Animal Welfare Professionals

The two major shelters in our city have interpreted Capacity for Care to mean that when residents call to report kittens in their backyard, they tell them to leave the kittens there "until they are weaned", unless they know the Mom cat is injured or deceased.

They used to call volunteer trappers who would go out and assess the situation. These volunteers found it easier to trap the Mom cat by baiting the trap with her kittens (easiest when the kittens are not yet moving fast) and fostering them in private homes, where even feral cats would relax and take great care of their kittens (not all homeless cats are feral).

Left outside, these kittens face many dangers - coyotes, raccoons, irate humans, cars, disease, abandonment (Mom ill or deceased). It's generally known only 25%-50% will survive to adulthood.

Left outside "until they are weaned" makes kittens and their Mom much more difficult to trap. Thus, Mom (and soon, her kittens) will continue to produce more kittens.

These shelters are citing statistics about the stress feral Moms face IN SHELTERS. They say nothing about stress in fosters. Further, they are seeming to discourage fosters from taking in homeless Mom cats and kittens. They are not calling volunteer trappers when a Mom cat is found, only when kittens are found that are running around.

We're really struggling to understand this thinking as we live in a city with abundant resources to care for homeless cats.

Are other shelters leaving homeless Moms and their kittens "out in the wild?"

Could someone point me to online accessible studies regarding the stress of feral Moms in shelters? Did they include feral Moms in foster homes?

Thanks for posting. I'm also interested in peer reviewed research on this topic. Our local shelter has adopted this policy too.

That's a step up from my local shelter. They see feral cats as wildlife, which I get, and do not respond to calls for them whatsoever. If someone is evicted and puts their cats outside, they will not respond since they're not "free roaming." The only time they respond, and this is very rare, is if it's injured or sick. I'm no fan of this place at all.

In my state, felines are explicitlly not to be considered wildlife. They are a domesticated species. Thus, it is legal to feed community cats while it is not legal to feed wildlife.

I have seen statements like the average lifespan of a house cat is 13-18 years, while the average lifespan of a cared-for community cat is 5 years, and the average lifespan for a cat on its own is 2 years. Further, kittens left out "in the wild" have a 25-50% chance of surviving 6 months, which is when they can begin bearing their own litters.

Thus, we feel it is extremely cruel not to help out homeless moms with kittens, especially since coyotes (as well as raccoons) are now a common sight in our urban environment.

I can understand shelters not wanting to deal with feral moms, but inhibiting/preventing volunteers from doing so?... Why?...

From a behavior point of view, it is best for kittens to be with mom growing up. There is no better way for them to learn to be well-adjusted cats. Also, the golden window of early socialization for kittens is between 2 and 7 weeks. Finally, I would also add that based on my experience fostering many feral moms with kittens for our shelter, most of these mom cats are pretty stressed, no matter how good the foster home. So, taking these factors together, I would agree that that allowing mom to raise the kittens outside and then capturing them at the age of 6-ish weeks, when fully weaned, and TNRing mom at that time a very good schedule. 

I do not find it right now, there was an article by Koret/UC Davis (or maybe Cornell?) on the topic this year, which had a similar recommendation. 

Ah, found the Koret article: https://www.sheltermedicine.com/library/resources/?r=is-there-a-right-time-to-trap-a-feral-mom-with-kittens

I'm not talking about fostering feral moms with their kittens in a shelter, but in a quiet, private home with an experienced foster who is able to socialize the kittens as well.

The experienced volunteer fosters in my city report that, left alone in a quiet space, the feral moms show little signs of stress. Any stress they experience is far less than the stress of trying to protect their kittens from outside dangers while having to hunt for food.

if you could find a reference to a study that compares an appropriate foster environment (not a generic shelter environment) to an outdoor environment in regards to the stress level of feral moms, I'd appreciate it.

I *am* a volunteer who has fostered many nursing feral mothers with their litters in a private home, and I have been doing that for years now for an open-admission, animal-control-contractor shelter in a major city. In my experience, even in a quiet home, with a proper setup and providing the felines with all the resources they need, keeping un-socialized cats confined while nursing a litter is typically highly stressful for them. Based on everything I have observed over the years, I wholeheartedly agree with Dr Schumacher in the article I linked. 

We exclusively work with outdoor and community cats, so 95% of our kittens come from feral moms (usually the local shelters are willing to take a friendly stray with babies). In my personal experience (and from what I've seen with our fosters), even when they're brought in at 5-6 weeks old, kittens are pretty weary of humans.

We've had enough 5ish week old kittens come in and refuse to "socialize" that I would be very weary of purposefully leaving them outside that long. That 5-10% of kittens are a huge drain on our resources since they take a lot longer to adopt out (time, money, les income since they often get an adult fee or no fee) and fosters feel terrible about the idea of putting them in a barn (and the emotional toll on your fosters is a resource!). We literally still have a couple of those kittens from last fall that barely made that socialization "cut" (and now they're even less adoptable because they're not as cute as kittens anymore).

We have adapated a policy of bringing in feral mom's with their kittens and them releasing her back to original location if safe. If not she goes to a barn or other location. The kittens are then raised to adopt. This has been successful for us. Our fosters are awesome and new fosters are given ferals and kittens in double end to end or side by side cages for safety. It all works for moms and kittens and fosters.

We do the same thing. We provide a large dog kennel with a small carrier in it for mom to raise the babies in. Kennels with two doors are best. In my experience, 90% of moms are just going to hide when a person comes in or wants to open the kennel. We will recommend bite-proof gloves, but have a lot of cheaper DIY options.

You can close/secure the carrier door using a large yard stick or broom pushed through the kennel bars to lock mom in the carrier if needed.

You can also use a spatula to retrieve the kittens from mom.

Both are demonstrated really well in this video from Flatbush Cats!