Animal Welfare Professionals

What is your shelter or group's policy on Return to Field for healthy but FIV+ cats?

No RTF or TNR for FIV+ cats. Any adoptable FIV+ cat is going to be adopted as special needs pets. Healthy ferals going through the TNR program are not tested for reasons stated by Alley Cat Allies. At the sheter we only had one cat that came in injured, and appeared adoptable, tested positive. Once he recovered it turned out he was truly feral. Unfortunately staff decided to euthanize him.

Same as Dorian - we typically don't FELV/FIV test healthy feral cats. 

We don't test any cats in our TNR program.  Spay and Neuter provides the healthiest outcome for them.  We follow Best Friends model and they do not recommend testing either. 

We don't test TRN cats either, unless they will be adopted through us. Our feeling is that FIV+ and FeLV+ cats have already exposed the colony, and we are doing the best thing we can--neutering them--to keep the spread of the disease in check.

We don't consider FIV much of a disease in a spayed/neutered group of cats. We allow our FIV+ cats to mingle with our FIV- cats unless someone is a fighter. FIV is only passed through sex, from which everyone is retired, and a DEEP bite penetrating a mucous membrane, 99.99% of the time associated with fighting over sex and territory, which spayed/neutered cats don't do. We have never had any transmission of FIV.

Not so with FeLV! If we take in an FeLV+ cat, we keep him/her separate until we get the cat adopted. However, in a community cat colony, again, we don't test unless the cat is ill, and we are doing the best thing we can--spay/neuter--to stop the spread of both diseases.