NOVEMBER 29, 2013
Volunteers work to control OC’s, area’s feral cats Trap-neuter-return prog. helps reduce population CLARA VAUGHN Staff Writer (Nov. 29, 2013) Susan Coleman starts most days at 6 a.m., doing rounds at six sites in and around Ocean City. By midmorning, she’s answering phone calls, and then is back out in the field. Each Thursday, Coleman loads her truck with around 25 traps and makes the trek to and from Cambridge, all part of an unpaid social service to the city’s feral felines. “It’s what I love doing,” said Coleman, who spearheads Community Cats Coalition, a group of volunteers that helps manage the area’s free roaming cats through a trap-neuter-return (TNR) program. Coleman moved here in 2009 and said Community Cats, working with Delmarva Cat Connection and Town Cats, has helped spay and neuter more than 2,500 of the area’s fecund felines since. The program is yielding results in some cat colonies, she said. TNR helps control the colonies by stemming reproduction and leading to attrition. The procedure costs just $45 per leonine head at Snip Tuck Inc., an all-volunteer, nonprofit group dedicated to reducing the number of unwanted animals on the Delmarva Peninsula. Compared to the average $150-250 price tag to get a cat fixed, the costs are low, thanks to the “assembly line” procedure at the clinic, Community Cats Coalition’s Carlene Morrison said. “They go from one station to the next,” she said, from the room where the cats get an injection that knocks them out to an ear-cleaning and nail-clipping station, presurgery shaving, operation and recovery. The procedure comes complete with a rabies vaccination, penicillin to fight off any infections and a full health exam, Morrison said. But TNR is contentious in Worcester County, where the city council and county health department split in their responses to a request this year for funding for the program. “Trap, neuter and release is primarily speaking to the reproductive status of the cats,” said Dr. Andrea Mathias, Deputy Health Officer and Medical Director for the Worcester County Health Department. “Reproductive health is not the only health aspect of any animal. There’s a lot of other health-related care that goes into taking care of a cat.” The big concern is rabies in Worcester County, Mathias said. Though all trapped cats get a rabies vaccination in the TNR package, re-trapping them for their one-year booster proves problematic since they roam free. See CAT on Page 22A
Ocean City Today
NEWS 21A