TRAP-NEUTER-RETURN

NOTE: If stray or homeless cats are being fed by you or someone else, it is important they are at least desexed.  Manawatu Alley Cat Trust will help to trap/catch these cats for desexing and any other veterinary attention.  PLEASE GET IN TOUCH…

DID YOU KNOW?
A high percentage of kittens born wild are malnourished and die of starvation within the first year of life.

Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR), is a humane practice that tackles the proliferation problem in stray colonies by catching, desexing and returning the cats, and is recommended in the Draft New Zealand National Cat Management Strategy September 2016 (viewable on the National SPCA website) as the preferred method for managing stray cats in urban environments. The trapping, neutering and returning of each cat to its territory, with the ongoing support of a caretaker to feed and care for them, not only ensures the welfare of the cat, but also addresses valid neighbourhood concerns about growing cat numbers, toxoplasmosis, yowling, urine marking, and cat fights.

Manawatu Alley Cat Trust believes the Trap and Kill solution used for decades to deal with unwanted cats is inefficient, as populations can rapidly rebound from surviving cats, or new cats which move in to the area. In addition, as we have found in our work, many communities enjoy the social aspects of having and caring for friendly (and even not-so-friendly) “community” TNR cats. As cats are territorial, having colonies of desexed TNRs helps prevent other undesexed cats from starting new colonies in these areas.

According to Alley Cat Allies, an American national advocacy organisation for the protection and humane treatment of cats, on their website, “For more than a century, the American shelter and animal control system has been relying on catching and killing outdoor cats to control their population. This approach continues to fail, and the number of outdoor cats increases despite the fact that millions of vibrant, healthy outdoor cats are killed each year.” ….”With catch and kill policies, vaccinated and neutered cats are removed from an area. But that only creates a vacuum in the environment, where new cats move in to take advantage of available resources. The new cats breed and the cat population grows. Catch and kill policies aren’t just cruel and ineffective, they go against what the public really wants: humane approaches to cats”.