Helping stray and feral cats in the City of Syracuse

Dear Mayor Miner:

The mission of this petition is to enlist your administration to write into your budget, money to help stray and feral cats in and around the City of Syracuse. Other cities have done this and the number of stray and feral cats has been dramatically reduced.

The way for any city or community to solve the feral cat overpopulation crisis is through the humane, non-lethal method of Trap-Neuter-Return, or TNR for short.

Tens of thousands of street cats live in the alleyways and backyards of the City of Syracuse. They are the offspring of lost or abandoned pet cats, and unaltered, they go on to spawn new generations. The cats group themselves together in packs called colonies. Many of their nuisance behaviors can be attributed to mating behaviors that would likely cease if they were sterilized. These behaviors include noise from fighting and mating and the smell from the spraying of pheromone-laced urine.

Because these cats are not socialized to humans, they are not candidates for adoption. The breeding of these street cats results in more kittens entering the shelters — taking away homes that would otherwise go to the adult cats already there. Most adult feral cats taken in at city shelters are euthanized because they are not adoptable as house pets. As a result, the city must shoulder higher costs for municipal animal control.

The solution is TNR. In neighborhoods throughout the city, TNR is proving effective in humanely managing feral cat colonies and reducing their numbers over time.

TNR is a two-step approach to feral cat overpopulation:

Step One: TNR

Stray and feral cats are humanely trapped, evaluated, given a rabies vaccination, left eartipped, and spayed or neutered by a veterinarian, and then returned to the familiar habitat of their original colony. Tame cats and kittens young enough to be socialized are removed for adoption placement in permanent indoor homes.

Step Two: Ongoing Feral Cat Colony Management

Volunteers, called colony caretakers, provide ongoing care of the cats, including daily food, water, and clean-up of the area, shelter, and monitoring of the cats' health. This ongoing surveillance ensures that any new cats that find their way into the colony will be removed if they are tame, or TNR'd (rabies vaccinated, left eartipped, and sterilized) if they are feral. This allows the number of cats in the colony to diminish over time through natural attrition, as cats get old and die from natural causes.

There are just a few non-profit groups in Syracuse that attempt to deal with this overwhelming task; the CNY Cat Coalition being one of them, as well as several members Operation Wildcats, which is based out of Madison County, however the volunteers live in Onondaga County.

The volunteers and members of these organizations provide advice to the general public and TNR caretakers by phone and e-mail, most calls coming through the CNY Cat Coalition's hotline; feline educational information via websites, Facebook and printed materials; free loans of Have-A-Heart traps and hands-on TNR assistance.

We would like a chance to meet with you and discuss the possibility of the City's help in the this undertaking. Other cities around the country have become models for TNR programs and we believe Syracuse could become one of those cities, however we need your help!

Thank you.