TNR: The Relentless Work of Saving Lives

By Michelle Blake

Lora Meisner greets the stray kittens at Dorothy’s patio door. They’ve learned to come to this patio for dinner at a designated time.

On a Sunday in Salem, with the slight tang of early fall in the air, the sun is preparing to turn out the lights on a clear blue day. Lora Meisner’s van is parked in a cul-de-sac in a mid-century residential neighborhood. The van is empty now, but Meisner hopes to leave with two passengers.

A homeowner named Dorothy sits at her dining-room table. A few feet away, two lanky juvenile cats are on her back deck, pawing at the sliding glass door. The kittens know it’s dinner time, and they know the humans inside will soon deliver their dinner.

Dorothy has established this routine with her neighborhood’s stray cats -- first by happenstance, and then deliberately. She originally started feeding a skittish, hungry cat who frequented her back yard. That cat soon had a litter of kittens, and then another. 

Enter Lora Meisner and her nonprofit Coalition Advocating for Animals, or CAFA. Tonight, Meisner is trapping the two grey tabby kittens. They have morning appointments at the Willamette Humane Society’s spay and neuter clinic.

The kittens look as interactive and curious as any pet cat until the glass door glides open. They scurry and duck into the bushes as Meisner steps outside, holding the cans of cat food she’ll use to bait their traps.

Dorothy has fed them every night at the same time, getting them accustomed to coming here on a predictable schedule. For the past week, she’s put their scheduled meals inside the traps, getting them used to walking into the little metal cages to eat. Now, Meisner places the food in the traps and sets the tension-loaded doors so they’ll clap shut when the unsuspecting diners step inside.

Wearing her CAFA t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Get it done while it’s only one,” she talks in a quiet, soothing voice to the waiting kittens. Anxious for their food, they’re tame enough to venture near, yet wild enough to keep humans at a safe distance.

Meisner prepares the humane traps that will carry the kittens to their surgery appointments at Willamette Humane Society’s Spay/Neuter Clinic

With the traps set, the humans retreat inside to wait. Within seconds, the first trap snaps shut. The trapped kitten’s eyes grow wild. He paws at the trap, looking for an escape. Meisner quickly slides open the door and lays a bath towel over the trap -- a trick of the trade that calms the cats. The kitten hunkers quietly on the trap floor, no longer interested in the dinner, which is still uneaten beside him. 

Meisner carries the trap to her van. She has one passenger. She’s going back for the second.

A Common Scenario

Tonight is meant to be the last of several trapping dates Meisner has coordinated at Dorothy’s house. 

“We had 6 traps out the first go-round,” Dorothy recalls. Eating their meals from the open traps for a week or so, the cats became comfortable with them. “You’d even see two kittens eating in the same trap.” The mother and her first round of kittens are now sterilized and rehomed, either as pets or barn cats, depending on how tame or wild each one proved to be.

These two remaining kittens will return temporarily to Dorothy’s after they’re neutered. She’ll continue feeding them until they find their own permanent placements. 

While Dorothy waits for her tabby friends to walk into their traps in her Salem backyard, similar scenes play out in yards, fields, and parking lots across the region. Every community of any size has active TNR programs working to cap the feral and free-roaming cat population. Studies indicate these programs are successful at managing populations and reducing cat deaths. But to be effective, the TNR programs must be comprehensive, and volunteers must be as relentless as the problem itself.

Unrelenting need

“We’re struggling with our growth, but we’re growing,” says Leann Garrison, a volunteer with the nonprofit Meow Village. Founded in Aurora, OR, less than a decade ago, the organization works seven days a week to answer requests for help. “We probably have several hundred cats [waiting to be trapped and sterilized]. I think our largest one is 25 cats [at one location], and we have several with 20, 16. Usually somebody in the country gets pregnant cats dumped off and it continues to grow and it gets out of control.”

Demand for services is so great -- and homeowners with rapidly-multiplying cats are so desperate to be rid of them -- Meow Village board members have ceased listing their last names on the organization’s website. It’s a precaution against people looking them up and dumping cats at their homes. “It happened to our director a couple of years ago. She walked out and there was a box of cats,” Garrison says. She confirmed she was willing to use her last name here, because her remote address makes her difficult to find.

Over the mountain range in Bend, where the Humane Society of Central Oregon operates the Bend Spay and Neuter Clinic, staff and volunteers have completed their busiest month to date and they’re preparing to increase their capacity.

The clinic tackled a colony of 123 feral cats in late September, performing 70 of the surgeries at its site and relying on area veterinarians for the rest. Some clinics squeezed 15 cat sterilizations into their weekend schedule to get the job done.

A staff member at Bend Spay & Neuter Clinic returns cats to their traps, where they recover after surgery.

It’s an example of the all-hands-on-deck cooperation that communities employ to get ahead of free-roaming populations. “These cats are out there because of people. They’re domesticated animals that became wild,” says Karen Burns, V.P. of Operations for both the Bend clinic and the shelter. “It’s a community-wide issue, not just a shelter issue.”

The Bend clinic has hired another veterinarian and a veterinary technician with experience in high-volume spay/neuter work, bringing the professional staff up to three doctors and three technicians to cover shelter medicine and the increasing volume at the spay/neuter clinic. “Eventually we’ll be adding appointments every day for feral cats,” Burns says. “I would say in the next few months we’re going to have a really smooth-running community cat program.”

Cat traps are lined up during the recent 123-cat spay/neuter operation in Bend. Courtesy Central Oregon Humane Society

.In Salem, where organizers estimate their region is home to 30,000 free-roaming cats, multiple animal welfare agencies cooperate in a comprehensive, community cat program. Meisner’s CAFA and others answer the public’s pleas for help, area rescues and shelters work to find homes for the trapped cats friendly enough to be adopted, and the Willamette Humane Society performs a high volume of cat sterilizations, thanks to a targeted grant. 

“They have the grant funding and we do the legwork,” says Meisner, who guesses she has personally trapped a couple thousand cats.

Volunteers work tirelessly. “My first year, I drove over 18,000 miles doing cats,” Leann Garrison recalls. Several years later, she still makes 90-mile round-trips to the nearest vet clinic offering low-cost feral surgeries, and her aging Prius is now a dedicated cat transport because it’s too messy to serve as a family car.

“Trapping is not fun or clean work,” says Karen Burns of HSCO. “It’s really hard work and messy work. There are long hours. It’s a lot of driving. It takes a big heart and a drive to make a difference.”

 Proof of Success

There’s plenty of evidence that this work does make a difference. TNR (Trap/Neuter/Return) is the accepted standard for managing free-roaming cat populations. In a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Medicine, the ASPCA and other wildlife and cat welfare organizations demonstrated the life-saving impact of intensive TNR programs. 

Communities with comprehensive programs see fewer overall cat deaths, both in shelters and in the wild, and they control populations more effectively than other approaches. 

This and other studies help bolster the TNR advocates who have faced critics and skeptics for decades. Concerns over wild cats preying on songbirds and other wildlife -- coupled with possible neighborhood nuisances like cat fights and soiled flower beds -- fuel the opponents who would prefer to trap and euthanize feral colonies. But studies often demonstrate that culling operations simply create a vacuum -- an open territory where other free-roaming cats can move in and take over. In contrast, TNR creates stable colonies, keeping populations and their possible negative impacts at sustainable levels.

The Public’s Role

TNR programs continue to grow, both in number and impact. The movement began in earnest in 1995 with the founding of the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon, which remains among the largest and most comprehensive programs of its kind. Now, with the growing cooperation of large shelters, small rescues, and tireless teams of volunteers armed with traps, towels, and gumption, more communities are nearing the level of intensive TNR work that can stabilize cat populations. 

With high-volume clinics, voucher programs, trapping initiatives, and barn cat placement programs up and running, the TNR programs now need one more component: public participation. Here, Meisner’s “Get it done while it’s still only one” motto summarizes the public’s ideal role.

“The worst thing is to trap a cat when you don’t have an appointment, cautions Karen Burns of HSCO. “They get wise to the trap and you might not get them again. You’re really losing that opportunity.” But property owners and allies who are willing to trap cats can be a welcome asset to any TNR program, assuming they take the steps in the correct order. 

Some members of the public are willing and able to catch and sterilize wild cats at their own expense. Few, however, will be able to do much of that. “If your nearest vet charges $225 for the surgery and you have 10 cats to do, are you going to feed your family or spay and neuter those cats?” says Leann Garrison of the Meow Village.

Photo courtesy of Bend Spay and Neuter Clinic. A cat during surgery.

The best approach: if you’re feeding one cat, contact the nearest TNR program and ask for help in getting the cat fixed. Then trap the cat when you have the surgery appointment in place. 

After trapping and sterilizing, property owners may need to temporarily care for cats until they can be relocated, but that’s one of the things volunteers like Garrison do best.

“What our program does is it takes cats from where they’re not wanted to where they are wanted and they serve a purpose. I’ve probably delivered and set up 200-300 cats in barn homes. I love it when I drive through the country and I say, ‘Oh, I have cats there, and there, and there.’”

For the foreseeable future, cat programs will continue to sterilize and place as many cats as humanly possible. Just how long it will take to finally claim widespread success is anyone’s guess. But there are local and regional successes they can already celebrate, at least for a moment.

“Every now and then we feel like we’re getting ahead of it,” Garrison says. “But I was looking at the list earlier and now we have several people on the list from Brooks, Oregon, and I didn’t even know where Brooks was. So suddenly there’s this population.”

And where there are populations, there will be volunteers.

Resources:

Check our comprehensive list of spay/neuter programs in our region.