Hello, and welcome to a new feature of the Feral Fixers website; The Feral Blog. My name is Ted Semon and I’m on the Board of Directors of Feral Fixers. I’ll be writing short blurbs about what is going on in the ‘daily life’ of Feral Fixers and bring other Feral cat related stories to your attention. My take on things is meant to complement the “From the President” column (writings from our President, Tammy McAuley, which are more lengthy and in more depth about a particular subject).

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Today was the day of our first annual Frosty Claws event, and all I can say about it is “WOW!” WOW for the number of people who showed up and WOW for the amount of money we raised, and WOW for the way that everyone pitched in to help set things up and take things down and WOW for the whole event in general. A huge THANK YOU goes out to everyone who showed up and/or donated and/or did anything to help make this event the success it was!

 It didn’t start off on a high note, however. Several of us arrived at the venue a little bit before 11:00am in order to set up the event. Three of us (and it happened to be we three members of the Board of Directors of Feral Fixers; Kurt, Regina and myself) went up to the building entrance to open up the door so we could begin bringing stuff in. Regina had the key to the door; she put it in the lock, turned it and….. the key broke off in the lock! She didn’t turn it hard, she didn’t try to jimmy it (I was watching), it just broke!

Geez, what do we do now?

Regina dialed the venue's emergency number while Kurt worked on getting the door open without a key. I’m happy to say that he succeeded (obviously lessons learned from a mis-spent youth :)) and we were off and running. That was the worst thing which happened to us all day – everything else (well, except for that coffee-pot thingy…) was a success…

I’ll blog more about this event later, but for now, welcome to the Blog!

In the September/October 2008 issue of the Animal Sheltering Magazine (put out by HSUS), there is an article about how NACA (the National Animal Control Association) has adopted a more humane view towards Feral Cats.

While the article does not directly call for animal control agencies to adopt a Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) policy, it does now advocate for the 'management' of all '...feral, stray and owned cats in the community.'

Money quote when talking about the new attitude: "It’s recognizing that in some cases, certain jurisdictions and communities are more interested in maintaining a stable cat population than they are in simply bailing the ocean with a thimble."

The article is excellent and the new attitude at NACA is to be applauded.

(The picture is of Mark Kumpf, NACA President and is from the article - click on it for a larger version of the picture).