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I thought I would share my own experiences with Feral cats, though they have only been in my life since hubby and I bought a new house!

First a little about me and hubby. I grew up with cats, and until I was 23 I was always around them. Then I went to college and when I came home from college found I was allergic to cats! I never knew while I was always with them, but the separation was enough to mean i couldn't tolerate long term association with them. Hubby has always been allergic to them. When we got married in 2001, it seemed fairly obvious that cats would never be a part of our lives.

After we got married I sort of got "into" reptiles and then into mice to raise to feed the reptiles and of course because I like the little furry critters too. We bought a new house in August of this year, complete with a "mouse house" for my furry and scaly friends. Shortly afteer we moved in we noticed that cats were hanging out in the side yard near the "mouse house". It didn't take long before we could see them in our back yard. Hubby started to croon to them and next thing I knew he was bringing home a big bag of catfood.

Now we have our group of cats, all of them with names. When we first moved in there was "Momma Kitty" who was seen nursing the 12 to 16 week old "babies". She seemed huge. Black, with a white face and tummy and legs. Two of her "kids" seemed most friendly, a long haired gray tabby with the same white face and belly, not to mention about 7 extra toes between her two front feet! And the other was a short haired gray tabby with no white. We called them Sparkle and Twinkle. Then one of their siblings decided he wanted to get in on the action. He was a short haired gray tabby with a perfect white face and paws, so we called him "Pretty Face". The fourth sibling makes short appearances but doesn't seem to like people too much. Hubby calls her CoCalico. All of these, Momma Kitty and her four babies, are willing to be fed, but not willing to be petted. Another visitor is Pantera, a male pure black tom cat who had obviously been strung up by the tail as he had a newly half amputated tail. He loves attention but rarely comes around. To round it all off, we have "Twinkle Twin" who looks like one of the "kids" but is obviously an old roughed up tom cat, a dullish gray tabby.

We've progressed to the point where the cats come into our kitchen to eat, even come into our living room to admire our snakes or our gerbils, and come into my mouse house when I am cleaning mouse cages and rat cages (and OH, they LIve for that occasional escaped mouse!)

We believe that Sparkle and Momma Kitty are both pregnant now. We are hoping to find out if there are any programs to help us to pay for getting them all fixed. We know we can catch them easily enough, and there are vets in our small time, but hubby and I are both high school teachers and do not have money to pay for multiple cat fixing. So we are going to do research to discover if there are any programs so that we can get the cats all fixed so that we don't have to have a plethora of cats calling our home theirs and breeding themselves into oblivion.

Anyway, thought I would share the story of the kitties who have decided we are there to serve them.

Below is a link to one of the Spay/Neuter listings. You might also check with your local animal shelter as many do provide assistance for altering feral cat colonies. It certainly sounds like you have found a way to have cats in your life after all - even if it is to serve them. That's the way it always is. As the old saying goes...cats were once worshiped as gods, they have not forgotten this.

Low Cost Spay/Neuter Resources

Thanks for the message! There was one place that showed as doing free spay/neuter for feral cats, it's about 70 miles away, but we still will take the effort if necessary. I'll call around to some of the area vets that aren't so far away, and to the humane society so that I can be sure there aren't any closer ones, and also see if they have a humane trap they can lend us to catch some of the more elusive ones. I'm sure I could catch four of the six or seven "regulars" but the others are too skittish. I'm glad to know that there are resources available, so we can get them fixed and keep them around as friends anyway.

Wow that is a lot of cats. When I lived in WA state we had a feral cat fund for getting feral cats spayed/neutored. The only thing we had to pay for was a 5 dollar rabies shot. I have heard it it better to try and catch and fix the males first because they can impregnant lots of females.

Good Luck.
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Jaime owned by
Mya the dog
and the cats:Crash, Moxie, Gabby and sometimes Tucker

Yeah, we do plan on catching the males and getting them fixed first. The nearest place that fixes feral cats for free is a sixty mile journey, and of course we have to CATCH the cats and don't have any cat carriers. So it becomes quite difficult. We have spring break coming up in March (Hubby and I are both high school teachers) so we might make plans to try to get them all in, or at least the males, one day during spring break. We figure that if we get at least the males fixed, that's a good job. Pretty much there are three established tom cats in the neighborhood. (We name them all, makes it easier when referring to them)... Agent Orange, Pantera, and Twinkle Twin... and two of the grown kittens are almost certainly males, and there is at least one other that we are not certain of. We're pretty sure that the momma kitty, her calico daughter, and possibly the other one are pregnant. It will be easier with kittens to get them in to be fixed, and we will try to find homes for them. Good thing is that we do have good exposure to the high school students of this small town. Between us, with hubby teaching Biology and myself teaching math, we teach pretty much all the kids in the area by the time a four year span has gone by.

But yes, we'll do what we can to keep our lovely feral kitties around, but keep them without progeny.