Animal commission checks in on community cat backlog

The Austin Animal Center is working with the Austin Humane Society to increase its spay/neuter capacity and make progress on its backlog of calls about community cats, according to a report from the Animal Advisory Commission’s spay/neuter work group to the full commission on Jan. 9. Community cats refer to free-roaming cats that may be stray or feral. Many live in colonies that have taken up permanent residence in urban neighborhoods.

Commissioner Amanda Bruce, who is on the working group, briefed the commissioners on a recent meeting the group had with Austin Humane Society staff and Austin Animal Center staffers who now work on the city’s community cat program.

The group did a walk-through of the Austin Humane Society facility, heard a historical overview of the community cat program and learned about the trajectory of the program through the eyes of the AAC, now that there are dedicated staff in place to oversee it.

In 2019, the commission voted to create a working group to look at problems with the city’s process for sterilizing, vaccinating, microchipping and releasing community cats back into their colonies.

“One of the things this commission has been charged with is finding ways to increase spay/neuter capacity across the multiple forms of spay/neuter that we contract with,” Bruce said.

AAC is currently catching up on a backlog of calls from the community about colonies of cats in the field. At one point, the backlog included 400 cats. Bruce reported that a staff member has taken responsibility for going through the backlog and it is now down to around 200.

“He’s reaching out to people who have called, working on getting cats trapped and delivered to the community cat program at AHS, and looking to clear contacts that have already been made so there can be some more proactive programming coming from AAC with regard to community cats,” she said.

Bruce said there also appears capacity to grow the city’s partnership with the Austin Humane Society, which is contracted to spay/neuter approximately 1,800 community cats each year. AHS experienced staffing turnover during the pandemic, and has been working on its ability to get back up to speed.

“With the current numbers, with the new AAC staff on board, they’re tracking to do about 2,000 cats per year,” Bruce said. “And it sounds like there is capacity within their systems to expand that and there’s demand for that.”

Discussions between the parties are still ongoing, but Bruce praised the project trajectory and the working relationship between both organizations.

The working group is also slated to look into AAC’s spay/neuter voucher program to learn more about how it works and is budgeted. Members will meet with nonprofit veterinary care provider Emancipet next month to discuss how the pandemic affected its capacity and contract, and to find out what the organization expects to be able to produce going forward.

Chair Craig Nazor noted that the Texas Attorney General’s Office is currently considering the legality of spay/neuter programs that rely on trapping and releasing animals – called TNR, for trap, neuter, release. “It seems to me like that would really affect any kind of spay/neuter program for community cats,” he said. “It’s like a dark cloud over the horizon.”

He concluded: “I’ll be very interested to see what you come up with because I think this is a difficult aspect, particularly in Texas where animals are owned, or property, and the way that affects how quickly and efficiently we can do spay/neuter.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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