TNR Puts Tax Dollars To A Better, More Humane Use

For over a hundred years, until TNR, the only option animal control systems had in dealing with the feral cat population was to catch and then kill them. Sadly, there are still many shelters that are forced to do this because they have no other way. Catch and kill only leave a vacuum which is quickly filled by even more homeless cats who are naturally going to move into a newly emptied territory and take advantage of its food sources.

Taxpayer dollars are wasted on a never-ending cycle of cruelty that only tends to make the situation worse, not better. Cats who have been through the TNR program make excellent neighbors. Once they come back from the vet’s office, they live out their lives in the area they were born in, and their presence prevents new cats (who are still able to breed) from moving in, taking over and becoming a problem for everyone.

A good example would be one neighborhood that started out with over 50 cats, and within seven years of implementing the TNR program in that area, the number of cats had naturally and humanely declined to less than ten. The system works for both humans and cats. If you don’t have TNR in your area, call your local animal shelter and see what you can do to change that.

All it takes is one person to care and stop this senseless waste of resources and killing. Instead of shelter funds being stretched to the limit, implementing TNR would be like giving them all a huge budget increase which most of them are sadly in need of. Too many shelters are like over-filled hotels with no vacancies until the next round of cats are euthanized, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

In areas where the TNR program has been implemented, there are apartment complexes, suburban neighborhoods, and many a business who all have fewer rodent problems today than ever before. Rodents are capable of causing major structural damage over time when they have no natural predators to control their numbers. For this reason alone, even if you don’t particularly care about cats one way or another, allowing them to live and naturally control the rodent population makes excellent sense.