Welcome to Animal Posse, the podcast dedicated to the people and rescues making a difference in the lives of animals. Okay, so joining me today is Erin and Cori, and they are feral cat colony caretakers, and TNR advocates. So hi ladies, how are you? We're good. How are you? I'm good. I know y'all just got done feeding cats?

Yes.

How long does it take you to go feed all the cats? Before we get into discussing what exactly y'all do?

I guess between an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half.

How did y'all get into feeding cats and doing TNR?

They actually put out a call for help because they were losing their. Colony caretaker. Yeah,

but start before that. At the hotel. At the hotel. Oh yeah. Both times. Both places. The same exact thing has happened.

We started at a hotel first and they called for help. So we said we'd do it, except they didn't tell us how many cats so we started feeding and trapping. We have been doing it since 2011 and we are down to three cats at the hotel. Over that period of time. Some have got adopted, we lost some, and then others have just wandered off and found another colony.

Where was the call put out that y'all first saw it to go apply to help these cats?

Facebook.

Before that, were you ever involved in taking care of cat colonies?

Nope.

No, not really. We just feeding at our house 'cause we live in a subdivision that borders an apartment complex. And we have a lot of abandoned cats from there. And they just migrate into our yard. So we feed 'em and trap 'em. And we've been doing that since we moved there in 2003.

I know apartments can be a big problem. I deal with that near my home too.

Yeah. And the apartments that we live by, they're not cat friendly so we're not allowed to go in there and trap. So the apartment complex has a huge cat problem.

I'm sure y'all are putting a dent in it though.

We try. We try. Yeah. We try. We set traps in our yard. Then we have a couple of neighbors that do it too. So they trap as well. And then when we see them, like other places outside the gate where we do feed outside the gate of the apartment complex, we trap 'em there. So we'll sit and do a, mainly a drop.

Do you find the apartment is a problem in general, just like you can never catch up almost with the apartments because of people moving in and just abandoning animals when they move out and not spaying and neutering?

Yes. Our biggest area we feed is an abandoned mall and there are restaurants along the road into the mall. We caught all the cats at this restaurant. They had three mamas with all kind of babies, caught them all, got 'em fixed and into a rescue, and now we have two more mamas there with five babies that we're basically starting over

and it's right next to the apartment complex.

I don't find a lot of people bring up apartment complexes. I find personally that the apartment complexes seem to be like the biggest problem.

They are. And part of the huge problem is these management companies do not want you trapping. They don't want you feeding, they don't want you trapping. But the residents of the apartment complex, they wanna feed the cats. Because they have all of these cats in their area and. They just feel bad for them.

I wish that there was some kind of way to get them on board, because I wanna have a place for people to move in. That's, of course, pet friendly so they can go move in pets to an apartment, but at the same time, they just get out of control so fast at these apartments, like you said, because of the management companies. And them allowing pets, but not enforcing, spay, neutering of the pets that the people have.

And some of these apartments are short term apartments and when they leave their cats. And we have that huge problem. We've noticed that problem since we moved in, in 2003. Most of our cats that we do see in our street all come from the apartment. Yeah. And I wanna say 99% of them are not fixed.

Yeah. See that's the same thing by me. Like I try to catch up. If I see 'em, I go out, I start trapping right away. But, it's never ending. You can never catch up. 'cause as soon as somebody else moves in, that's it. Then you see kittens again.

And then they come from the apartments. They either come to my house, 'cause my house is between the apartments and the mall. So the apartment's right in the middle of us, so if they don't come to my house, they come to the mall. And

we started with two cats at the mall. We are now over 50.

Wow.

And the majority of 'em are fixed, but it's just never ending because we always have more cats. We have a brand new, what, five, six month old baby. We saw yesterday. No clue where this baby came from. And

all the cats in that one area are fixed. Every single one of 'em. Don't know where this baby came from.

He's probably a dump. Majority of our cats are dumps. We have one, his name is Julius. Beautiful Young Orange Tabby. We grabbed him to get him fixed and have his mouth looked at 'cause he was having a problem dropping food. So we brought him to the vet. The vet got him ready to fix and he was already fixed, but he did not have an ear tip. And the vet said he was such a sweet, friendly cat that he belonged to someone, but they just dumped him at the mall.

I know y'all were trying to get him checked for a chip. Were y'all able to check?

He is not chipped. No. And. It's just, he's a wonderful, beautiful little cat, but they're always showing up.

We had one man stopped her in the middle of feeding one day and asked if he could bring his three cats. The next day we had three new cats, caught 'em all beautiful orange, fluffy cat. Leo is just beautiful. He's got that medium long hair. Big, fluffy tail. He talks up his arm to you. He was one of the ones. Him. Mr. Gray. And Gail. And Gail. Now Gail is a very odd looking cat. I don't know why these people wanna get rid of these cats 'cause they're absolutely gorgeous. Gail looks like a Russian blue with silver eyes. He is beautiful.

I have never seen a cat that looks like Gail. Ever. He's just so odd looking you when he's sitting there looking at you, you cannot see his eyes because they are the exact same color as him.

He's beautiful. Got 'em all trapped and fixed and brought 'em right back to the mall.

Okay, so let's get to the mall then. So y'all started at a hotel? How is it that you got hooked up with the mall?

Same story. They put a call out on Facebook to feed these two cats at the mall. 'Cause their caretaker was moving to Atlanta to take care of her mother. So we were like, yeah, we can take care of these two that's right around the corner from my house. And that was Beauty and Tiger. Who we just recently found out Tiger was a little girl 'cause they were already both fixed by the time we were feeding them. And that was in 2016 maybe. And then we had a third one show up. She just showed up. We don't know where she came from. We called her Smelly. Smelly was a pain. No matter what we did to try and trap her, she would get on top of the trap and just lay there the entire time. We'd trap her every single time. She'd get on top of the trap and just lay there.

Didn't matter if it was a regular trap or a drop trap.

Smelly was on top. We called her smelly because she couldn't smell. We'd put her food down and have to literally show her where her food was 'cause she couldn't find it by smelling. It was the funniest thing. Biggest talker in the world and. We tried for years catching her, never did. And she had a litter of three and then a, another litter of four. And we trapped all them. They're all fixed now. We call 'em the juvie. And people just then started seeing the cats there, and then they started dumping.

Was the mall open and operational when y'all first started?

Oh yes. The mall didn't close until 2021 after Hurricane Ida. One time we have a little one there named Crooky. She has a crooked tail, so her name's Crooky. She got into the mall while it was still open and one, and thank goodness she comes when we call her. Because we just opened the doors one night when the mall had closed, the manager had let us in and we just called her and here she came. So we got her out pretty quick 'cause she was ready to eat.

When the fire marshal would come check the building, crooky would go with the manager in the fire marshal and walk around the building for him to check all the fire extinguishers or the sprinkler systems. She'd go for a walk with him.

She was his assistant. Sometimes you need those feline assistance.

That's right. Right now the police department, when people break into the mall, they call 'em the guard cats because most of the time when somebody breaks in, the cats get in and by the cameras in the mall that we watch we can tell where the door is. The door that's open because of the cat that's in the mall. We know where that cat's from 'cause we know all of our cats.

That's what I was gonna ask. So you have over 50 now? Yes. Okay. And they all have names?

Pretty much.

The majority do, yes.

And as far as getting involved, when you first got involved, even with the hotel, like who taught you how to trap, was that something that You'all learned on your own?

YouTube.

Yeah, we taught ourselves. 'cause there was really nobody to show us how to trap back then. 'cause TNR was not popular when we started at the mall. Uhhuh or at the, actually at the hotel. TNR wasn't popular then back then. Now that it's gotten to be known now. Quite a few people do it but when we first started in 2011. There wasn't a lot of people trapping at that point.

And today we do have more trappers, but they're so overwhelmed. It's unbelievable how many trappers are, I'm on this Facebook group the community cat page, and every day they are trapping cats and they're talking 30 cats a day, 40 cats a day, and they're just bringing them in to get fixed. Thank goodness we have the. TNR program, where in our area it's free. It's just, the trappers are so overwhelmed and there's not enough of us.

And then it seems too, like we said earlier, no matter how much you trap, it's hard to even see a dent in it.

We actually had one entire, now the mall we feed at is 700,000 square feet. Just the mall, not the outbuildings. The outbuilding stores that are still open, that's not included in the 700,000 square feet, but the mall itself is 700,000 square feet. We had one entire side totally fixed. Everybody had been TNR and we can't say that anymore. Because that's the side the apartments are on. And every summer we see these certain cats that are coming to the mall and then they go right back to the apartments. I'll tell her, I'll tell Cori. I'll be like, Hey, look, there's a little tribal orange one. And we know where he's from. He's from the apartments. and 'cause we'll see him over there. And then every now and then we'll see him over by us and then all of a sudden we have Siamese kitten. We don't have a Siamese cat at the mall at all, but we have Siamese kittens now. Thank goodness we were able to catch all of them. And they went to rescue the Siamese went to one rescue, the black one got adopted from us. 'cause we work with our vet. When we get kittens, they actually go into the cages at the vet and they get adopted through the vet. They work very well with us. It's VCA. And they also work with us when we need a vet emergency, all I have to do is call and say I'm coming and they're waiting for me, which they work really well with us. But we got, I have two of cookies, babies at my house. Because no matter what we did the two grays, we could not get them adopted. Nobody wanted gray tabby's. So now I have Humphrey and Dexter who turned three last month. Yeah. Last month they turned three. So no four. They turned four. 'cause they were born in 2021 right before Hurricane Ida. But yeah,

it's just everybody wants exotic looking cats now. Yes. They don't want regular gray tabbies anymore. An orange or a tuxedo or a calico or a torty. Yeah. They don't want regular gray tabbies.

Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. And it's sad too because your plain average looking cats are usually your best cats.

They are, Dexter and Humphrey are a blast and a half, and Dexter is probably one of the sweetest cats I have ever seen. I call him, I have a, an older gentleman at my house named Tips, who's an orange and white. And then I have my little gentleman who is Dexter. Dexter is just, he'll come up, he'll cuddle, he wants to lay on you. You go to the window and he's coming to climb up you to, for you to hold him. 'cause he wants you to hold him by the window so he can look for lizards. They are the best cats. And Dexter has the prettiest teal eyes I have ever seen. He has his mama's eyes. Cookie is still at the mall, but but they're beautiful and they're the best cats.

Yeah. It's a shame. And I've been on a run of simes mixes lately. I don't understand what's going on. It just seems every time I get a kitten, it's a Siamese mix and

we actually have a new Siamese at the mall. We named him Sammy. We have no idea where he came from.

Yeah and usually those are the easiest ones to get adopted, but you also get a lot of people that want 'em just because, oh, I'm looking for a Siamese. They don't think about the temperament, they don't think about any of that. All they think about are the looks, and I've had people inquire on mine and they're like, oh, what does the mom and dad look like? And I'm like, I have no idea. I'm like, the mom might have been a tabby, she was t and r, but I'm like, I have no idea who the dad was. I'm like, this isn't a breeder.

It's so funny 'cause. The, when we first caught cookies, baby, she had two Siamese and we called a friend of ours who runs a kitten rescue and the first thing she says is, bring me to Siamese. I have a waiting list. Yep. And they got adopted super fast, but the other three, not so much.

Feeding all these cats at the mall, what are some of the challenges, aside from people dumping animals that you face?

The cost, it comes out of our own pockets.

So you're not a 5 0 1 C3?

No. Everything that we feed them, comes out of our paychecks. They have to go to the vet, comes out of our paychecks. And we are very big on if there is a cat hurt or a cat sick, they're going to the vet. When we first noticed Julius dropping his food, the little orange one at the mall, two days, we grabbed him. And got him to the vet. Now we thought he still had to be fixed, but he had only been there a couple of weeks. So we were like, okay, Julius has to be fixed and he's dropping food. He can't eat, he's in pain. We had Julius, what, five minutes We put the drop trap there and five minutes we had him come to find out he is fixed. But they gave him an antibiotic shot. We had his teeth cleaned and. That day and a pain shot and brought him back. But all of that comes out of our own pocket.

And how much food do you go through?

About five 30 pound bags a week. And about 120 cans of cat food. Wet food.

Wow. So how much money on food alone? Monthly.

Monthly. Oh, I gotta think about that. You're talking a 30 pound bag is usually $27, a 60 can box of canned food is $43. $43. So we're talking 150 in cat food a week and almost $90 in wet food a week.

Wow. That's not including

vet bills.

Yeah, I can imagine With the vet bills added on top of that.

Yeah. Julius was 300,

$261. Yeah.

What other kind of veterinary emergencies have y'all had with these?

We had one, we actually just had to recently put down she was the original mall cat. Her name was Beauty. She was my super senior. We went on a Tuesday and fed her. She was still eating, still getting around, but I noticed flies and she was longhaired. So I'm like, okay, maybe she got something in her hair, went back on Wednesday, couldn't find her, and then I saw Leo my longhaired fluffy orange cat looking down at something. So I pulled over by Leo and I'm like, what are you looking at? And there was beauty. I'm like, oh, I found beauty. And I said, I'm gonna go down and feed her. Erin goes, please tell me she's alive. I said, yeah, she's alive. She's looking at me. So I went down to feed her and I noticed more flies and I fed her and she just turned her nose up at it. So we grabbed her. I called the vet right then and there, and my vet's bring her, just bring her. Put her in a trap. I'd never been able to touch beauty ever. I just picked her up and put her in the trap, got her to the vet the doctor's okay, let's just take a look. We may not have to put her down. Maybe she just has a wound somewhere that's infected. When we turned her over, she had holes in her stomach full of maggots.

She had cancer.

The tumors burst.

So you're talking, wait, that was 230. That was $200. And then another one big boy had a cat bite on his foot. So we had to trap him, get him fixed, and have his foot cleaned. Antibiotics. Romeo was probably our biggest, Romeo, was at the hotel. Beautiful. Flame Point, Siamese blind as a bat. Romeo couldn't see nothing, but he was the alpha cat over at the hotel. He ruled everybody. We took care of Romeo from the very beginning, at the hotel 2011. And two years ago we went to feed him and he was wobbly and Romeo was prone to ear infections. So we're like, okay, maybe it's an ear infection. We did everything for a month and a half to get him better. Even hospitalizing him at the vet for what, four or five days. And no matter what Dr. G did, he wasn't getting better. He cost us probably couple of thousand. Couple of thousand dollars.

We wound up having to put him down.

Yeah. Dr. G thinks he had brain cancer. Most of our hotel cats. That's what they die of. Cancer. Yes. Majority of them died of cancer and

nobody can figure out why. That's crazy. See, I just lost one of my boys and they are speculating. He had a heart tumor. Yeah. So it was like super fast, super unexpected.

And that's how the cats at the hotel were. You're talking super fast. We wouldn't even know they were sick. One day we went over and we called her mama Cat, and then we had a grandma. We had grandma cat, and we had red mama cat. We saw blood on her. We grabbed her, threw her in the car, took her to the vet. It was cancer. Her tumor had burst.

Wow. That is crazy.

Grandma had cancer on her spine.

Now this is all one family. Uhhuh, this is grandma, mama, son,

red. They took his leg off because he had cancer in his leg and he didn't survive recovery.

And they all lived in. One area of the hotel,

is this like an industrial area that it was in?

No. It's right next to the interstate between a canal and, a major highway, but it's restaurants, hotels, there's nothing.

Oh, that's crazy because usually you don't see that too as much in like an outdoor cat, yeah. It's usually other things, like respiratory, those types of things. That's just insane.

Out of our 50 cats, we only had to put one down that had respiratory issues. Her lungs filled with fluid. We think she had FIP. She was the only one. The only one out of all the 50 cats, but the majority of them that did die on us. The majority were cancer. Of course, you know the vet bills added up there. Oh yeah, definitely. One cat at the hotel he was abandoned in his carrier. His name is Polar. He was a he's

a Himalayan. That looks like a siamese

He's a him. Yeah. Manx. No tail. He's beautiful. He was abandoned in his kennel at the hotel. We grabbed him, took him to the vet. He had the worst UTI Dr. G had ever seen. He was matted, he was in horrible condition. Polar was over a thousand dollars. So yeah, the cats take a huge chunk out of our paychecks.

So have you ever thought about doing a 5 0 1 C3?

We have. We just don't know. Much about it. When we have talked to other rescues that are 5 0 1 c threes, they tell us it's not worth it. 'Cause we are not a rescue. We're just feeders and trappers of our own little colony. A lot of them are like, it's not worth it. To spend all the money to get a 5 0 1 C3. And, so we never really pursued it. So we just take care of our cats every day. We are out there every single day feeding our cats, checking our cats, and thank goodness the owners of the mall are wonderful. They, they let us do whatever we need to do. We have a key to the mall, so if there is a cat in there. We can go in and get it.

We have two cats in there at the moment. Two cats a possum, two cats a an adult possum and a baby possum. 'cause we can see them on the cameras.

Do y'all ever have to go in the mall to go rescue the cats or do any kind of rescue missions for cats that are in the mall?

Oh yes. We've had two on the roof taking care of these cats since 2016. We never, ever had a problem. Then in January of this year, we had our first cat get on the roof. No clue how she got up there.

There's no tree, there's

nothing by her to get her on this three story building roof. But up she went. She found her way down and. Hurt herself in the process, but she's fine now. Took her to the vet. Had her checked. When we got her fixed, 'cause she was a baby, she was still only about five, six months when she got up there. And then a couple of months ago, another cat on the roof. We go feed and we hear screaming. We look up and they're leaning over, screaming at us. Great. Up on the roof, we go setting traps, putting cameras and him, we caught within a week, right? Yeah.

The other little, when she showed up down probably what, four or five days later from getting up on the roof. But we think she either fell or she jumped. Because she messed up her legs pretty bad. Now she still walks funny, and still runs funny. But the vet that said, she's perfectly fine. And then the new, the other one who got on the roof a couple times, I call him roofie. We call him roofie. He's perfectly fine. He had a busted up nose from hitting the trap constantly, but now he just comes and screams at me to feed him.

So now I did hear about an elevator incident.

Yes. Oh, we've had more than that. We had a kitten in the drain. The fire department came out and helped us get that little one out, and a fireman actually adopted her.

Oh, awesome.

Her name is now Espy. And then we had another baby fall into an elevator shaft, an outside elevator shaft, and the elevator company came out and helped us get. Her out.

Yeah. The mall has no electricity. So they literally had to come and hook up riggings and manually pull this elevator up so that someone could get in the shaft to get this baby out. Wow. His name is Max.

Is he still a mall cat?

Yes, he is. He is. We always are fussing at him and telling him to quit being a bully 'cause he can be a bully. He lives with Leo. Leo is his best friend, Leo and Baldy. We have Leo, Baldy, and Max who are the bachelors, our bachelors and they all live in one little area. Max is the bully. Baldy is the, I guess you could say the introvert and Leo is the talker.

When y'all are feeding, do you ever get harassed by people?

Yes. Oh yes. Oh yeah. More though. People stop and ask questions. We've had a couple that, tell us we shouldn't be doing this. We have to explain. We do have permission. The owners allow us to do this 'cause they allow us to take care of the cats. We watch them all for them. We watch the cameras. We know when there's people in there. We know when there's break-ins. We know when there's something wrong or broken or something. Just because we've been there so long, we can spot something out of place immediately. We know every single square inch of that mall inside and out. So we take care of the cats and we take care of the mall for them. But we have had some people stop and scream at us and yell at us for doing it. And a lot of times we just ignore 'em. But the majority of the people are very friendly. Stop and ask questions. They love the cat. They'll bring us food every now and then they'll give us some money for the cat food. Not much, and it doesn't happen often, but the majority of the people that do stop are very friendly.

The ones that stop and will tell you something, are those just like animal haters, cat haters?

I don't know. There are some probably that are cat haters. They don't tell us why they're mad at us feeding the cat. Just that they don't want us doing it. Okay. And most of them stay in their car and just, pull off, once we totally ignore them.

When you feed, do you have problems with other people trying to say, oh, I'm gonna go feed the cats at the mall?

We do have a problem with that, especially when we're trying to trap them. One of our trapper friends was actually trapping for us. He was trapping the juvie force and he got into an argument with a woman because he was trying to trap them to get them fixed. And she was determined to feed.

Yeah, she was gonna feed him whether he liked it or not. And he got into an argument with her, but.

I don't mind if they feed. What gets me is they leave their trash behind. We try and leave no trash. So they all have feeding stations, they all have water bowls, they have food bowls. They have cat houses that the food goes in. We try and make their footprint as small as possible, where when other people feed, they leave their plates, they leave their cat food bags all over the place and we wind up picking it up. That drives me nuts. We try and keep it as clean as possible

because a lot of people in our area, they do complain about the mall, the grass being high or the trash around the mall. It's not nice looking. You can tell it's abandoned 'cause of all this stuff, and. Of course it, in the same parking lot is a movie theater where when people come out, they just throw their trash on the mo grounds and we have cups and popcorn things all over. So when we feed, we feed in actual food bowls, they're hard bowls in their little houses, you cannot see them really. And they're behind things. You're not gonna see them out in the open. We don't want the cats eating and feeding out in the open. We don't want people complaining about them.

There's only one area, mainly that is out in the open, and that's because we don't have any other choice. That's where we have to feed them. But the other ones is either behind trees or behind a wall. So that you cannot see them.

But people will pass and will see like these huge piles of food in dirt, different areas. Which, we're fine with feed the cats. It helps us out a bit. But just, don't make a mess. And that's our biggest problem is people just make a mess.

And how many feeding stations do you have?

I gotta count. 12. 12. 12? Yeah. 12 areas around the mall.

That's a lot.

Yeah. They're all spread out. They are literally around the entire mall. They're on the sides. They're in the front. They're basically everywhere. They are totally spread out over the 700,000 square foot place. We have to have that many feeding stations. And then the juvie are probably our largest colony at the mall. Last time I counted there was 18 there.

Now we did have kittens this year. We only had one set of kittens this year. That's a good thing. And all those kittens one went to rescue two got adopted.

That's awesome.

Haven't had any kittens since, fingers crossed we're finished here.

We have had some mamas that had kittens that didn't make it. We do have a cat right now that we cannot get fixed. The vet does not think she would make it.

She is a mama. She does have one baby, little orange fluffy baby. I did talk to my vet about getting her fixed, and he's I would wait because he doesn't think she's healthy enough.

What's going on with her?

When she breathes, you can literally see her trying to take a breath in.

Oh, like abdominal breathing?

Yes. She has been on antibiotics multiple times. The antibiotics work for a while and then she's back to. The heavy breathing, she is very thin. No matter what we do, we deworm her, we give her high calorie supplements, she will not gain weight. And he basically said she would not make the surgery. So there's not much we can really do with her. Except feed and take care of her. Her babies do not usually survive actually. I've only ever seen one survive.

And that's this one. That's this one little orange fluff ball. She did have kittens last season. None of them survived. She had two

and that's crazy.

Yeah.

Does she take care of 'em?

Yes. Oh yeah. Yes. She takes care of his little orange one, this little one. She's always by him. She nurses him. She's taken really good care of him.

It's just, I don't think they're healthy enough. Because she's not healthy enough.

Yeah, exactly.

She's a beautiful little calico. Sweet little thing. You can tell that she would not do well inside, we can't get her adopted, but she, yeah, she's just not healthy enough. But she gets around. Really well. Today she was actually not where I usually find her. But yeah, she's the only one we know that we. Literally cannot get fixed. But we're not really worried about her. 'cause the babies just don't do well. And then we had another Calico dumped recently, very recently, probably a month ago, she had kittens and we don't think they survived.

We are not really sure yet, and the reason we think that is every time we go feed, she is never with the babies. She's always away from them. And we know where the babies are, or were. But every time we see her,

she's not with the babies or even in the area. And I know, taking care of cats so long, mamas don't do that.

Yeah. Usually the babies have to come with them to learn how to eat and stuff too.

Would be only two weeks old about, 'cause she was dumped pregnant. And, but we heard 'em one time and that's the only time we ever heard them. And in the beginning she was staying in this one area and she was very protective.

She'd go after any cat that got into the area. She's

not like that anymore. Yeah. And she's never in the area anymore. She'll come over there to eat, but as soon as she's done, she goes away again, not where the babies were and where we are seeing her, there's no place to hide babies. Cause she's out in this big field open. So we think that, the only real baby we have now is the six month old that we think was dumped. That we saw two days ago. No, yesterday. We saw yesterday. Yesterday was the first time we saw it. And he was there again today. So now we got him, get him trapped and fixed because,

like I said, and where he is, everybody's fixed. I have no unfixed cats in that area.

We think he's him and the little orange fluff ball they're the only two and they're pretty, they're old enough to eat on their own and do things like that. But yeah, that's it. Everybody else is good.

I think it's impressive the way that you take care of the cats, especially being able to look at 50 plus cats and know when you have one that is sick and needs to go to the vet. 'cause there's people that might own two cats and they can't even tell that

We know our cats so well. We know when something's wrong. Cause we pay attention to every single one of them. I have my brave ones. I have my chickens, I have my sort of friendly ones. Screamers. I have my screamers. I have one. He's my new super senior. His name is Jack. And when he sees you coming, you can be across the parking lot and he's going to walk to you screaming the entire way at you to come feed him. He's gonna probably be my next one that we're gonna have to really spend money on and pay attention to because he is our super senior and his legs don't work very well. We probably pass there two and three times a day just to check on Jack. To make sure he is okay. Not overheated 'cause of 110 degrees heat. He just can't take it. We bought him cooling pet pads. Put 'em under the bushes for him. He does use them, thank goodness. But we also make sure he eats in the shade. He's a tuxedo. Long-haired tuxedo. He's gonna be probably our next big I don't wanna say problem child, but he vet Bill. Taking care of Jack in his senior years.

And we don't even know where Jack came from. I don't even remember when Jack showed up. He just showed up one day.

Yeah we know all of our cats. Every single one of them. Part of the problem is it's just her and I, we're the only ones that trap, we're the only ones that feed it's getting appointments. We work full time. We do not trap there after dark. I know a lot of trappers do. That's when the cats come out. We don't, because there are no lights there. It is an abandoned area. It's just not safe. Which doesn't give us a lot of time. We do have our tricks. We have been very fortunate. It doesn't usually take us long because the cats know us so well. That they come when we just call them.

Yeah. I think last time we trapped, I got three females in under 30 seconds.

Oh wow. That's pretty good

on drop trap. Yeah.

And they all got fixed the mama and two and her two babies. We got Julius in under three minutes because of the catnip. The mama and the two little girls they're very food motivated, so it was just easy to put the food down and we got 'em.

One night, eight were caught over by the juvie. In a week we had 14.

And that's a shame too, that there's that many being dumped constantly.

Constantly. It's just never ending. People see cats and they're like, oh, let me bring them here because they're taken care of.

Yep. And it's a shame. It's hard to stop something like that too,

we'll never stop that. Yeah. We'll never stop it.

So all you can do is just trap 'em and get 'em spayed and neutered so that at least they don't reproduce.

The hotel was easier, the hotel, it did take a long time to get them fixed, but we weren't having new cats dropped off. We weren't having new cats dump. But the mall, it's going to be never ending because of the dumps, because of the apartments.

And people know about it, so they think it's like an easy way out when they wanna get rid of an animal.

Yeah. We had a man stop a couple of weeks ago asking if we ever had dogs dumped, which sort of made me worried. I'm like, I don't need any dogs dumped here. 'cause I don't do fool with dogs. But thank goodness, no, we have not had dogs dumped. We do have dogs that show up because they're lost and they have pretty much left the cats alone.

And I told her the other day, I told Cori yesterday, I said, the good thing about our mall cats, they're very accepting when a new cat is dumped. They immediately accepted into the colony.

We never have any problems. They're just, really accepting easygoing cats.

Thank you both for joining me today and talking about the great work you do with the mall cats.

Thank you.

That's all the time that we have for today's episode. If you are enjoying our show, please consider leaving us a donation. A hundred percent goes to our animals.

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