Animal Welfare Professionals

Our organization is a "Friends of" to our local municipal shelter. Occansionally we take ownership of hospice/behavior issue dogs, so we fall into the rescue category.

We facilitate TNR of community cats in an effort to reduce intake at our local shelter.  I'm not sure if we should enter return-to-field stats in SAC (Shelter Animal Count). We subsidize spay/neuter of community cats on behalf of caregivers. We fund a portion of surgery cost or sometimes 100% of the costs. Should we update SAC with the cats we fully fund the TNR? We don't take ownership of the cats, but then the cats are not offically owned by anyone.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Penny 

Hi Penny, what a great 'friend' you are to your shelter!  If the cats are being admitted into the shelter and then sterilized and returned to field, those would be counted in SAC as both an intake and outcome.  If you are facilitating these surgeries outside of the shelter (asking the caretaker to go directly to the spay/neuter clinic and/or having your own volunteers TNR the cats) then those would not be counted.  SAC is looking for true intake and outcome numbers of animals entering the shelter system. Any animals that you can divert from being admitted into the shelter is a win, so even if they aren't counted in SAC, don't think of it as a bad thing!

This was a great question to pose because I can tell you when our group started to TNR 5 years ago we never gave ourselves credit (under Asilomar) for the work we did helping feral cats, and there were a lot of them.   When we started SAC, my lightbulb went on and realized those animals count as well.  The rule of thumb for us is any cat that breaks the threshold of our back door - gets counted even if it's out the same day.  This was a good realization to have because we are currently working under a grant from our community that includes helping return found cats to owners and helping owners with lost cats find them.  We do a lot of work posting these lost/found animals, helping connect owners with possible leads etc, etc.   Whether the cat is found (dead or alive) or never steps a paw in our building, our group has worked on behalf of that cat and spent resources, so for this particular grant, we give ourselves credit. 

We are a municipal shelter than contracts with an outside agency to do our TNR program. We count the cats as part of our intake and list them as TNR in our outcomes even though the actual surgery and return is done by a third party. We want to be fully transparent with SAC numbers.