Trap-Neuter-Return

Curious about how the Trap-Neuter-Return method works?

Do you want to start TNR'ing stray and feral cats?

Here's a two minute overview of the basics of trapping stray and feral cats from Bluebonnet Hill Sanctuary's lead TNR instructor Sean.

Video: Overview of Trap-Neuter-Return

 To donate to our efforts, please visit the link below:
http://t.co/RBOsZd2xGh

Our Cats: His Name Is Inky

About three months ago I had just gotten out of the shower on a Saturday Night when my phone rang.  A nice young lady who signed up to volunteer with us (whenever our crowdfunding campaign is over) had gone to a Dairy Queen in a nearby town for some late-night ice cream treats. She said she heard him before she saw him.  After rolling her window down and ordering at the drive-thru, she heard a cat meowing.  Sure enough, she spotted a kitten in a parking spot directly next to the drive-thru slowly moving closer to the vehicles in line.

I got the call just after 8pm. She didn't have anything with her, and the kitten wouldn't let her get close enough to pick it up.  I grabbed one of my feral cat traps and met her up there.  One of the employees met me outside the drive-thru and explained she thought someone had dumped kittens in the dumpster behind the restaurant after they closed the night before. She didn't know how many had been dropped off, but she said when she came to work that morning she noticed one had ventured off into the road and gotten hit.  I looked around but only saw one kitten, the same one that was making all the noise next to the window.

I took this picture:

He looked about 4-5 weeks old, pretty dirty and dusty and didn't want anything to do with me.  He found a storage shed next to the dumpster and even though he was desperately hungry, he wouldn't come out for more than a second or two without diving back behind it. I set one of our custom kitten traps with some wet food.  I also then set one of the hairiest hair triggers I've ever managed to set.  I honestly figured I'd be there a few hours, but within a few minutes of us backing away from the trap, he was pacing around it.  He was leery of all of it.  He didn't like me or the trap, but his nose kept leading him back to it.  Within another few minutes he was sticking his head in the trap.  Again, something spooked him and he ran back behind the shed. At this point I was wondering if he'd even go for it.

We backed off even farther, the employee that was outside talking to me went back inside.  Eventually he came back to the trap and got a little more courage.  He finally went all the way in the trap, but he was holding still and being really careful eating the wet food.  He didn't even weigh enough to set off the lightest trigger I could possibly set.  Right when frustration was beginning to set in, a car in the parking lot started up.  It startled him just enough to where he forgot about being all delicate with whatever he was touching and spun around to get out of the trap. He put just enough pressure on the trigger plate and set the trap off.  I had him. Victory is mine.

After getting him back and inspecting him, he looked like he was in need of some food, a bath, and a flea treatment.  Besides that, I couldn't spot anything seriously wrong with him.  I transferred him to a larger cat cage when I got home and got baby kitty hissed at a few times as I expected.  We set him up with some food and made a vet appointment for the next day. 

The vet confirmed what I thought.  Besides getting his shots and a flea/de-worming treatment, he was good to go.  Within a few more weeks he would be big enough to get his second round of shots and his rabies vaccine. It was my job now to socialize him.  The next few days I made sure to take him out of his cage every few hours and pet him while I topped off his food and water.  I still got hissed at, but his body language seemed less and less panicked. After two days of doing this pretty regularly, I didn't get hissed at anymore.  He actually started purring a little when I would pick him up.

 

Then I brought him inside.  He was immediately my buddy.  I couldn't go anywhere in the house without him following me around and sitting close-by or on my lap.  He purred all the time, so much so the vet couldn't listen to his heart or lungs on our next vet visit because every time you picked him up -- instant purr.  He made a habit of falling asleep on anyone he could.  He had decided he loves people.

So now, he's a totally domesticated cat. He spends his days playing with the other cats, sitting on my lap, or keeping an eye on me whenever I'm on the computer... from on top of the computer. Like so.

 

To donate to our efforts, please visit: igg.me/at/TexasCats

Our Cats: His Name Is Gizmo

So right around when I had started feeding Very Feral in the last blog post, I get a knock at my door one afternoon.  It's another property owner from around the corner.  She'd been managing all kinds of wildlife on her acreage for years, but she couldn't really do much anymore.  She'd previously given me open ended access to her acreage on the condition that I would help her TNR (trap-neuter-return) any feral cats on her property and help her manage predatory animals.

So anyway, she's at my door one afternoon saying she's hearing "strange noises" coming from the woods. She can't be too sure, but she thinks she heard muffled whimpers for help and possibly a rattlesnake.  I packed up a couple "things" and went out with a friend to where she said she heard this.  We walked around for probably 20 minutes, never saw or heard anything.  No ground sign of anything either.  

So fast forward a couple days and the coyotes were extra close late one night.  Two different packs of at least four coyotes a piece were howling. One pack sounded like they were near or right behind my neighbors house - the same general area we had checked a few days before and found nothing. The other pack sounded about a quarter to a half mile away, towards the lake.  

My roommate and I checked out the first location near her house, again nothing. Another let down. Obviously the coyotes and whatever else was there had found a quick out, or bedded down somewhere we couldn't find.  We moved on. We had two Q-Beam LED spotlights constantly searching the night.  You have to be there to appreciate how pitch black it is during a new moon when you're away from city lights in the middle of nowhere. We were giving it our best trying to find whatever was there. Back in the truck, we continued down the dirt road. About halfway to the lake there was something in the middle of the road.  We couldn't exactly tell what we were looking at, so we got out and started our approach on foot.  I employed the blind-the-hell-out-of-it technique as we walked up slowly.  Didn't take too long to realize it was a dark colored feral cat, but the cat had something in-front of it.  It was the tiniest feral kitten I had ever seen in the wild.  So my thought process is I'm staring at something that will probably be eaten by coyotes later tonight.  Best case scenario, tomorrow night.  If this kitten has any chance at life, it has to leave with me.  The adult cat takes off when we get close.  The kitten, still being blinded by my 11 billion candlepower spotlight doesn't know which direction to run.  It waits until it hears me start running toward it to try and make an escape... Too late. I reach out and grab it. 

This is what I grabbed: 

His body from his head to tail was the width of an adult palm. Eyes nearly crusted over from some type of infection, plus literally hundreds of fleas.  Everyone that helped de-flea this cat couldn't believe the amount of adult fleas this poor little guy had on him.  When we gave him his first bath, the water turned pink from blood leaking from all his flea bites.  We gave him four baths that day in total.  Took him to the vet, got him some medicine and his shots. Sure I could just have just fixed him up and released him back into the wild, but it didn't feel right. Being an outside cat even seemed way out of character for him.  So I kept him. 

On November 25th, 2012 I tweeted this:

The tweet reads "I love my Gizmo. You don't want to know where I found him."

With this picture attached:

I named him Gizmo. He's one of the sweetest cats I've ever met.

He's awesome because his father is awesome. His father is Very Feral.

This is the Gizmo in his natural environment.

Our Cats: His Name Is Very Feral

I was originally approached by a neighbor in 2011.  The situation was basically that an older land-owner in the area had ceased to maintain his 800 acre tract. Among roaming packs of coyotes and feral hogs on the property, there were feral cats on the acreage that needed help

Up to this point I had trapped plenty of times before, but never a whole colony of anything.  It seemed straightforward enough... these were wild cats showing up in people's backyards in decent numbers.  They were never someone's pets, they were never someone's "outside cats."  The only human contact they had ever known was running away from humans.  They lived in the woods and were being pushed into the backside of a neighborhood by predators on the same tract of uncleared land they were sharing.

I set up my first trap around sunset one night... Nothing special, just a medium size Little Giant single-door trap with dry cat food inside.  Within 3 hours I had my first cat in the trap.  I can't accurately describe how terrified a feral cat is the first time you walk up to them in a trap and they realize they can't run away. Imagine the cartoon tazmanian devil in a trap. It's a pretty accurate visual. A short trip to the nearby vet, and the cat was spayed and its ear was clipped so anyone in the future knows that TNR has already taken place.

This process repeated itself about 10-15 times within a month or two with similar results.  There were only a few cats left to trap and the job was almost done.  Then one evening a large male panda cat showed up in my trap.  In the 5 minutes it took me to put a jacket on and get to the trap, he had eaten all the food.  I was greeted by this when I walked up:

I was only able to get that picture after him flipping out for a good 10 minutes.  He had expended all his energy and was now just completely scared out of his mind.  Every instinct and experience with predators he had already told him he was done for.  When I went to pick him up from the vet, they told me their greenhorn vet-tech got torn up by this cat when they pulled him out of the trap to do the surgery.  He looked just as terrified on the ride back.  When we got back I released him and didn't think much else of it.  In my mind it was onto the next one.  I gave him the nickname "Very Feral." Of all the cats I trapped, he was the most feral.

Over the next few months, I would see him here and there.  Each time I called out to him "Hey Very Feral!" which was quickly followed by him scurrying into the woods as fast as he could manage.  After all, I took his balls.  Literally. I didn't see him for awhile, but when I did he looked a lot skinnier.  A nearby land-owner said he was even coming on her property and getting roughed up by her dog, just in an attempt to get food.

I did something I had never done up to that point, I tried to put myself in his shoes.  He was likely starving.  He was likely very scared.  He was likely being pushed off his hunting ground and didn't have a backup plan.  He was trying his best to survive.  That night I grabbed an old bowl, filled it with some dry food and left it by where he usually showed up at.  The next day the food was gone, so I repeated the process.  

A few more repetitions later, I was walking up one evening to fill the bowl as usual.  I turned the corner slowly and there he was, sound asleep next to the empty bowl.  I walked up within a foot of him.  I wasn't about to try to pet him, so I just said softly "Hey Very Feral."  My voice instantly woke him up.  He took a half-second glance at me and started running toward the treeline.  Halfway there he just stopped and looked back at me.  The best way I can describe the look I got was "You had me... You had me dead to rights yet you did nothing?!"  I let him watch me fill the bowl with food and walk back home.  I really think that experience was the turning point in our little dysfunctional friendship.  Over the next few nights he was always around when I showed up to fill the bowl.  I started moving it a few feet closer to my property each time.  Baby steps, maybe 8-10 feet each day.  After a week or so I came out in the afternoon to fill the bowl, and he was at the end of my driveway giving me a look like "I thought me coming here would be easier?"  From that day forward, he would only eat on my property.  

Then we reached our next milestone, I would watch him eat sometimes and afterward he would usually slowly walk away.  This time he rubbed up on my leg as he passed by.  Once again I did not attempt to pet him.  A few more times like this and I successfully tried to pet his back.  You could tell it was a new sensation for him, but he didn't react negatively.  Then it hit me - I had just pet the Very Feral, and he didn't flip out. I started coming out after that and he would just be on my property, I don't think he even went to the woods anymore.  I could pet him while he ate and he didn't mind.  The few outside cats I had didn't mind him, and he didn't mind them.

Then the real test of our friendship came... moving day.  Most people in the know about feral cats will tell you moving them results in roughly a 80-90% flight loss.  Meaning 80-90% of feral cats will run away/not stay if you move them somewhere else.  But before I had to even cross that road, I had to trap him again.  I tried for two weeks, he remembered the trap and wouldn't go near it.  I had no choice, on moving day I had to go hands-on.  I had a helper.  She was the head-trainer at a national pet store in town.  She thought I was crazy for going hands on with a feral cat I had only known for a few months.  I told her to prep the trap door and hold on.  I started petting him, and then just picked him up.  The tazmanian devil was back.  He was two feet from the trap but it still took me almost a minute to drop him into it.  I stepped back as she closed the trap.  My hands were cramped, I was sweating profusely.  Then I realized I didn't have a bite wound.  In fact I didn't have a scratch on me.  He refused to go all prison-rules on me.

I transported and released him.  He was there when I came out the next morning.  He didn't run away. We actually became pretty good friends.  He even lets people that are with me pet him now.  The most feral of feral cats has become a porch cat. You'd never know I didn't adopt him from a pet store if I didn't tell you.

He has never left our new piece of property.  We can pet him whenever we want.

Here's a picture of how he looks these days:

The next time someone tells you feral cats are "unmanageable," tell them the truth.