Animal Welfare Professionals

I'd like to hear from people who have "barn"/"working" cat programs who are in states this extreme weather. What are some solutions to relocating cats to ensure their physical welfare without sacrificing the opportunity to relocate and save a life?

We live in a place that gets down below freezing (for a couple days) in the winters with highs in the 110s during the summer. 

Our shelter has an outdoor space we call the bungalow, where we can house our working cats. This is a shed with a covered catio attached. We can give the cats enough blankets and close the door/windows in the winter to allow acclimation a good 8 months out of the year. (I know Austin uses SnuggleSafe disks during the coldest winter nights.) Blankets should be fleece, as towels absorb too much moisture from the air, and you can use plastic tubs filled with straw or fleece blankets for nest boxes. This will translate well to relocation areas. Place your relocation crate out of wind/drafts, put a tarp on the side to protect it further. If using a crate not in a larger structure, a plastic airline crate provides better protection than a wire crate.

Summer - I stopped placing cats from indoor-only homes into our bungalow once the daily highs were consistently above 90-95 degrees. Cats have higher body temps than us, and can more easily tolerate higher temps.

Our bungalow has a little extra protection from the sun on the west side due to the main building. It has a dirt floor outside, so we run water from a hose for a few minutes every morning to provide them with evaporative cooling. (They lay under a kuranda bed that sits a piece of kennel deck and all stay cool together that way.) You could do this if acclimating cats in a wire crate, as well. Fill a 1 gal jug with water and freeze. Cats will stay near the ice to stay cool. Ice in water bowls helps, too. Soak/spray a cotton sheet with water and drape over the wire crate for evaporative cooling. Place relocation crate in full shade with plenty of airflow. A crate placed into a stall of a barn is better than the private 10x10 shed with a cat flap that was set aside for kitties if relocating in the summer (although they will love it come winter). 

Since we have cats acclimated to our weather, I have actually held some of them back for a while, because we ended up with several working cat homes in a row that offered either indoor warehouse-type garage for acclimation, air conditioned house with crate on the back patio and offering to leave a window open that blew out into the crate, etc. Our indoor-only hoarding cats who came in during the summer got those homes because they weren’t adapted to the weather. A more exposed outdoor situation came up just last week, and the bungalow cats were better suited to that. Some had been with us up to 5 months. The cats went home just today (yay!) and the bungalow will probably be empty for about the next month or so, unless we get outdoor cats that can’t be SNR’d for some reason. 

Thanks so much for the suggestions. I am not really worried about winters here in Nevada but the summers are brutal, average high of 110. I like the idea of the cotton sheet soaked and frozen ice water. We do only use wired dog crate for the relocate temp housing so it should work nicely.

If anyone frArizonaona has any ideas I loved to hear them since your weather is simislar to ours.

Thank you SIstryker I just realized you are from PIMA in Arizona

We used to house our feral/barn cats indoors, which makes no sense at all, as they come from outdoors and go to outdoors. Finally I got permission to build a barn cat habitat outdoors. It has a roof and screen walls. The cats have wooden boxes filled with straw that can go with the cat. These boxes can be closed and double as carriers, hence eliminating the need to net the cats. It also helps to reduce stress that the cats can take their bedroom to the new place.

I am working on that as well but for now, I'd like to make sure that the cats we set up in new relocation sites are comfortable in their enclosure, not all sites have sheds or barns we look for shaded areas such as patios or collection of trees, garages. Some property owners buy portable coolers for the cats.