Well first of all, thank you so much for inviting me to come in and speak about Community Cat Advocats, which is the organization I’m representing. My name is Susan Chesley. I live in Winchester, and I began becoming concerned about the number of abandoned and community cats in Winchester when I moved here in 2012.

I came from Iowa and I didn’t know what a feral cat was out there in the corn. But here in Winchester, on every street corner there’s a cat that has been left behind by someone. Or kittens that have been born in the wild by cats who were never spayed and were left behind. So our organization was formed in 2013, after a meeting that the SPCA sponsored around the issue of community cats.

I went and the very next day I was trapping cats on Jubal Early. The way we work is we trap, neuter, vaccinate, return, TNVR. We become aware of a colony of cats. A colony of cats are a group of cats that live outdoors, as, in a sense, a family. There’s a hierarchy, they protect each other, they breed with one another, they sometimes fight. So we get a call about a particular colony that we would, that someone would like for us to come assess and possibly do our TNVR in that area. We work with a home owner, or business owner, or who ever has called us. They’re usually on a feeding schedule, we ask that food be withheld for 24 hours before we will come back with our traps. We set traps with a good stinky food. The cats go in, the trap snaps shut, we cover the trap so that the cat will calm down a bit. They usually spend the night with me and the next morning we drive them to Harrisonburg or Manassas to clinics. It’s a low cost clinic. No clinics locally are low cost. And that is absolutely one of our goals for 2019, is to try to work more with local vets so that residents can get low cost spay neuter and we don’t have to travel an hour north or an hour south to have that same service.

You know, I’ve been trapping cats now, since 2013. And I will tell you that one of the hardest things for me is when that cat walks in the trap, and that trap snaps shut. My heart breaks a little bit because I know that is a terrified cat. They don’t know that they’re going to be coming back home to their outdoor colony. And there’s no way I can convince them of that. The best I can do is have them spayed or neutered, vaccinated against rabies and then within either one to up to seven days, after the trapping, the cat is then taken back to its colony. I will say that’s one of the policies that Community Cat Advocats adheres to. We do not relocate cats. Cats rarely, relocating cat rarely works. You have to contain a cat for at least two months in a new home, either in a cage, in a barn where they can’t escape. Or it will not work. So we do not relocate cats, but we do rescue kittens.

And if a kitten is rescued before they’re about eight weeks old, they are usually able to be socialized. The mother hasn’t imprinted that feral instinct on them, so we can handle them. We have fosters and we can get them into adoptive homes, forever homes. In Winchester our focus has been, well they’re all over the place, the cat colonies. But in Winchester, we’ve written grants to focus on downtown. It is cost prohibitive for many folks to have a cat spayed. It can be as much as $200, I’m sorry, $200 to $500. $200 for the boy. So they go unspayed, unneutered, and kittens are born by the bus load.

So downtown Winchester, we’ve had grant money and had quite a bit of success. Also rural areas in Frederick county. Again cats can grow in number and a colony can be 30, and I don’t care what you’re income is. To spay and neuter locally at a vet, 30 cats, is almost unmanageable for anyone. So we come in and work with the resident. They usually give us donations, but we write grants for rural areas so that we can provide this service at low cost to the folks needing our help.

I would think that one of our biggest needs right now, it sounds so crass, but it’s cash. Even at low cost, it’s $79 … $75 a cat. Which includes their rabies vaccination. We do write grants and we do get donations, but it is never enough. And the more financial security we have, the more we’ll be able to answer the dozens of calls that come in, sometimes weekly. There are, we have a very long waiting list. I will also say that within Winchester, there are colonies of cats that our members also manage. I have five colonies myself, which are only getting smaller. I’ve got a couple of colonies, two cats, started out at 18. But a colony that is fully spayed, and neutered, and vaccinated will not grow. It’s an odd thing, but new cats do not come in unless there are fertile females or intact males.

But I cannot, I cannot stress enough the importance of dollars to what we do. We are also always welcoming in people who want to service fosters for babies and also want to learn to trap. And we are train … we’ve got a handful of folks this year that have stepped up and want to be a part of the actual hands on work. But behind that, we need to fill the checking account. I would like to say, because we all see these cats running around, please do not take what you believe to be an abandoned or a feral cat into the shelter. They will not be euthanized immediately, they’ll be kept in a cage where they will be terrified for the last few days of their life. If you see cats and there’s an ear tip, which means the tip of the left ear has been snipped off, that’s a universal sign that that cat has been spayed and neutered and is most likely a part of a colony that’s being cared for. So definitely do not bother cats with ear tips. And really, don’t bother with any cats unless you know that if a cat comes to your back door and it’s lovely and it’s hungry, and you think this cat has been … is lost, that’s a different situation. But for the most part, please, please, please do not take cats into the shelter. It’s a horrible way for them to live out their last, last few days of life.

While I was asked to come in and represent our organization, Community Cat Advocats, I do no more or no less than any of the other folk. We’re very small. We have two other trappers, Robin Ritchie and Ken Haron. We also have a wonderful treasurer, Sarah Brown, who writes our grants and finds places in the universe where money is sitting, waiting to be grabbed. And then we have a number of folk who aren’t necessarily a part of our organization, but are, who work with us as fosters, and colony caretakers, and places that we can go when we need ideas about a … About a particular problem or situation has arisen. So it is not Susan Chesley, it is Community Cat Advocats. Small but powerful. A group of folk from Winchester. To kind of piggy back on that need for more money, we realize that a wonderful source is the community itself. When we’re able to we put on fundraisers. Whether they be an event at a local winery, or we always participate in this city wide garage sale that is a fundraiser for Watts. We always do that. We’ve also had our own little fundraisers. We have done mailings where we have asked some folks in the past who have been so helpful to us, to step up to the plate once more. But we’re always looking for new opportunities. And I will say that we have a wonderful website, www.ccadvocats.org, and if anybody has a burning desire or an idea that’s been peculating for a while around a fundraiser and you haven’t known what kind of organization might benefit Winchester the most, please get in touch with us. We are always about making our circle larger and the more the merrier. The more people that we get involved, the more successful we will be in this mission. I will say that our deepest desire is to go out of business, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.