January 12, 2023
I live in a fairly rural area. There are goats, sheep, chickens, horses and lots of cats. Most noticeably, a pasture across the street from us always seemed to have a boat load of cats living there. The lady that lived there fed the cats for years and never fixed any of them. The cats did what cats do, and over the years the cat population would rise and fall. We spoke to the lady with the cats about spay/neuter but she was unwilling to take on the task, and then she stopped feeding the cats! My husband and I live by the rule, if you feed them you must fix them. I wanted to feed them, so fixing them became the goal.
I have never trapped very much. My husband had a lot of experience but it had been years ago. We still had his very good, sturdy trap and the second week of January we set that trap up near the cats in the pasture on a Wednesday evening. (We had the lady’s heartfelt permission to do this). We are fortunate the colony we are working on is across the street. We could set that trap, sit in our yard and see when one of the little souls wandered in. The first one took about 5 minutes! Carried that trap to our enclosed horse trailer, covered the trap with a towel and let him spend the night there. Now for the fun part….
Bakersfield is very fortunate to have a low cost spay/neuter clinic in town. With an appointment for a companion cat a spay is only $65.00 at this writing, which is a really good price. But, they also have a Community Cat Program that is supported by the city and the county. Monday through Thursday Critters without Litters (a 501 non-profit), will fix 20 cats at no cost. Demand is high, so this is where the fun part comes in. In order to get on that list of 20 cats a trapper needs to arrive VERY early in the morning. We are talking 4:00 AM - 4:30 AM. If someone has an especially difficult case and they don’t want to risk missing out on the list, they may arrive at 2:30 AM! When you arrive one of the other trappers will greet you and offer you a number. This is key! That number is your place in line for signing up on the list which is not posted until 6:00AM. And don’t fall asleep in your car and miss the list being put up!! If 20 cats are listed when you get there you have no guarantee you will get your cat in that day. Again, we are lucky to have this service but we all ask, why should it be this hard to do a good thing for the community?
Anyway, Thursday morning (4:00AM) I arrived at Critters with my one feral cat, got on the list, and little Sparky was taken in to be neutered at 7:15AM. It was a long morning. The cats have the surgery, a flea treatment, a couple of vaccines and get their ear tipped-for free! The cats are kept overnight so that they can be released right away. We pick them up the following morning at 7:00AM and off we go. It is a wonderful service and we appreciate them so much. But to get up that early, we need to trap more cats at a time! Critters will do two cats per address, so we got another trap!
January 16, 2023
With two traps in hand, we set them up on Sunday evening in a pretty light rain, hoping the cats would go for our chicken and rice stew. They did! We got a young boy first, and the second trap was sprung a couple minutes after by an older female. It feels so good getting a girl cat done when you’re on a TNR mission. Keeping more kittens from being born is the bottom line. Off we went to Critters on Monday morning. It was quiet that morning so getting on the list was easy, but we still were there at 4:00. The cats were taken to surgery and picked up Tuesday morning to be released back to the pasture. We estimate 16 or so cats, so 13 (at least) to get done. The mission is going well, we will keep after it…..we borrowed two more traps!
