Go me!

so I am a shiny registered Feral Caregiver with the Windsor Essex County Humane Society (WECHS) for the Feral Caregiver Program!!!

This is so exciting!

As some of you know already (if you’ve read my bucket list) it is my dream to one day run a cat sanctuary. That may or may not happen but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

I wish to devote my life to help educate humans on ethical treatment of animals in general and cats in particular, and to improve the quality of life of community cats in my area -wherever that area may be.

TL;DR: community cats include both Feral & Stray cats. A cat is considered feral is she was born outside and has never lived indoors or had much contact with humans. A cat is considered stray if she was at some point a house cat but now lives outdoors for whatever reason (i.e: being dumped or left behind by a heartless human).

One of the first things I learned when I moved to Windsor is the city’s big cat overpopulation problem.

In a way, it has made finding my darling Satchie even more difficult as there are hundreds of feral and stray brown tabbies roaming the city.

There is a big colony of brown tabbies right in the field adjacent to the motel Satchie broke free from, for example.

The causes of cat overpopulation are several – of course, I don’t claim the problem is a simple one – but one of them is believe it or not, compassionate people who feed community cats on a regular basis but don’t think of neutering/spaying them.

When cats are well fed, they have a better change of having strong litters that will grow to have more litters.

As WECHS puts it:

If you’re already feeding free-roaming cats, you’ve shown that you care for them. But the best way to make their lives easier is through TNR, or Trap-Neuter-Return, sometimes also called TNVR (Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Return). By feeding but not fixing them, you can actually be making the cats’ lives harder because you are allowing them to have larger litters with more of the kittens surviving to adulthood.