The Community Cat Coalition of Tulsa is an initiative of Oklahoma Alliance for Animals and local TNR groups to promote the spay and neuter and vaccination of community cats in Tulsa. They may be feral (unsocialized to humans) or friendly, may have been born into the wild, or may be lost or abandoned pets. Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Return (TNVR) is a Solution That Works for Everyone
Cats have lived outdoors in our country for hundreds of years—in fact, keeping indoor-only cats only became possible in the mid-20th century with the commercial marketing of kitty litter. It is unlikely that outdoor cats will ever not be a part of our current ecosystem. It does not decrease feral cat populations. Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Return (TNVR) does effectively reduce and stabilize feral cat populations. As with most outdoor cats across the country, Tulsa’s feral cats are healthy, but they are unadoptable, because they are not socialized to people. Any city’s catch and kill policy for feral cats leads to thousands of needless deaths in shelters each year, at considerable cost to taxpayers. Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Return is the only proven effective, humane and non-lethal approach to managing community cat populations. TNVR benefits the cats and the people in the neighborhoods where they live. The process is simple: free-roaming cats are humanely trapped and taken to a clinic for spay/neuter surgery and vaccination. They receive an ear tip — a small snip of the tip of the left ear — as an indicator they’ve been fixed. After recovery, they are returned to the same place from which they were trapped – their “home.” Most of these colonies are regularly supplied with fresh water and food by local citizens – the “community.” They are only returned if healthy and with a viable food source.
