After helping low-income and hard-to-reach families spay and neuter their pets for several years, a local program is addressing what it sees as a growing problem in Whatcom County: feral cats.
Whatcom Education, Spay & Neuter Impact Program - or WeSNIP - has started trapping and fixing feral cats out in the county, after receiving calls from people who didn't know what to do with growing populations of wild cats.
The goal is to get those cat colonies stable by catching them, fixing them and returning them to the wild.
"If you do a whole colony, then what happens is the animals have a tendency to be healthier and live longer and they do the things that people like," WeSNIP co-founder Patricia Maass said. "They take care of the mouse populations. They don't fight and they don't breed."
If the cats can't breed, then the colony population won't get out of control and eventually will die out.
The program recently spayed and neutered 45 cats from a colony near Birch Bay, the biggest one Maass had ever seen.
The group has about 20 traps, so they catch the cats in waves for bigger colonies, often with help from whoever called the colony in. The group has gotten a lot of calls about feral cat colonies in the Maple Falls and Kendall areas.
It's easy for those colonies to get out of control, especially when people start feeding them. A cat can have up to three litters a year with four to eight kittens each. As the population grows, so does the likelihood of diseases such as worms, distemper and feline leukemia, as well as brutal fighting.
"It's a sad life for an animal that is meant to be domestic," she said. "This is not their natural way to live anymore. It's really a hard, ugly, short life."
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For more information about WeSNIP, go online to wesnip.org. To get help for a feral cat colony, call 360-733-6549.
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