Yesterday, Sunday, we had six more cats processed at the PAWS-Chicago Spay/Neuter clinic. I brought the cats in and picked them, and so did 'double-duty' yesterday...
All was normal, all was routine, and I had them back to Tammy's for recovery by 6:45pm - nice and early.
With these six cats, Feral Fixers has processed 84 cats for the month, 134 for this year and 1,613 overall.
'March madness' continues - we hope that getting to all of these cats early in the year (in prime breeding season) will help us continue to drive the numbers of Feral Cats taken in by DuPage County Animal Care & Control (DCACC) downward. As our President noted in her monthly article (March Notes) and, as I have blogged about before, this past year saw a 35% reduction in the number of feral cats taken in by DCACC. We fervently hope that our efforts have played a role in this. We have every reason to think they do, but these reductions will have to continue for the next few years for us to be sure.
In 2007, DCACC took in 348 feral cats. In 2008, despite our best efforts (we did 525 cats that year), that number increased to 485. For 2009, however, DCACC took in 'only' 314 feral cats - a number below even what they took in in 2007. We think that this decrease was due to both the total number of cats we sterilized in 2009 (868) and also due to the fact that we got to many of them early in the year, in breeding season (we did 202 by the end of April, 2009). We are trying to repeat that this year by, again, doing a lot of them in March and April. Let's hope this continues the downward trend of cats being brought into DCACC...