. College campuses are attractive places for people to dump litters of kittens, believing erroneously that the cute and cuddly kittens will be snapped up by college students wanting pets. Instead, the kittens run and hide in the bushes and die slowly of starvation and injuries, either inflicted by wildlife or by cars. Those left reproduce to increase the feral cat population.

 When the public sees the feeders, with their attached signs explaining when and how to feed, they will also see the line that it is a crime to abandon animals and that the feeding stations are monitored. It reduces the number of unwanted abandonment's in the area.

 Studies have shown that to reduce the feral cat population in a given spot and in the area at large, the only reliable way is to practice trap, neuter, and release. The college will be providing a solution, not just for the school, but for the community at large. 

This plan begins with you, Buddy. At this point, we just want your permission to talk to your trapper to stop the killing of the cats and to provide some time for you and I to work on a longer-term solution. The cats are not the problem. The bags of open cat food are the problem. We can put an end to that, given permission to put up small signs and monitor the feeding spots.

Harold
Tomball SOS
Happy Cat Adoptions (where some of the formerly feral cats find homes)