Long Day Part 1: Mass Trapping

Tuesday was a long day of Project Purr hard work. Because it was so long and varied I'm going to do four posts- the first for the mass trapping, the second for watching surgeries, the third for dealing with a sick kitten, and the fourth for all of the rest.

I arrived at Lynne's house at 7am. We left immediately to go trapping. The place we were trapping is going to stay unnamed, but let's just say this place is up to it's ears in cats. On Monday morning, Lynne had trapped three kittens, and so this morning we were releasing them and hoping to trap three or four more. Unfortunately, Project Purr does not have access to a veterinarian who is equipped to do true mass spay/neuter, so doing three or four at a time is as big as it gets. Some feral cat groups can do twenty or thirty cats in one day for large colonies!

As soon as we got to the location, we released the three kittens (see video). Then we set the traps and caught three more, a male kitten and two adult females. (See video of one adult being trapped.) It was exciting to trap two females that were known moms, because mom cats are usually hard to trap, and when a colony is starting to be trapped, normally all you get is kittens.

One of the mom cats we trapped had a notch in her ear and was less feral than the others. Lynne and I thought that maybe someone had tamed her, then brought her over the hill to be spayed (because no one on this side of the hill does ear notches). We almost let her go, but decided to let her go through the program anyway, even if she was spayed. That way, she would get a clear ear tip, plus a deworming, flea, tick, and ear mite medicine, and vaccinations. As it turns out, she wasn't spayed. That ear notch must have been from an accident in the past. Good thing we decided not to release her!