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Feral cats find new friends 'What can you do when somebody drops a cat out and you've got the cat and the kittens? I don't want the cats to starve.' Rhoda Nelson, Wolfe Street resident
Neighbors on Fredericksburg's Wolfe Street come together to deal with strays
Date published: 11/8/2005
By EMILY BATTLE
From her front porch on Wolfe Street, Rhoda Nelson watches the daily movements of the cat colony that has made a home in her neighborhood.
Inside, she's got her own cat, Molly, but Nelson can't bear to watch the feral cats that scamper around outside go hungry.
She leaves a little dish of food on the corner of the porch, which the cats visit for meals several times a day.
"What can you do when somebody drops a cat out and you've got the cat and the kittens? I don't want the cats to starve," said Nelson, who has lived in the neighborhood for three decades.
Feral and stray cats live in neighborhoods all over the Fredericksburg area. In the city, you can spot cats darting in and out of crawl spaces under old buildings, holing up in backyard sheds or slinking through trash bins looking for food.
Local animal control officers warn against feeding feral cats, pointing out that left to themselves, the felines will just multiply at an alarming rate.
But in Nelson's neighborhood, compassion for the animals is tempered by a desire not to watch their ranks grow larger.
So on the other end of Nelson's porch, a humane cat trap sits ready for action, a sign of an effort that neighbors hope will ensure that their new feline neighbors will stop breeding.
Over the past two months, residents of this block of Wolfe Street have met at dusk several nights a week to stalk and trap members of the feral cat colony.
It started with three female cats, and within a matter of months ballooned to around 18.
Eight residents of the neighborhood, along with just as many friends and relatives--some of whom had never even seen the cats--contributed money to have them spayed or neutered and vaccinated.
They've also bought food and litter for friends who agree to keep the cats in their homes until they're ready to either be adopted or released back into the neighborhood--minus the ability to breed and spread disease.
Not wanting to watch the cats starve or tear up their garbage looking for food, the neighbors found few alternatives to this approach when they called around to the city and local animal shelters.
Doing nothing didn't seem to be an option, either.
"If we hadn't caught all those kittens within a couple of months, we could have had 40 to 50 more cats," said Kelly Baker, who lives on Sophia Street and has been helping her neighbors on Wolfe Street. "If you ignore the problem, it's only going to get worse. They're going to keep reproducing and you're going to have a lot more starving kitties with a poor quality of life."
In Fredericksburg, as in Spotsylvania and Stafford counties, stray cats are considered "free-roaming animals," just like skunks and possums.
Read more stories about Fredericksburg
Date published: 11/8/2005
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