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Home / Animal groups bracing for uptick in feral cats
Animal groups bracing for uptick in feral cats
Nadia Crow
Mar. 21, 2012 8:55 am
A warm spring, coupled with an unusually mild winter, could lead to more furry friends roaming around Eastern Iowa neighborhoods this summer.
After the flood of 2008, animal control groups in Eastern Iowa worked to decrease the number of feral, or stray, cats in Cedar Rapids. Now, because of the warm winter, the number of those cats could peak this spring.
The breeding season for cats typically runs from February to September. A cat can have three litters over that nine month period, meaning up to 18 new kittens per cat by fall. One animal rights groups estimates there are currently 28,000 feral cats in the Cedar Rapids area.
Those kittens usually end up at animal shelters like the Cedar Valley Humane Society. But one group hopes to limit the amount of homeless kittens and un-adoptable feral cats. While the breeding season remains the same every year, warmer temperatures mean cats and kittens will be out and about.
"If it's very cold and they don't have access to proper food from their mother's hunting ... with this warmer weather I would anticipate they would survive more,” said Cedar Valley Humane Society Executive Director Bob Citrullo.
"When more kittens survive that's more kittens that are going to have kittens of their one in just a few months,” said Iowa Humane Alliance Program Director Mary Blount.
While adult stray cats don't make good pets, their kittens can be socialized and find a good home. That's why the Cedar Valley Humane Society staff is working hard to adopt out as many of the cats they have now through special programs.
"This is all in anticipation with the kitten season coming on. We need to be able to handle that,” said Citrullo.
Blount said she hopes to beat the problem at the root by giving pet owners more options.
"They just don't have the veterinary resources. They can't get appointments. They can't get quality assured services with a good cost,” said Blount.
The non-profit's spay and neuter clinic is still under construction, but they hope to provide a daily service to keep the feral cat and dog populations at reasonable levels.
"They go out, humanely trap these cats and spay and neuter them and let them go back and then they watch and see the population go down because of that,” said Blount.
Their goal is simple and couldn't come at a more critical time.
"We want to do that to see a decrease in cats going into our shelters and wandering our neighborhoods,” said Blount.
Blount says the Iowa Humane Alliance will open by the end of spring, and organizers hope to spay and neuter up to to 10,000 cats a year. The public's is invited to attend an open house March 25 to see the Iowa Humane Alliance's new facility at 6540 6
th
Street SW in Cedar Rapids.