TheBestCatPage The best is yet to come …
HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, FLORIDA — Hillsborough County has recently joined up with the Humane Society of Tampa Bay in the neutering of tens of thousands of wild or feral cats, then putting them back on the street the next day.
It is part of the Trap, Neuter, Vaccinate and Release (TNVR) program which helps control and to reduce the feral cat population, which is currently estimated at 200,000 in Hillsborough County. Since 2007, the Humane Society of Tampa Bay says it has neutered or spayed 47,000 feral cats.
However, how are these cats adjusting after surgery? Seems no one knows for sure!
“It’s helping to reduce the killing at our local shelter and that’s what’s important to the Humane Society of Tampa Bay,” stated H.S.T.B. executive director Sherry Silk. She admits the Humane Society isn’t keeping track of what happens afterward to the feral cats. After a 2-year pilot program, the Hillsborough County Pet Resources Center doesn’t seem to have any data either.
A local news team has seen pictures of what’s happened to some. The pictures are so disturbing, the News Channel 8 managers wouldn’t even allow them on television.
Every Monday, feral cats are trapped by the Humane Society of Tampa Bay and the Pet Resources Center, are spayed /or neutered and vaccinated. Usually, the cats undergoing this sort of procedure spend between to 10 days in a cone, to prevent them from getting at their incision.
“We don’t have a place to put them for a couple of days,” Sherry Silk went on to explain. So, they are kept just overnight. The next day, they are indeed released back on the street in the neighborhood where they were trapped. While neither the county nor the Humane Society has any information or data at all about what happens to the cats once they’ve been released, evidence indicates it can be horrific.
One disturbing photograph shows a bloody trap cage which once held a cat. The cat’s incision opened after surgery and the cat bled out.
“That’s the worse case scenario is that the wound gets pulled back open. At that point you again, without proper care, I’ve got to believe that an animal that’s dripping blood all over the street isn’t going to last very long,” explained executive director of the Hillsborough Animal Health Foundation, Don Thompson.
Other photos showed the animal indeed bled to death, as well as other incisions on other cats that became infected and then later on, became infested with maggots.
“So we have no follow up care, no pain meds, we have nothing. We say that these cats do okay with that, but again I’ve not seen any data to support that one way or the other,” Thompson added.
Sherry Silk admits complications sometimes do occur, but they hope for the best.
“You know, you’re doing the best you can with the tools that we have, it is not perfect, it’s definitely not perfect,” she went on to say. Sherry Silk and the county point to the dramatically declining the number of cats being euthanized at the shelter and believe that TNVR plays a role in that.
Don Thompson is hoping that the county’s pilot feral cat program would produce data which would shed light on something more than how many cats were trapped and released. He questions, however, how humane it is to release a cat into the wild with a fresh incision which could open at any time.
“For me personally, I would way rather lie in a bed and have somebody provide something that would let me go to sleep peacefully than I would to say you’re going to cut my guts out, drop me out onto the street, and let me bleed out,” he concluded.
