Reflections on a disappearing colony

On the weekends I go down to feed the Fast Food Ferals. Kat feeds them during the week. In 2002, there was such a swarm down there. Fourteen or so kittens, and twelve or more adults. There were probably more, but many were ill and probably died before they were caught and fixed.

I expected they would all get killed in that hazardous area in short order, but they did not. The females especially hung out and got fat and sassy. But four years later, it appears, from the tracks I am seeing in the snow, that there are no more than three cats left.

I am surprised at the melancholy I feel. After all, the whole point of Trap/Neuter/Return is to enable the cats to live a well-fed, more sheltered existance, while safeguards are put in place to prevent a reoccurance of the original problem (removal of other food sources, junk, neutering new cats, removal of new kittens or tame strays). It is expected that they will pass on, and obviously it's not going to be at a vet office at age 20 in someone's caring arms.

The fast food strip has really cleaned up. The junk is gone. The old trailer where so many of the cats lived (in relative luxury...they were INSIDE the trailer sleeping on upholstered chairs) has been removed. The dumpsters at many of the restaurants are now secured, or at least picked up more often. There haven't been any new kittens since the summer of 2003.

Sooner or later there will be no cat tracks at all. Tiger and Vannie are still around. Budgie was around this fall, but I haven't seen her recently. I haven't seen Wings (the orange cat above, who is dad to the Wings in our facility) in well over a year, and he was one who would regularly come out to watch as I filled the bowls.

Staff at the solid waste facility tell me they have seen cats that had been killed in the highway over the past few years, so that is likely how some of them have gone. However they went, it would not have been the gentler death of a pet cat in a home. Nonetheless, it was a better life than what they would have experienced had they not been cared for.

And there are no more swarms of cats and kittens on the Fast Food Strip.

I'm not sure what will be done once the cats are all gone. Some sort of monitoring will have to stay in place to watch for new cats. We can't just pick up and leave, or it will all happen again in a few years. I know from experience I can't just say "Call if you see if new cat," because staff at restaurants change (even the whole restaurant changes, next door to the colony!).

I did not expect, however, to miss them so much.

Here is Vannie, one of the last remaining cats. She is named after Vanessa, a wonderful woman on the feral_cats yahoo listserv who sent me money to fix two cats on the strip, back in 2003.