Chattanooga Feral Cat Alliance

09/03/2026

This week we provided TNR for eight cats at the Beaches Colony: New Smyrna, Laguna, Clearwater, Garden Key, Daytona, Rockaway, Coney and Atlantic! Clearwater received a spay-abort, which is always the most compassionate choice for a pregnant cat. We say it all the time but it bears repeating: it’s estimated that 75% of kittens born outside will die before they reach six months of age, including kittens whose mothers die during labor. And especially here in Chattanooga, shelters and rescues are full of friendly cats and kittens needing homes, so there’s no place for more to go.

🌟 Our mission as a TNR nonprofit is to humanely reduce overpopulation and improve the lives of community cats, which means we will always choose spay-abort over adding more kittens to an already overwhelming population.
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A big thank you to Camp Chihuahua 🐶 💕 for donating during our Fix Ferals by Fall fundraiser to name this colony! If you’d like to donate to help us continue spaying/neutering and vaccinating community cats, the link to support us is in our bio. We pay anywhere from $35 to $100 per cat depending on the clinic, so every donation helps.

08/27/2026

This week we pulled off a rare feat: we managed to trap every single cat in a colony in just one trapping effort! It helped a lot that the colony caretaker had gotten everyone on a very strict feeding schedule while on our waitlist, and then the TNR stars aligned and in less than two hours we were able to trap everyone in the Star Trek Colony: Beverly Crusher and Jean-Luc Picard plus their kids Guinan, William Riker, Data, Worf and Wesley Crusher. Mama Beverly has had two other litters, so we’re especially glad to have been able to get her spayed before she had another.

🌟 A huge shoutout to our longtime supporter and friend Greg, who donated during our Fix Ferals by Fall campaign and came up with the Star Trek theme. If you’d like to donate to provide names or themes for future colonies, please visit the link in our bio! Donations allow us to continue to spay/neuter and vaccinate against rabies—we pay anywhere from $35 to $100 per cat depending on the clinic, so every donation helps.

08/16/2026

Chanel and Dior are still waiting for their forever home! These girls have been doing great in foster for the last two months, developing confidence and learning how to do “cat stuff” from the resident adult cats in the home. Their favorite activities include chasing each other up and down the stairs, running after mouse toys, napping in the sun together and eating Churu before bedtime. They get along great with the resident cats and dog (a lazy senior), but still prefer to spend their playing and napping time together. They will explore the house separately for a bit, but call for each other if they’re out of sight for too long.

The perfect home for them would be quiet, calm and patient. While they’ve developed a lot of confidence in their foster home, they had a rough start to life in a community cat colony and they’ll need time to adjust to a new environment. We’re not looking for just any home for these girls: we’re looking for the right home with an adopter who understands that earning their trust could take some time.

We’re accepting applications for them to be adopted together; if you’re interested, the link to apply is in our bio.

🐈 Their stats 🐈‍⬛
• 5 months old
• Spayed
• Fully vaccinated
• Microchipped
• FeLV/FIV negative

08/13/2026

We’re celebrating 6️⃣0️⃣ cats trapped, neutered and returned since our Fix Ferals by Fall grant program started on May 15! 🎉 Sixty cats TNRd in just under three months is a huge deal for our small team, which is made up of two trappers and one very dedicated early-morning clinic transport volunteer. We’ve been hustling to get through our very long waitlist, and we really appreciate our regular TNR clinic along with our private vet partners for accommodating more surgeries than usual this summer. We’re really excited to have helped so many cats so far!

This week we TNRd Oliver Twist, a young kitty who showed up at CHAFCA headquarters a while back and was quickly accepted into the colony by long-timers Uncle Meat and Meemaw. We also returned to the Catering Colony and were able to TNR Chicken Cordon Bleu, Caesar Salad and Cobb Salad.

📝 With more than 100 cats currently on our waitlist for TNR, we’ve temporarily closed our request form until we can work through that backlog. If you’re feeding community cats and want to get started with TNR yourself, please reach out to us! We’re happy to offer guidance, advice and best practices to get you started.

08/04/2026

Heads up to anyone who was planning to trap a community cat for surgery tomorrow! McKamey’s Community Cat Day is on pause this week.

🐾 TNR Services Update

Community Cat/TNR services will be paused on Wednesday, August 5th. Services will resume next week.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding! 💙🐱

07/30/2026

This week we returned to the Catering Colony, which we’d stabilized after TNRing 20+ cats back in 2024. But unfortunately when nearby folks bring free, unfixed kittens home and then put them outside once they’re not young and cute anymore, they’ll find their way to the largest food source in the neighborhood and start making more cats.

Luckily the caretakers kept our contact info from a few years ago, and we were able to come out and TNR five of the eight new cats this week. Cheesecake, Hot Dog, Pizza Roll, Hamburger and Patty Melt all received surgery, rabies vaccines and ear tips. Can y’all believe that everyone but Hamburger is a girl and NOBODY was pregnant?! We’re buying lotto tickets this weekend.

Hot Dog had a wicked polyp removed from her ear thanks to the meticulous vet at McKamey Animal Center, and she also got an antibiotic injection to help her feel better. She’s probably experiencing all new sounds in stereo now, that thing was so large. 😅

The caretakers warned us that Bagel Bite, a kitten, had started limping this past weekend and sure enough he was found to have a fractured humerus bone (and an upper respiratory infection). Our friends at Felty’s Feline Friends accepted him into their rescue since he’s no longer a candidate for return to the colony, and he’s receiving top-notch care while in medical foster with Blue House Cats 💕. He’s already purring up a storm, so we’re confident he’ll heal up well and get adopted into a loving home once he’s ready.

07/23/2026

We rounded out a busy week of TNR by returning the five additional cats we trapped for surgery, rabies vaccines and ear tips back to their respective colonies 🏡 . From the Matrix Colony we had The Merovingian, The Oracle (who received a spay abort and is finally done with having multiple litters every year), and Link. We also helped out Chance the Napper (who was also pregnant) and Philippe (a very large, very mouthy boy), two kitties from nearby colonies whose caretakers were able to do the trapping while we were otherwise occupied at the Matrix Colony.

There are only a couple kittens left at the Matrix Colony who weigh enough for TNR, but they’re totally on to our game at this point so we’re going to take a break from trapping there and let things get back to normal before returning. The cats learn to recognize our car, our smell, our voices, the sound of the traps, but doing what we call a “colony reset” and returning after 2-3 weeks will usually result in trapping the remaining cats. 🤞

This summer has been a busy one—for us and all of our friends in other area TNR groups—so please be patient with all of us if you’re requesting help. CHAFCA currently has more than 100 cats on our waitlist for TNR, and we’re working as hard as we can to get to everyone as quickly as we can. We’re prioritizing colonies with pregnant cats, but also colonies whose cats are showing up to eat around 5 p.m. consistently every day. Since we usually trap once a week after we get off work, and only have a handful of guaranteed low-cost surgery spots, we need to be as sure as we can that we’ll be able to fill those spots when we come out to trap. Please keep that in mind when requesting our help.

📣 We’d like to give a huge shoutout to our vet clinics, especially this week, for working with us to provide efficient and high-quality care for the community cats we bring in for surgery. Although these feral kitties live outside and aren’t owned as pets, they still deserve the same level of care as inside cats. We’re so appreciative of the vets and clinic staff for always treating them with respect and making their visits as stress-free as possible. 💕

07/23/2026

After an extra day of recovery, mama Neo was returned to the Matrix Colony and reunited with her friends and family. This lady cranked out litter after litter over the years, but not anymore! From now on, she’ll get to lounge on her favorite rocking bench and eat meals just for herself. We’re so happy (and relieved) we were able to help her.

07/21/2026

We don’t like to brag, but y’all we are 🎲 on a roll 🎲 at the Matrix Colony! We started on the colony last week and TNRd four cats, and this Sunday we spent both morning and evening trapping and were able to get Mouse, Tank, Switch, Dozer, Apoc and Neo—the very pregnant, very smart cat who’d evaded us many times the week before. Everyone was spayed/neutered, vaccinated and ear-tipped, including Neo who received a spay abort. The five pictured here were returned home this morning (swipe to watch Switch and Tank bolt out of their traps 🏃).

And then right after she returned Mouse, Dozer and Apoc, Blue House Cats 💕 noticed a few others hanging around who we hadn’t trapped yet. She had a hunch, set the traps, and within minutes had trapped three more cats to go in for surgery tomorrow! 🙀 You’ve got to trap while the trappin’ is good, even if it’s not on the morning agenda. (This is another reason we focus on trapping in neighborhoods near where we live; the newly trapped cats could be conveniently dropped off at CHAFCA headquarters before everyone had to be at work.)

Since Neo isn’t stressed in the large trap, we decided to hold her an extra day to give her a bit of added recovery time indoors (out of the heat) with a few more hearty meals. She’s been eating well and purring when we check in on her, but she no doubt will be glad to get back to her colony later. 🥰

This makes a total of 13 cats we’ve trapped at the Matrix Colony! We’ve still got a few more, and then we’ll need to wait on some kittens to make weight before they qualify for TNR. We’ll be back at it tonight, so wish us luck that our hot streak continues!

07/20/2026

Last week we started a new trap-neuter-return project at The Matrix Colony where we TNRd Trinity, Morpheus, Cypher and Agent Smith. We tried for days to trap Neo, a pregnant cat who evaded every trick we threw at her: trap training, multiple drop traps, fried chicken, tuna, the smelliest dry and wet food, etc. She even watched her own kittens go into a drop trap multiple times and did not care. After several hours spent over several days, we finally got her Sunday evening when we discovered a neighbor several houses down could PICK HER UP! Nobody else has ever been able to even touch her in the years she’s been at this colony. 😅 She’s at the clinic today, along with five others we trapped yesterday.

This colony has been a good example of the importance of talking with neighbors to see who knows what about the cats. In addition to discovering the neighbor who could pick up Neo, we found two others on the block who’ve also been feeding the cats for years on their own porches. Once we located all of the feeders, we realized this colony is bigger than we initially thought. But now we’re all on the same page and have a game plan moving forward, and most importantly we can let everyone know to not feed when we come back to trap again. TNR really takes a village, and everyone has their part to play to ensure the cats get the help they need.