Fix our Ferals

Fix Our Ferals, founded by Linda McCormick, is a Berkeley nonprofit that spays and neuters feral cats -- domestic cats who were abandoned, lost, or born in the wild. Although some are tameable, most fear human contact and must be trapped or sedated to be touched.

Nobody knows how many feral cats there are, but everyone agrees there are too many. Unsterilized, unvaccinated and unmanaged, they breed prolifically and can lead wretched lives. Each year, their kittens flood shelters and are euthanized in droves.

Fix Our Ferals, established in the year 2000, is one of several East Bay organizations trying to reduce the number of feral cats through "trap/neuter/return," an idea originating in Denmark and England. The group holds a monthly clinic, spaying or neutering up to 200 cats in a day.

For a $10-per-cat donation, people borrow traps, trap neighborhood feral cats and bring them to the clinic. There, a team of about 60 volunteers, 14 volunteer veterinarians and 15 UC Davis vet students sterilize them, vaccinate them and treat them for fleas, ear mites and medical problems. Caretakers are encouraged to find homes for kittens, which are usually adoptable; older cats get an ear notched and can be released back into their colonies.

Sterilized colonies, if monitored for new cats, shrink by attrition: One of Linda's colonies has dwindled from 30 to 10 cats in four years.

The clinic is a veterinary assembly-line. Anesthetized females are attached to Plexiglas boards (spaying females is more difficult than neutering males) and put on a five-shelved rack, with the most recently anesthetized cat on the bottom.

As soon as a surgeon becomes available, the assistant takes the cat on top and they all move up, said Dr. Rene Gandolfi, FOF's veterinary medical director.

Cats move through stations, ending in recovery. Nursing queens are given a wake-up agent so they can go home early and feed their kittens.

"At the end of one of these clinics, you walk down to where the cats are being held and there, stacked in front of you, something like 150 to 200 cats, all in some stage of anesthesia," Gandolfi said. "It gives you a sense of how big the problem is. Allowing cats to reproduce at all, when we've got so many cats needing homes, I'd criminalize it. I'd throw people in jail for it."

McCormick started Fix Our Ferals after feeding cats at the Berkeley Marina and realizing that they were proliferating. She modeled it on San Diego's Feral Cat Coalition, a widely followed prototype for trap/neuter/return programs.

It's still a controversial idea. "Trap and kill" policies remain the norm, and caretakers are secretive about the locations of feral cat colonies. Wildlife organizations blame feral cats for a decline in some bird species and want the cats euthanized, but the U.S. Humane Society claims studies are inconclusive.

Shelley Samuels, who takes cats to Fix Our Ferals, feeds a colony in an East Bay regional park. "Our problem is that we're not allowed to feed in the park," she said. Rangers trap the cats and take them to the shelter; an FOF volunteer tries to rescue them from the shelter and return them, and the cycle continues.

In Berkeley, feeding colonies of sterilized feral cats is legal. Kate O'Connor, manager of Berkeley Animal Care Services, said that since the inception of Fix Our Ferals, there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of cats euthanized there. The shelter works with the group to return trapped cats to their colonies; Oakland's shelter also cooperates with the group.

Dairne Ryan, FOF's volunteer coordinator, said the organization tries to reach people already feeding feral cats. "We're saying, great, feed them, but spay and neuter them, too. We all bear the responsibility for putting them here," she said. "Taking cats to shelters doesn't solve the problem."

McCormick's day job is rebuilding grand pianos. She stores the autoclave, a machine that sterilizes FOF's surgical instruments, in her piano workshop at her house in Berkeley.

She makes cold calls to recruit volunteer vets. "Sometimes I think I'll have to cancel a clinic -- I get desperate," she said. "The vets that do come, I just want to pat them on the back 'til they get blue in the face."