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“For the last five years in Rhode Island, 15,000 animals per year have gone into shelters and 3,000 were euthanized per year,” says Liz Skrobisch, president of PawsWatch Rhode Island, a non-profit, volunteer organization dedicated to reducing the feral cat population.
Skrobisch argues the numbers are too high.
At the Warwick Animal Shelter alone, 300 dogs were brought in last year, 15 of which had to be euthanized. Ann Corvin, director of the Warwick Animal Shelter, said due to the floods, the numbers of cats taken in 2010 were “very conservative.”
“There was a four-month period of time where we stopped taking cats,” she explained, noting that this year they’ve already taken in 65.
Skrobisch said large numbers of feral and stray cats is leading to overcrowding in Rhode Island shelters, and consequently, higher euthanasia rates.
PawsWatch, established in 1997, was the brainchild of two Newport residents who noticed feral cats near their home that needed veterinary attention. From there, they put their heads together and founded the beginnings of what is now PawsWatch.
PawsWatch works in conjunction with the Rhode Island Community Spay and Neuter Clinic (RICSNC) in Warwick to spay and neuter animals from across the state. The clinic opened its doors on July 1 of 2010, and has seen over 7,000 patients since then. In that time, they’ve performed a total of 6,600 spay and neuter operations, with the numbers growing substantially daily.
Skrobisch said that between the clinic’s two doctors, they can perform a high volume of spay and neuter operations every day.
“We can do probably 50 [spay or neuter] operations in a day. Our record was 61,” she said.
Skrobisch explained that the clinic’s doctors have been specially trained to perform surgeries efficiently, and can complete the operations in 4 to 15 minutes, depending on the size and health of the animal.
High volume is the key to operating within the financial constraints of the organization, which provides subsidized care to low-income pet owners.
RICSNC was founded by OSAC (Ocean State Animal Coalition), a group of organizations dedicated to animal care, shelter control and medicine. OSAC came together when the Rhode Island Foundation invited members of animal service organizations to come together to work on common issues throughout the industry.
Skrobisch serves as OSAC’s vice president, but her background is not in veterinary care.
Instead, she spent years as the head of marketing for a major firm on Wall Street. It wasn’t until she moved to Rhode Island and found a kitten on her doorstep that she became involved with animal outreach.
As she watched the kitten grow, she began to take care of it, and eventually needed to get it “fixed.” That’s when she discovered PawsWatch.
“It’s funny how opportunities present themselves,” she said.
Now Skrobisch is passionate about controlling the pet population in the state. She encourages people to adopt at shelters, and to get their pets – cats especially – spayed or neutered. By doing these things, she says, fewer animals will be euthanized.
“It’s preventable. If all pets are spayed or neutered, all of these unwanted pregnancies won’t happen. It’s the only way to prevent it,” she said.
Skrobisch said feral dogs are not an issue here in the north, but they are in the south. Sometimes, dogs are rescued from euthanasia in the south and brought here, because dogs so often get adopted from shelters.
“Most dogs get adopted, but you see what happens to cats, the crisis is absolutely unequivocally related to cats,” she said.
In fact, the feral cat population is so out of control that there is a spay and neuter law.
Since 2006, it has been law in Rhode Island that if a cat is 6 months or older, it must be spayed or neutered. Those who choose to breed their cats must pay annually for a permit. Violation of the law is punishable by a fine.
“It’s not very well enforced,” said Skrobisch. “Now we’ve made the operation less expensive than the fine. They made the [law] mandatory before it was accessible and affordable.”
RICSNC offers low rates for feral cats and pit bulls, the two animals most commonly euthanized at shelters. The operation for a pit bull is $75, and $50 for a feral cat.
If an owner, or someone who discovers a feral cat, is still having difficulty finding the money for the operation, there is a “spay it forward” fund, where the owner pays what they can, and the rest is covered by donations.
PawsWatch also uses the TNRM technique, or ‘Trap, Neuter, Return, Monitor’ to bring in feral cats for operations.
“We’re the only organization in Rhode Island that is totally dedicated to TNRM,” said Skrobisch. “It’s practiced worldwide, but we do it here in Rhode Island.”
Cats that have been spayed or neutered get an “ear tip,” where, while under anesthesia, the left point of their ear is removed, making it flat across the top. This lets animal control officers, veterinarians and animal rescue workers know that the cat, whether it be feral or stray, has been fixed.
After their recovery, feral cats are re-released.
“Putting a feral cat in a shelter is a death sentence. Feral means that they’re un-socialized, and they do not desire human contact,” said Skrobisch.
She explained that once a cat is determined to be unsocial and un-adoptable, they are euthanized.
Kittens that are trapped, on the other hand, are typically placed in shelters for adoption, as are strays.
“A stray cat is different. Strays are cats that were once domesticated, and have been lost or abandoned by their owners. They can possibly be reclaimed,” she said.
Though PawsWatch is not an adoption agency, Skrobisch does work with shelters to place animals in homes when applicable.
Their main concern is population control, and addressing potential health issues that arise from an abundance of feral cats.
“These are cats that would otherwise never see a veterinarian,” explained Skrobisch, who said they are given important shots, too.
“We’re addressing the public health concern; we give them their rabies and distemper shots,” she said.
PawsWatch has trapped, neutered, released and monitored 14,000 cats since its inception in 1996.
At the clinic, 75 percent of their operations were on cats, 28 percent of those being feral.
“There’s a wide range of estimates of how many feral cats there are,” said Skrobisch, who’s heard figures between 50,000 to 200,000.
“State Veterinarian of Rhode Island, Dr. Scott Marshall…will be looking at the issue of feral cats,” she said. “They’re just starting a multi-year study. It’ll be interesting to see…I personally think the number is somewhere in the six figures.”
Skrobisch believes the population of stray and feral cats is growing due to the economy.
“It’s impossible to count them all…and [the numbers] are increasing as people are abandoning them due to the economic climate,” she said.
Though most of the clinic’s clients come from Providence and Warwick, they do have a van that will pick up pets from across the state. Skrobisch wants to reach out to as many areas as possible, and knows they are just starting to make a dent in the problem.
“We’re the eighty-ninth clinic based on the Humane Alliance model,” she said, referencing a pioneer clinic in North Carolina. “Where clinics have been open for a while, we start to see drops in numbers in the [feral] populations, and then a drop in the euthanasia rates, because there are less animals in the shelter.”
Despite their high-volume surgeries, Skrobisch and her team have a long way to go on the road to ending the overpopulation problem.
“We’re not there yet, but give us a few years,” she said.
Trapping and/or sterilizing and testing as a solution is a failed concept from Day-One.
There are now about 150,000,000 INVASIVE-SPECIES feral-cats just in the USA, PLUS 86,000,000 pet-cats (60,000,000 of which are still allowed to kill all wildlife), this means the population is already oversaturated for a long time. Nobody wants more than 86,000,000 cats for pets. There's only 311,000,000 people in the USA. 2+ cats exist for every 3 people, from infant to senior. Thanks to those who outlawed destroying them in a more efficient, often more-humane, and more cost-effective manner by shooting them. While they also promoted their slow, random-chance, inefficient, and failed trapping programs. TNR people (criminally animal-abusive and irresponsible cat-hoarders in reality) will claim trap and kill is also a failure, and they'd be right. The problem has always been the trapping, slowing things down far below cats' breeding-rates. No trapping has ever managed to trap more than 0.4% of feral-cats in any one area. Allowing >99.6% to continue to breed out of control all these years, and still going strong.
Keep in mind their exponential growth-rate. An average litter of 5 cats every 5-6 months (some say 3X's a year), breeding as early as 6-months of age. 2 can become 42 (up to 252) cats in only 1 year. No amount of trapping them (if you could even get them all to enter traps), nor valuable resources (transport and vet costs, etc.), man-hours, nor money will ever catch-up to their growth rate. You have an ecological, human-health, animal-welfare, and financial disaster on your hands, ALL thanks to cat-lovers and TNR-advocates. The faster that cats are destroyed the better. Even using guns and having all stray and feral cats shot-on-sight we still might not be able to catch-up to their exponential growth. Not even until every last land animal (including humans) is gone from this earth, due to cats destroying the whole food-chain, with nothing but cannibalistic cats left walking the land. No exaggeration. Do the math. Ask any TNR group how many cats they've trapped. They haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the problem THEY CAUSED and are only exacerbating with their blatant lies and deceptions. Using the birth-rate [of (N/2) X 5)] every 6 months, guess how many feral-cats alone will be born just this year? 375,000,000 (1st gen) + 937,500,000 (2nd gen) = 1,312,500,000. This is of course if they only breed 2X a year and not 3X a year. Add in the original breeding population and you have 150,000,000 + 1,312,500,000 = 1,462,500,000. Yes, nearly 1.5 BILLION cats. Got enough traps? Got enough centuries to trap them all while they're still breeding at exponential rates and still annihilating all wildlife? Trap-advocates cost you to lose the feral-cat-explosion race LONG ago.
On advice of the sheriff, I alone was able to completely rid my land of ALL these INVASIVE-SPECIES feral-cats by shooting. Cats had annihilated the native food-chain for ALL native wildlife, destroying not only all the prey that their cats disemboweled and cruelly tortured for play-toys, but all the predators that depended on that prey, starving all native predators to death as well. (Now there's REAL animal cruelty for you, caused by cat-lovers. They should all be in prisons for life.) Shooting cats is perfectly legal where I live, and is even a more humane method when done right than terrorizing trapping and animal-shelter methods. One moment they are happily stalking defenseless animals to cruelly torture again, the next they are dead and don't even know what happened. Making your land 100% cat-free is something that cat advocates haven't been able to solve nation-wide for 30-40 years. On my land only 1 person in only 2 seasons was able to accomplish what they couldn't attain in decades. Why is that? It's also been over a year since, guess how many replaced them. NONE. Another flat-out TNR LIE, their "vacuum effect". What replaced them is all the wildlife THAT *WAS* HERE AND BELONGED HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE. It's time for you all to grow a spine and get enough strength-of-heart to do what needs to be done. If it's not legal where you live then use the "SSS Cat Management Program", for Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-Up. That's legal everywhere in the world. It may be the only thing that saves us from this ecological disaster caused by spineless and ignorant lawmakers, as well as all the heartless and disrespectful cat-advocates that they defend. Don't waste your time arguing with ignorant cat-lovers either, as I stupidly tried to do for 15 years. Just do what needs to be done FIRST. Only later, after you've made your land 100% cat-free should you take your time to try to educate the ineducable, as I am attempting to do now.
The Feral-Cat Solution:
Make new cat-ownership AND care-taking of feral-cats a felony, with fines and prison for anyone failing to comply until this ecological-disaster they created is brought under control by any and all means possible. Shoot-on-sight is without a doubt, the fastest, most humane, most economical (0.3 cent to 5 cents, a ONE TIME expense per cat, depending on ammo prices), and most effective method available. It's how I was able to LEGALLY rid my own land 100% of this invasive-species nightmare. (NONE have returned, the TNR-advocates' "vacuum effect" is a bald-faced lie. Native wildlife THAT BELONGED HERE replaced them.) This is the only method that doesn't endanger nor harass any other animals, as frequently happens with non-discriminatory random-chance traps, and is also the ONLY method faster than cats can out-breed and adapt to. (Cats that learned to evade traps are the next generations to try to destroy.) If it's not legal where you live then use the "SSS Cat Management Program" -- SSS = Shoot, Shovel, & Shut-Up. Avoid use of poisons if at all possible, that once entered into the food-chain, will go on to destroy more of the very wildlife that you are hoping to save from destruction by cats. Whatever you do, please bury or incinerate the carcasses so all the deadly diseases that cats now carry won't go on to further infect the native wildlife, nor any other humans that might come in contact with them. (Which now even includes the plague, Google that fun fact. Cats also pass their Toxoplasma gondii brain-altering parasites to your livestock through their cats' feces, which is how it gets into the food-chain and people contract it from eating undercooked meats.)
Following is some good documentation on the most humane ways to confront a feral-cat problem where you live, including the best firearms, air-rifles, and ammo required. Though avoid using their suggested slow and inefficient trapping methods that got us into the disaster that we have now. http://deenawinter.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/ec1781.pdf
I think the article was presented in a way for everyone to understand the plight of the feral/strays and that we must work at getting the spay/neuter programs to be affordable and reachable for everyone. I think doing it humanely is the best way as we are the ones who domesticated these animals to live with us and WE are the cause of the high number of strays not being fixed and are put out when we no longer can afford or care. Instead of spending endless hours on the statistics which solves nothing,( and feels KILLING is the solution as the article above), maybe if more people would volunteer to help with TNRM and educating people about low cost spay/neutering that we would have less of a problem. Everything takes time and we hope through the new clinic that it will be sucessful as the other clinics have been and we can put a good dent in overpopulation.
I wonder if the article writer above would recommend we do the same for humans........
To the Woodsman> You reflect the archaic thinking of the Caveman, Neanderthal-----shoot first and don't bother to think.
@ Woodsman - you took the long winded approach to say nothing of any substance.
If you do your research you'll quickly find out that *ANY* TNR program and their advocates are making absolute fools out of everyone that they con with their nonsense. Not only causing untold damage of wildlife and further spread of deadly diseases but are also doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to curtail cats' breeding rates.
Not even *ONE* TNR program has EVER trapped more than 0.4% of existing cats in any one area for over a decade now. They simply cannot trap them faster than they breed out of control, no matter what they do. And those cats that learn to evade traps go on to produce offspring that now also know how to evade any trapping method used. This is why, due to TNR-Advocates' insistence that they have the "solution for everyone", that our feral-cat population has now climbed to an ecologically-deadly 150 MILLION feral cats across the USA. Soon to turn into 1.5 BILLION cats within the year if you apply cats' breeding rates to previous population numbers.
Find whatever way that you can to destroy all feral and stray cats on-sight. Avoid using traps if at all possible because trapping is what slowed everything down to where cat populations have now sky-rocketed out of control.
On advice of the local sheriff where I live I used a .22 equipped with a good illuminated-scope and a laser-sight for use when they are most active, dusk to dawn. I shot every last one of them on my property to try to restore all the native wildlife to proper balance. Mission accomplished! The cost was only 0.3 CENT per cat this way (5000 rounds on sale for only $15). And contrary to another famous TNR-Advocate's bald-faced "vacuum effect" LIE ... NO CATS REPLACED THEM. The NATIVE predators and their required NATIVE prey that WAS here and BELONGS here is what replaced these lousy invasive-species cats that destroyed the native food-chain.
May you have as much success as I did, and so inexpensively too.
p.s. Avoid the use of poisons if at all possible that, if released into the food-chain, might harm the very wildlife that you are trying to save from destruction by cats. And please bury or incinerate the carcasses so all the highly toxic diseases that cats now carry won't go on to harm or infect more wildlife or humans. Which, if you do a Google search, now even includes cats spreading The Plague in the USA. So much for that myth that cats would have saved people from The Plague in Europe, cats would have made it far worse!