Spay and Neuter Clinic Dedicates ‘Fourth Mondays’ to Community Cats

Reese McClanahan, Virginia, United States

South Central Spay Neuter clinic helps community cats everyday through spay/neuter but we also dedicate the fourth Monday of every month to community cats. We take in community cats every day for surgery, and give them a rabies vaccine and an eartip, but we needed to support trappers working entire colonies of cats. The Fourth (Monday Cat) Day is a project we started in 2017 to assist trappers with a day that was dedicated to a large number (40) of cats allowing them to trap an entire colony, as their biggest complaint was trying to get through a colony two cats at a time. This has allowed us to spay or neuter 3,696 eartipped cats in 21 months. We found that trappers worked together to coordinate their efforts, they were focused on getting entire colonies “fixed” and moving to the next and that they did not feel they had to “back track” to get stragglers. The trappers worked on Sundays and we met them to bring the cats in that afternoon, get them checked-in and ready for surgery on Monday. Any stragglers were trapped while the majority of the colony was away and brought in for surgery. Fourth (Monday Cat) Day is a day that we will keep through 2019. Hopefully the Fourth can be with you as well.