Citrus students were told not to feed the feral cats on campus in an email from Claudette Dain, vice president of Finance and Administration Services.
A list of complaints about the cats were compiled, ranging from “occupying public areas around facility dumpsters” to “strong odors resulting from urine and spraying during mating season,” according to the email.
While many students see the cats as a cute addition to the campus, Vice President Dain addresses them in her email, “Feral cats can serve as a reservoir for a host of human and wildlife diseases and parasites.”
She goes on to further say that according to the CDC they can contain diseases such as, “salmonellosis- which causes diarrhea, bartonellosis- commonly known as the cat scratch disease and toxoplasmosis- which is contracted through cat feces.”
Their reason for being on campus seems to stem from the people who leave food out for them.
Samantha Villanueva, a student at Citrus said, “I don’t think we should just do nothing, or not feed them, obviously they need help. You can’t just have an organization come and take them to the shelters because they’re going to die.”
Facilities have yet to respond on their plan for how they are going to go take care of the feral cats on campus.
“All you have to do is get an organization to come and they do TNR (trap neuter release), they trap the cat, they neuter it, and then they bring it back,” Villanueva said. “It helps prevent cats from having more babies and it helps with their vaccines so that they don’t have diseases. If they’re feral you can’t just take them to the shelter, they need to have their treatments.”
The Inland Valley Humane Society in Pomona has their own TNR program and they could service the cats on campus.
Jennifer Ayala, one of the employees of the Inland Valley Humane Society explained the process of TNR as a very humane one.
According to Ayala, the property that is in need of the TNR service must first come to Inland Valley Humane Society and pick up the trap, where they then explain process of how to set up the trap.
Once the animal has been caught and brought back to their facility, the Inland Valley Humane Society will then conduct an evaluation of the animal’s needs. During this evaluation they vaccinate and neuter the animals and assess the animal’s temperament free of charge. This helps them decide if the animal would be able to be adopted out or if they can release it back to where they were found.
“Many studies have shown that removing wild cats from an area only increases the number of cats over time,” says the ASPCA. “The only successful way to deal with a “cat problem” is to maintain a healthy and stable population that cannot reproduce, such as with a TNR program.
Here’s who to contact. This works. We do it here in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as in the Virgin Islands. It’s safe and humane. http://fixnation.org/about-tnr/trap-neuter-return/