We never knew what we were getting into. Seriously.
It was the spring of 2008. Once again, as in previous years, a stray cat had deposited her litter of kittens in our backyard. We knew from past experience that fleas were likely to build up very quickly, and that they could be easily tracked into the house, where they might spread to our indoors-only cats.
My husband decided to do something about it. His plan was to trap the kittens and get them to a shelter while they were still young enough to make good, adoptable pets. Thus began step one: putting food out for them.
There was only one hitch in this plan. Every single shelter that we contacted already had more kittens than they could handle; it was spring after all. Nobody was willing to take our litter.
As the weeks went by, we grew more and more desperate. It was getting past the window of time where the kittens could still be hand-tamed, so their chances of ever finding homes through a shelter were diminishing. (Taking them in and hand-taming them ourselves was not an option, as we did not want to expose our own two cats to any possible parasites or diseases they might be carrying.) Carting them off to the pound was out of the question, but we knew we had to do something. I began to research feral cats and found a wealth of information on "Trap, Neuter and Release" programs. If nothing else, we could at least prevent these kittens from producing future litters of their own.
While TNR seemed like a good idea, it was the "release" element that had us stymied. Most information on the process didn't really address what happens to the animals afterwards, and the assumption seemed to be that this was all taking place in a non-residential setting. In our case, of course, it was in our own backyard. We knew these cats were not going to disappear unless we stopped feeding them, but unfortunately ferals left to fend for themselves have a very poor quality of life. Going to the trouble of getting them fixed implied that we were responsible for their care afterwards, plus it wouldn't be fair to foist them off on our neighbors. (And this is the one glaring omission in literature on the subject. The acronym describing this program should really be "TNRF", for "Trap, Neuter, Release, and FEED FOR THE REST OF THEIR DAYS".)
So after much debate on what we were actually committing to, we began trapping the kittens, one by one.....
