The Feral Cat "Neuterer"

This Saturday morning I woke up at my usual time—6:30 AM. While this is a typical Saturday morning for a mother of three boys, this Saturday morning was devoted to wrangling our feral cat population instead of my three sons. All the neighbors were involved and everyone agreed not to feed the cats the day before. I prepared all the traps and waited for my neighbor Sharon to help me out with the trapping. A cat walked into my driveway smelling the food that I had laid out. She was hungry after a day without eating. I decided to set the trap and sure enough within 30 seconds-- I caught my very first cat. I thought to myself, “this is easy.” So, I got on a roll and caught five more within the next 30 minutes. Needless to say I was pretty impressed with myself. Even my skeptical husband was shocked. When Sharon joined me, we caught three more for a total of nine.

Later that morning over on the corner of Argyle and Ditmas-- Andrea started her trapping. She caught two pretty quickly and then a third one a little later on. Andrea had two traps left and our goal was to catch the black male cat. As my son Alexander refers to him, “The Daddy”. She called me later to say that he had walked into the trap but was smart enough not trip the trap and walked out. Sunday is another day.

Seeing how easy it was, my other neighbors Beth and Svetlana, set another trap. They caught the same cat twice. This cat had already been fixed. They moved the cat and we caught another female. With no more room in my garage, I brought this cat to Andrea. Unfortunately she was a smart one and got out. Those are the breaks.

For the first evening feeding, we discovered we had a nursing mother. We did not know where the kittens were so we had to set her free. One days work and we had eleven cats. Our goal is fourteen cats.