Educating Others On Feral Cats

[ashade1]

Hello all! Being in rescue a huge part of this experience is education! I would love to be able to educate more people on feral colonies and what to do if they encounter one. What I am looking for in this thread is, those of you who aren't experienced with feral colonies... what are some questions you have/had? For those of you who have experience what questions have you been asked? Anything specific that you think should be mentioned?
I think my main question that I want to answer is what to do when you find one? I think a lot of people will see feral colonies of cats... either at a grocery store or even a neighbors house and a big mistake is ignoring it. I know that most people probably do not want to get involved in the TNR process, but even alerting a nearby rescue to the colony so that they can reach out to someone with resources to fix the colony would help. If we can plug up some of these holes that are a constant flow of kittens I think it would make a huge difference. Also this would make it so that we aren't waiting until neighbors/management is complaining that they have 30 cats and they want immediate results.
Thoughts? Ways to approach this?

 

[Furballsmom]

Hi, not so much questions from me, but of course being on the edges of Denver we have ferals. Over the years one family across the way was feeding, then they stopped. A few houses down then started and then stopped. In the meantime, I'd been talking now and then with a TNR organization on Next door.
Long story short, they live one street away, and just a week ago I ran into a lady in the store unrelated to them buying cat food as a TNR.
It's amazing how people are stepping up. It's expensive, for one thing, and there are still people who don't like it and just want the problem to go away and will actually cause and make problems for tnr people.. Which is, of course, such a huge part if the problem!!
I guess my thought would be what if you can get more media involved to tell people that this is a good thing and can help with cats? I asked my local TNR folks, they said they tried but at least one TV news station said sure, for $1000... craziness!