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Every year the same thing happens. The first genuinely cold night arrives, somebody posts in a rescue group at eleven at night asking what to do right now, and forty people reply with good advice that would have been much more useful a month ago. Cold weather prep is the one piece of colony care…
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A for-sale sign goes up on the lot behind the shopping centre, or a fence appears on a Tuesday, or the person who always said yes stops working there. However it arrives, the news is the same: the cats are where they have always been, and the ground under them has changed owners. This is…
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# When a Colony Caretaker Stops: The Handover Nobody Plans Almost nobody leaves this work on schedule. The version people picture is a caretaker who announces in March that they are stepping back in June, with a tidy three months to hand things over. What actually happens is a knee surgery, a job in another…
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# The Black Cat Myth Is Fake. The Halloween Risk to Your Colony Is Not. Every October, somebody reposts the warning: shelters won’t adopt out black cats this month because of satanic rituals. It gets shared with good intentions, by people who genuinely want to protect cats, and it has been doing the opposite for…
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The traps are the easy part. The day goes wrong in the twelve hours before them, almost every time. The day before is the actual work Tell everyone who feeds that colony to stop. This sinks more trap days than everything else put together. You withhold food for about a day so the cats are…
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The clinic is not an infinite resource. That’s the whole post, really, but here’s what it means in practice. A high-volume spay/neuter clinic runs on a fixed number of surgery slots per day, staffed by people who are almost always doing this on top of, not instead of, their regular caseload. Every slot you book…
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Almost everyone who picks up a litter of kittens is trying to save them. That is worth saying first, because the honest answer is that most of those kittens did not need saving, and the people who took them had no way to know that. Here is the short version. A mother cat leaves her…
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Compassion fatigue is the specific cost of caring, at close range, for suffering you can only partly fix. It has a name, and the name matters.
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Compassion fatigue is the specific cost of repeated exposure to suffering you can only partly fix. It is not the same as being tired, and it is not the same as not caring enough.
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A colony can be perfectly managed and still generate an angry neighbor, and how you handle that conversation determines whether the cats keep their site. Usually the complaint is real and fixable, and TNR has already solved half of it.