Cat fight in Jamaica Plain

How you treat animals is how you treat people.

For about ten years my wife did cat rescue, first in our backyards then on to our neighborhood and eventually the whole city, and the above statement always proved to be true. We met many different people who were feeding cats and all had huge hearts and empathy, our staunchest cat lovers were warehouse workers and fleet truck drivers. My wife would trapped 500 cats a year for 5 years so this belief is not something I want to be true but proven again and again.

The tried and true method is Trap Neuter Release (TNR) and have covered feeding stations that are tended by a primary caretaker. The City of New York supported this as a program because the alternative is poison stations after rats and mice have infested an area, costing tax money and vet bills for poisoned pets, and after Animal Care and Control has gone through the process of capture, evaluation, care for several weeks for adoptable pets, and euthanasia for sick for unadoptable pets; unnecessary costs to the tax payer.

The problem of cat poo? It's as easy as having the feeder provide a litter box, cats prefer the type of material used as cat litter to dirt, harder to cover. It sounds naive but it has worked for us many times and is a small cost to solve the bigger problem of keeping the peace with the neighbors.

Raccoons and opossums? Put the feeding station on a single post platform,or a platform with a 18-20 inch overhang, set at 42 inches high. Raccoons cannot reach higher than about 39 inches and cannot jump, but are highly intelligent and the station needs to be free standing with no over hanging trees or structures they can climb; they can't jump but they will drop down like a ninja. Possums are kind of dumb so if you beat the raccoons you have no worries with possums.

People who get loud and aggressive about killing cats just want to kill something and use the minor problems with cat colonies as an avenue to satisfy themselves. A better way to head off the cats being out in the wild is to only get pets from adoption centers like Animal Care and Control, the ASPCA, Humane Society, or big box pet stores allow adoption groups to set up an area or have adoptions days (Cabela's does it also). The shelters are stuffed with pedigreed cats and dogs bought by someone who didn't realize the effort needed to provide a stable home and abandon the pet to a shakey fate.