Close your eyes and imagine it: A colony of feral cats living in your neighborhood. Day after day they appear, malnourished, breeding and uncared for. A compassionate person notices them; a person with a tender heart. She knows they are souls with heartbeats, and that these kitties matter, but she doesn’t quite know what to do about them. Now open your eyes and look at this picture.
There must have been close to 16 community cats residing in Debbie and John Parish’s yard and neighborhood. After being trained at FixNation, they decided to try to help this colony and do some TNR. They set up 4 traps as feeding stations and for 3 nights let the cats enjoy free grub. Then our very own volunteer extraordinaire, Joe Federico, joined them for an evening of trapping. They dubbed the spot the Crawford Colony.
The plan was to trap as many cats as possible, and then have them spend the night in the Parish’s guest bedroom before going in for spay/neuter the next day. These lucky felines would spend one more night recovering from surgery at the Parish’s before being released back to their colony the following day. They would be allowed to go back to living their happy lives: eating vermin, being looked after by the Parish’s in their colony, and NOT reproducing anymore!
The trapping began at 7 pm and within half an hour, with Joe’s guidance, they were able to trap 9 cats. This gave them enough time to set up more traps with the hope of catching 3 more kitties spotted in another neighbor’s yard. It also allowed them to spread the word about needing to pay attention to the colony, a call for help that would involve their whole community. The Parish’s discovered they had friendly neighbors who were ready to assist in properly TNRing cats; neighbors who were eager to work together. The resulting group effort to take care of homeless cats on their block is incredibly heartwarming and inspiring.
