McNulty enlisted the help of her HSUS friends and another cat-loving neighbor to raise money for the spay/neuter surgeries and to organize a neighborhood-wide trapping effort. The owner had started clearing out the old scrap metal, and some of the cats had been scared away by the noise and chaos. She also solved the mystery of the sudden new influx: Next to the caregiver’s house was a former junkyard.
And nobody wants the cats to be hungry, but that’s not providing a solution.”įor the first time, McNulty realized where the cats she’d found over the years likely originated. “A lot of people with good intentions will feed, feed, feed,” she says, “and they won’t go ahead and fix the cats. It was a scenario that Susan Richmond, executive director of Neighborhood Cats in New York City, sees all too often. Their caregiver had been feeding dozens of cats in her backyard for more than a decade. As McNulty later learned, the cats were part of a large colony a few houses away. Neither course of action would have solved the problem in the long term. McNulty, an operations manager with the HSUS, had heard some of her coworkers talk about trap-neuter-return(TNR), so her next plan was to borrow traps and get her new backyard residents sterilized. But they were wild, and the shelter was already struggling with too many cats. Her first thought was to take the cats to the local shelter. She’d just recently managed to stop her cat Murphys (named for an Irish beer) from spraying, and she feared any additional feline housemates, even temporary fosters, would increase his stress and trigger a return to his old habits. The next day, she counted 11 cats and kittens, and she started to panic. But in 2010, looking out her kitchen window one summer morning, McNulty spied five black teenage kittens in her backyard. It was all manageable as long as the unexpected cats came in a trickle. Over the years, she’d adopted two of these strays and found homes for a few more. And from time to time, a stray would show up and take shelter in her backyard shed. In her rural community in Monrovia, Maryland, some of her neighbors let their pet cats roam free. Beth McNulty was used to seeing the occasional cat cross her property.
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