Interview! Bryan Kortis, Director of National Programs, Neighborhood Cats
May 18, 2019
Interview! Christina Ha, Cat Camp & Meow Parlour Cat Café
May 24, 2019
This week, we have the next installment of our occasional series called Trapper Tips & Tricks, which will profile folks who are involved in trapping community cats. This week we bring you tips from Keith Williams, President and Founder of C5 (Community Cat Coalition of Clark County) in Las Vegas, Nevada, who was recently interviewed by Stacy on CCP Episode 297.
If you have tips and tricks you’d like to share, or know of someone we should consider profiling, please email Stacy.
Why did you become a trapper?
I became a trapper because we had free-roaming cats in our neighborhood. We quickly became tired of the number of kittens being born, with most of them dying a short time later. Sadly, the normal mortality rate is quite high. We knew that if they didn’t die we would have a hundred cats in short order. Neither option was acceptable.
Tell us about your first trapping experience.
Our first trapping experience went quite well in spite of our almost total ignorance. Over a several month period, we rounded them up a couple at a time. After paying full price at our vet’s office they referred us to Heaven Can Wait for low-cost surgeries.
Why do you support TNR?
I support TNR because it works. C5 has trapped almost 3,000 colonies. Many of these have had no kittens in years. Our shelter euthanasia of cats is down by over 90% and the stray cat intake is down by about half.
If you could give someone one piece of trapping advice, what would it be?
The most important thing when doing TNR is to trap entire colonies. If you trap some or even most of the cats in a colony you will be largely wasting your time. To make real progress, trap all of the cats at a location.
What is your favorite type of trap?
My favorite trap is the Tru-Catch 30LTD. There are other good traps but the Tru-Catch is the best.
What is the most challenging part of doing TNR?
The most challenging parts are maintaining the focus to trap entire colonies rather than filling up traps with a few from here and a few from there. The other thing is building enough TNR capacity to trap on a scale that is effective in managing the cats community-wide.
What is the most rewarding part?
The most rewarding parts are the reports of “No kittens in years” and the shelter euthanasia numbers dropping by thousands per year.
Anything else you want to share with us?
The biggest need in TNR at this time is for people to get together and build the resources to do TNR on a large scale as efficiently as possible. We need to outgrow the practice of individuals trapping at random and making no real progress. In [C5’s] 10 years of operation, we have TNRed over 36,000 cats and built a well organized and efficient TNR group with over 60 volunteers.
