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If you have ever seen a community cat with the top of one ear missing, in a neat straight line, you were looking at a cat who has already been through a clinic. That flat edge is called an ear tip, and it is the closest thing trap-neuter-return has to a universal signal. This post…
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A feeding schedule tells you when. It does not tell you how, and the how is where newborn kittens get hurt. The biggest risk is aspiration: formula getting into the lungs. It is life-threatening, it is mostly preventable, and most of what prevents it is technique, not equipment. This post draws on two published guides:…
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Short answer: yes, and there’s an 11-year study to prove it. A 2003 study in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, led by veterinarian Julie Levy, tracked the free-roaming cat colonies on a university campus for eleven years under a Trap-Neuter-Return program. The population fell 66%, from 68 cats down to 23. No…
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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…