Local cat groups have teamed up to hold the biggest one day neuter/spay event ever today in a effort to mitigate the coming springtime kitten population explosion. The well organized event will sterilize hundreds of cats in a whirlwind of coordinated activity.
As the one day Feral Cat Coalition clinic gets underway today, they have one goal in mind – to break their record of fixing 308 cats…IN ONE DAY. Rancho San Diego Animal Hospital is loaning their facility to the Feral Cat Coalition for the event. Several other organizations are pulling together to make this happen – NatCat (who you may remember from last week’s story on Gizmo), ECAR, SNAP, Animal Care Clinic, and many others will be sending in volunteers to participate. It will take some 80-90 volunteers to make it happen. FCC has already broken a record for any one clinic with 17 local vets set to volunteer their time this Sunday. People are coming from all over to help in this effort. NatCat is sending people from both their Spring Valley and Newport Beach locations to volunteer at this Sundays clinic.
These clinics are the wild west of spaying and neutering. They are intense and chaotic, but they accomplish a substantial amount towards the mission of reducing overpopulation in our county. Over population isn’t just an animal problem. National City, a hotspot for feral cats, allegedly spent 60k in 2010 euthanizing animals.
In collaboration with the FCC clinic, another record will be broken this weekend by East County Animal Rescue (ECAR). ECAR’s 3 cat trappers set out to trap some 70 cats over Friday and Saturday to be fixed at todays clinic. They worked through the night trapping cats throughout the streets and alleys of San Diego County to exceed their record of 52 cats trapped in a weekend
This Feral Cat Coalition photo album from a spay/neuter clinic held in September, 2011 shows the well organized team effort that makes it possible to do hundreds of surgeries in a single day.
East County Animal Rescue (ECAR) posted this photo album from a previous trapping operation. ECAR does extensive Trap-Neuter-Return of feral cats for the San Diego county community to help reduce the feral cat population. Josh Hirschmiller and his kids are all ECAR volunteers, and are some of the most experienced cat trappers in the area.
We look forward to learning how many cats were helped to stop contributing to the area’s overbreeding of homeless cats as a result of this ambitious project.
