It is “kitten season” in Southwest Colorado, the busiest time of year for the Feral Cat Project, a nonprofit working to spay, neuter and feed feral cat colonies and rescue kittens in Montezuma and Dolores counties.
Project Coordinator Marian Rohman said the uptick in litters lasts from April through August or September as unspayed female cats go into heat and start birthing more frequently.
Since 2009, the project run by the For Pets’ Sake Humane Society has worked to spay and neuter over 7,000 cats. But the kittens just keep coming, Rohman said.
“You would think there would be fewer kittens, but I don’t think there are,” Rohman said. “I was talking to our foster person who keeps better track of it, and she said that she feels that For Pets’ Sake is getting as many phone calls this year as other years, if not more.”
The program also assists residents in providing food to colonies and funnels kittens birthed from feral mothers into foster homes. But a lack of volunteers and people willing to foster means there are a lot of cats that slip through the cracks.
“We usually take in somewhere between 150 (and) 200 kittens in a season. I bet we refuse 300 or 400,” Rohman said.
Feral cat colonies are scattered throughout the Montezuma and Dolores counties, residing under trailers, in bushes and in barns. The project, which hosts a call line for people seeking to manage colonies close to them, has worked with 842 colonies, according to Rohman, and has 27 people on its waiting list seeking the project’s services for additional colonies.
“Our waiting list never goes down to zero. There’s always new people calling,” Rohman said.
Rohman added the project’s biggest issue is finding available foster homes for kittens rescued from these colonies. When a feral cat gives birth, the clock immediately starts ticking. Kittens need to be captured before they reach eight or nine weeks old when they become too wild to be tamed.
“We don't have a shelter. We are dependent upon individuals who have to meet some state criteria and some standard criteria that we have,” Rohman said. “Many of the kittens age out before we have our foster homes open up again.”
Rohman estimated that feral kittens have a 20% to 30% survival rate in the wild. The project partners with a local veterinarian to get kittens treatment for common upper respiratory infections but also for amputations, eye removals and other serious conditions and procedures.
“If the cats are out there uncontrolled, first of all, they're hungry, and they're often sick,” Rohman said. “When I first started this program, we would just find dead kittens along the roads in the trailer park regularly.”
Most of the kittens rescued by the Feral Cat Project end up in no-kill shelters in Glenwood Springs, Eagle and Alamosa. The Cortez Animal Shelter has limited capacity and sends most of its kittens to shelters in Denver, sometimes sending kittens to the Feral Cat Project.
“I can't take a whole lot. The more cats that you have crammed into the building, the higher rate of illness that you would have,” Jennifer Crouse, the Cortez Animal Shelter’s kennel supervisor, said.
Crouse has 16 cages in the adoption room, fit for one adult cat or two kittens each. The isolation room has eight cages and several kitty condos, leaving Crouse with room for around 25 to 30 cats total. The waiting list for people seeking to put cats and kittens up for adoption at the shelter is over a month.
The shelter also functions as an impound facility for the Montezuma County Sheriff and the Cortez Police departments, making space even tighter.
“Sometimes it could be two months before we can call someone to bring them in. It just depends on how full law enforcement keeps us,” Crouse said.
Once kittens make it into the shelter, the facility gets them spayed or neutered and vaccinates and deworms them. But many residents aren’t adopting cats right now, which Crouse attributed to economic struggles and lack of animal medical care in the area. The Feral Cat Project takes several kittens to Moab, Utah, each season to receive emergent care with only one local veterinarian available to help them.
“Cat litter and cat food is more expensive, and it's very, very, very hard to get into a vet in this area, so that has deterred people as well in adopting. So the adoptions have been a little bit slower this year,” Crouse said.
Any Montezuma or Dolores County residents who need assistance in managing feral cat colonies can call the Feral Cat Project for spaying and neutering, kitten rescue and cat food purchasing assistance at 970-565-7387.
Rohman is also seeking volunteers to assist with fundraising for the project, specifically for its September yard sale, which requires 80 to 100 volunteers. Anyone interested in helping can call the same line.
Both Rohman and Crouse agreed that the most important way to manage feral cat colonies is prevention.
“Kittens can come in heat as early as four months of age. So they have kittens while they're still kittens. The sooner that they can get fixed, the better it is,” Crouse said.
avanderveen@the-journal.com
