16/04/2025
Does Trap-Neuter-Return Reduce the Number of Community Cats?
4 Mistakes that Can Sabotage your TNR Efforts and Give TNR a Bad Name.
We received a flurry of comments recently stating that TNR doesn't work. Some of these comments came from people concerned about the effect of cats on wildlife. Others were from frustrated trappers who found that their TNR'd colony kept growing despite their efforts to get them all. Does TNR actually stop colony growth and reduce the number of community cats?
Yes, TNR works great in controlling the population of cats and stopping colony growth, but ONLY if done correctly. If you make one of these mistakes, your TNR project may fail. As a new trapper I made all 4 of these mistakes.
Nothing hijacks our emotions more than homeless kittens, so when I got a call about a nearby business with 5 cats and 3 kittens, I rushed out to get the kittens. I knew it was important to get the babies first so they could be socialized and adopted into homes. And to be honest, I was smitten with kittens. Saving the kittens was a lot more fun than getting the colony fixed. So, I decided to get the kittens socialized, fixed and into homes before I tackled the 5 adults in the colony.
You can guess what happened. By the time I got around to making appointments for the 5 adults in the colony, two of the cats had given birth and the colony was now larger than when I started. I now had 5 adults and 8 more kittens to trap. Prioritizing the kittens resulted in a larger TNR project.
I made appointments for the 5 remaining cats but soon discovered another flaw in my plan. The business owner had reported 5 adults, and I believed him. Big rookie mistake! There are nearly always more cats than reported. Once I started trapping, I discovered that there were actually 9 adult cats. Now I needed more appointments and there weren't any available appointments until the next month. While I waited, more kittens were born. :-/
After 6 weeks of trapping, I had fixed 32 cats, but I was still making mistakes! The colony was in a nearby town, so it was too far out of my way to feed every day. My solution was to go twice a week and leave a huge bin of dry food to last until the next visit. In addition to attracting unwanted raccoons, the surplus also brought in cats from nearby colonies and from a local neighborhood. The business wasn't happy and now there were more cats to trap.
This colony was eventually TNR'd. But the mistakes I made resulted in a much larger and more expensive project. Most experienced trappers know to avoid these mistakes by:
-Assessing the colony size BEFORE trapping. Wildlife cameras or WiFi cameras aimed at the feeding station can help with this.
-Checking nearby homes or businesses for additional cats.
-Prioritizing the timely TNR of ALL cats instead of focusing on the kittens. When possible, it is best to do the entire colony at once.
-Feeding responsibly by leaving out just enough food for meals. When there is too much food, you have increased the "carrying capacity" for your colony and will attract more cats and wildlife.
-Following up after the TNR project to make sure no newcomers have arrived. Tomcats can have large territories and may visit the feeding station intermittently, so it is easy to miss them while doing TNR. Colonies in some residential areas may also have a continuous influx of pet cats who are lost or abandoned.
TNR works beautifully when you avoid these 4 mistakes. It is wonderful to see a TNR'd colony thriving with a stable population. Smaller, stable populations are MORE likely to be accepted by the humans living and working nearby and LESS likely to be targeted by cat haters.
Arklow Cat Rescue is a shelter / sanctuary for cats and a TNR service. Cat rescue.
