Bryan Kortis serves as Chair of the New York City Feral Cat Council (NYCFCC), a coalition of twelve animal welfare organizations that utilize Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) as the most humane and effective means of dealing with New York City's feral cat population. Organized in 2005, the Council is a member of the Mayor's Alliance for NYC's Animals, sponsored by Maddie's Fund®. Kortis is also the Executive Director of the Manhattan-based Neighborhood Cats.
Q. What are the goals of the NYCFCC?
A. Our overall goals are threefold:
- to significantly reduce the number of cats living on the street
- to provide humane care for the cats that are there
- to help support the achievement of a no-kill city
More immediately, our goals are to further institutionalize our methods, increase our resources and increase our services.
Q. Is NYCFCC somewhat unusual in its approach?
A. TNR has become fairly widespread, but generally speaking, it's practiced on the individual caretaker level. We take it to the next level by operating on a community-wide basis.
Q. What are the advantages of this approach?
A. Working together brings several benefits: for example, by pooling resources, we can purchase and share equipment on a large scale.
As I mentioned, we've institutionalized the way the entire community works with feral cats. We've all agreed on various standards, principles and methods, and so we're all of one mind when it comes to how we trap, manage our colonies, and care for the cats. Thus, if the ASPCA schedules a spay/neuter van for 25 cats, they have the assurance of knowing that the people who reserved the van are all skilled, highly-trained and able to carry out the task.
Perhaps most importantly, a community approach legitimizes the effort and enables us to reach and impact more people. By having all the feral cat groups work together and by being part of the Mayor's Alliance, we're able to gain more acceptance from the City and secure the support of Animal Care & Control of New York City, which is a member of the Council. In fact, AC&C and many of the other local animal welfare organizations refer feral complaint calls to Council members.
With possibly hundreds of thousands of feral cats in New York, no individual organization, not even one as large as the ASPCA, can go it alone -- everyone in the system has to work together.
Q. What does the Council do day-to-day?
A. The member organizations offer a wide range of TNR-related services to the public, many of them at no cost, to encourage community participation. Free spay/neuter surgeries, TNR workshops, trap banks, hands-on assistance, and even feral cat shelters are some of the things we offer.
We help each other as well. We hold quarterly meetings to share information, discuss common challenges, organize publicity campaigns and coordinate our resources and services.
We also maintain an online cat colony database. We ask cat colony caretakers to input information into the main database, detailing where their colony is located, when they took it on, how many cats and kittens were in it when they started, how many are there today, how many have been neutered and so on. Individual's names and colony addresses are confidential. When people enter data, they can't see the entire database, only their own entry. Obviously, administrators can see the whole thing, and this gives us a very good community snapshot.
Our database also serves as a program management tool. We can see where TNR is happening and where it's not. We can pinpoint colonies that might need extra help.
As we gather more data and get a better handle on the impact TNR is having on the feral cat population, we'll make our findings public.
Q. How many colonies and caretakers are currently in your database?
A. We have 245 colonies and a primary caretaker for each colony, plus we encourage the listing of a secondary caretaker for each colony as well. We have colonies in all five boroughs. We expect to double the number of colonies in six months.
Q. Is there an average colony size?
A. Colonies range in size from one to 68, but the average size before TNR is fifteen. After TNR, we've seen these colonies drop to an average of about ten—globally, we've seen a reduction of about 30% of the total number of feral cats in our registered colonies. The rate of decline varies from colony to colony. Often, a reduction occurs right after someone takes on a colony because a lot of young cats and kittens can be pulled, socialized and adopted into homes. When I started with my first colony, there were thirty cats, but twenty were candidates for adoption. To date, colony caregivers listed in the database have removed 2,000 cats and kittens (an average of eight cats per colony), adopting them into new homes.
Q. How do caregivers find these cats homes?
A. The colony caretakers generally take the cats into their own homes and foster them while they look for permanent placements. They tap into friends and relatives or post the cats on Petfinder.com through Neighborhood Cats or through other organizations. Shelters such as the ASPCA, Humane Society of New York, North Shore Animal League and Bide-A-Wee can take the cats occasionally.
Q. Earlier you talked about standardized procedures. Could you give an example?
A. Rather than trapping a few cats at a time, we are proponents of mass trapping and offer classes to teach the method. We provide the equipment, and if the colony is large, we can even provide people to help. Here's how it works: First, we establish a feeding pattern –we put out the food at the same time and place every day, and within two weeks, the cats are trained. As the cats feed, we count the cats, taking notes and photos to substantiate the count. Then we secure a holding place (garage or basement) for before and after surgery. The last step is making the spay/neuter appointment.
Let's say a colony has twenty cats. Caregivers will need to start trapping three days before the appointment. They might trap 80% the first day and have to hold the cats 4-5 days, but the cats are not handled—they stay in covered cages the whole time so they stay calm. If a colony has at least 10 cats, the ASPCA will send its mobile spay/neuter clinic to the site and can handle as many as twenty-five cats at a time. Because the mobile clinic program is so popular, sometimes this can mean waiting longer for a spay/neuter date than taking the cats to a fixed clinic.. If any of the cats are adoptable, then preferably they're fostered and not returned to the cats' territory.
Q. Who performs the surgeries?
A. Although some folks use private practitioners, most go to the clinic at the Humane Society of New York or utilize one of the two ASPCA mobile clinics. These organizations provide free surgeries, but to qualify, trappers must go through our three hour training and get certified. Once they do the training, they have access to other benefits as well, such as free equipment and expert assistance.
Interest in TNR has grown so quickly we now have more people requesting surgeries than we have slots -- demand has outstripped capacity. To offset this problem, the Mayor's Alliance has joined with Brooklyn-based Muffin's Pet Connection to launch "MAMA" (Mayor's Alliance And Muffins), a low-cost spay/neuter network of private veterinarians specifically for feral cats. MAMA will offer coupons to reduce the cost of the surgeries. We expect the program to be in operation early in 2007.
Q. How many cats do you think you need to neuter to reduce colony size?
A. We believe a colony can be stabilized if 70% of the cats are spayed or neutered. It's uncertain how long that can last, since just one litter of kittens can start building the numbers up again. With 90% and long-term colony management, it's almost guaranteed that numbers will start to drop. In our current registered colonies, the average neutering rate is about 65%, but people are there to pull kittens for adoption, which keeps the colonies stable. Our goal is always to reach as close to 100% as possible.
Q. How many surgeries have been performed to date?
A. The ASPCA and the Humane Society of New York have been performing thousands of surgeries per year on feral cats for several years now. The New York City Feral Cat Initiative, another program of the Mayor's Alliance that coordinates a lot of the work out in the field trapping, has itself TNRed over 1700 cats since January of 2005. I'm sure many more are being done outside of our coalition. People use NYCFCC to varying degrees. For example, they may take a workshop and manage a colony but decide not to participate in our data collection effort.
Q. Does Animal Care and Control of New York City take in feral cats?
A. My understanding is that AC&C does not respond anymore to requests to trap cats absent a public health emergency or other similar situation. If someone traps them, AC&C is required to go and pick them up. The feral cats that come into AC&C come primarily from private citizens or extermination companies hired by private citizens.
If an ear-tipped cat ends up in a shelter, we are notified. The cats aren't micro-chipped but AC&C gives us the general location where the cat was picked up and then we put word out to our extensive e-mail list to figure out which colony the cat belongs to. Of seventeen cases this year, half of the cats were returned to their colonies; the rest were either adopted out or placed in another colony. Due to our strong network, only one of the cats was euthanized and that was due to terminal illness – we actually did locate the caretaker so at least he had a chance to say goodbye.
Q. Do New York's harsh winters take a toll on free roaming/feral cats?
A. Not in our managed colonies. Every fall, Council members do a lot of feral shelter building--CSM Stray Foundation is especially big on this. Their standard shelter consists of a 25 gallon Rubbermaid storage bin lined with 1" inch Styrofoam and stuffed with straw. The Neighborhood Cats website also has instructions on other inexpensive and easily-made designs. Between the shelters and their winter coats, the cats do just fine. Most of the shelters are designed to house three or four cats, but as many as six may bundle in to keep warm.
We have a manual on keeping cats over the winter – how to keep water from freezing, the kind of bowl to use that lessens the likelihood of freezing, the type of food (we rely on dry food when it's really cold unless the cats are trained to come at a certain time).
Q. How do you go about recruiting new feral cat colony caretakers?
A. Recruitment is currently self-perpetuating. We hold two workshops per month at the ASPCA and draw on average 15 to 20 people to each. We don't want to do an all-out recruitment drive until we develop more spay/neuter capacity.
When it's time to increase our volunteer base, we will do a mailing to the more than 1,000 people who have attended our workshops. Not long ago, the New York Post donated free ad space for a few months and our attendance at workshops doubled.
"The Council has been a big plus -- it's nice to be connected."
When Neighborhood Cats organized a meeting of TNR groups, we thought it was a good idea. Networking is so much better than working independently. We can improve our services and help the public more—we can get help from each other and become more efficient. A perfect example: when people used to call for traps, I didn't always have enough to go around. Now I can use the Trap Bank.
One of the big benefits of working together is having standardized training classes. The trainings empower people to be independent. A woman who rented a house with twenty cats in the backyard called me today for help. In addition to my taking the time to go out there personally to assess the situation, she agreed to go to the workshop and take responsibility for the cats herself. Ongoing support is always available if needed, once she completes the training workshop and begins her TNR project.
– Nancy Fahnestock, Treasurer of CSM Stray Foundation
