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The stray cat, nicknamed Brown Kitty, who caught Jennie Renner's attention outside her home.Last year, a cat started showing up occasionally outside my house.
In the many years we’ve been together, my husband and I have had many cats. We’re currently
owned by our seventh cat. We’re “cat people,” and we’ve taken in stray cats before. But this cat wanted nothing to do with us, running away whenever we approached. We thought it might be our neighbor’s until we asked and found out it wasn’t.
The cat didn’t appear to be looking for a home; In fact, it seemed to be at home right where it was – outside. Even so, I wondered how it would survive the winter. Looking for an answer, I said something to my friend who works at
Humane Fort Wayne, and she introduced me to their community cat program.
Also known as TNR (Trap-Neuter-Return), community cat programs began gaining popularity in the 1990s. National organizations such as
Alley Cat Allies championed the idea of managing cat populations by sterilizing and releasing cats rather than the traditional trap-and-kill methods. The goal of these programs is to stabilize cat populations by preventing further reproduction while improving the health of free-roaming cats.
Locally,
Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control and
Humane Fort Wayne each have programs giving the community a place to go for education and resources to support community cats.
Patricia Peterson is the community cat and transfer coordinator for Fort Wayne Animal Care & Control (FWACC). She says FWACC proposed a community cat program, and in 2014, it was incorporated into Fort Wayne City Ordinances.
Then, in 2017, local organizations were
awarded mentoring services from the national animal welfare organization Best Friends Animal Society to support community cat programs, which helped create Humane Fort Wayne’s program.
“At Humane Fort Wayne, we are trying to reduce the number of deaths by euthanasia by offering TNR,” says Kassidi Doyle, community cat resource specialist. “TNR is humane, effective, and also gives these cats a chance at protecting their life by avoiding shelter euthanasia due to limited space, adopters, and resources.”
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Humane Fort WayneEach organization runs its program differently. At Animal Care & Control, strays are evaluated to determine if they are candidates for the Community Cat Program. Cats are examined by a veterinarian, and minor medical issues may be addressed. Then the animals receive a sterilization surgery, an FVRCP (feline viral rhinotracheitis, calicivirus, and panleukopenia) vaccine, a rabies vaccine, a microchip, and an ear tip.
The ear tip offers an easy way to identify community cats from a distance, letting humans know that they have been sterilized and vaccinated. The ear-tipping removes the top one-third of the cat’s left ear while they are under anesthesia.
As the organization’s primary role is that of a shelter, it only offers a very limited number of community cat appointments.
“Monday and Tuesday mornings, we do accept walk-ins,” says Peterson, “but right now, during peak season, with how full our shelter is, we're actually only able to accept the first five walk-in community cats on Monday and Tuesday mornings.”
Peterson acknowledges that the need for spay and neuter assistance for community cats goes above and beyond what Animal Care & Control can provide. That's where Humane Fort Wayne comes in.
The
Community Cat Advocacy Program at Humane Fort Wayne offers a TNR surgery package for a reduced price of $50. The package includes sterilization surgery, a microchip, a three-year rabies vaccine, and a mandatory ear tip.
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A community cat Humane Fort Wayne has spayed or neutered this year.“What I want people to know most is once they see an unaltered community cat roaming their property, it is important to get them TNR’d immediately,” says Doyle. “If you can see that the left tip of the ear is tipped, this means the cat has already had spay/neuter surgery; If not, give us a call and get that cat on the schedule for surgery.”
Last year, Humane Fort Wayne offered one day a week, known as “Feral Fridays,” for community cat appointments. They also had live traps available to borrow, so community members didn’t have to purchase a trap to capture a cat. Even with this limited schedule, the clinic spayed and neutered 2,021 community cats in 2024.
The cat in my neighborhood seemed like a good candidate for the Community Cat Advocacy Program, so I filled out an online form to request an appointment. I had no idea how I would catch the cat if my number was called, but my friend loaned me a live trap and began giving me tips. (
Humane Fort Wayne also has tips on its website.)
I got an email response to my inquiry that read, “Unfortunately, we do not have any available appointments at this time for Community Cats... Due to the high volume of requests that we receive, these weekly Friday appointments will often reach capacity very quickly.”
The email also suggested that I might consider another low-cost spay/neuter clinic in our region, but none of the locations were in Fort Wayne. I never got a call back from Humane Fort Wayne, but I found out in the spring that the agency would soon be offering walk-in TNR services.
In June, Humane Fort Wayne began walk-in appointments for community cats Monday through Wednesday for up to two cats per household. According to their website, check-ins begin at 8:15 a.m., and once they reach 10 cats, no more are accepted.
As an experienced TNR volunteer, Melissa Rennaker, who makes a living as a hairdresser, says she’s grateful for the walk-in appointments that Humane Fort Wayne now offers for community cats, but says it still isn’t enough to meet the local demand.
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Melissa Rennaker, community cat volunteer “We still need more surgery spaces... if we're going to volunteer our time – and it's time consuming... and we’re going to go to all that work and trap, we have to make sure that we are not going to be number 11 or number 12 and be turned away because we're not going to catch those cats again.”
Rennaker became a community cat volunteer by accident. In July 2022, while visiting a mobile home park to help her nephew find a place to live, she came upon a colony of over 100 cats. She began feeding and caring for the cats while searching for resources to help her find homes for them.
“We got homes for over 90 cats,” Rennaker says. “We TNR’d all of them.”
A year after her first TNR experience, she began helping Humane Fort Wayne with outreach in the mobile home community where she found the 100 cats. Rennaker has also continued doing TNR, although she prefers to only do it for people who cannot physically do it themselves now. For others, she wants to educate, train, and connect them to resources.
“The educational part, I feel, is the foundation of it all because... people who do (TNR) are tired and we can't do it all,” she says. “If everybody could just do their part even at their own home... if they're feeding a group of kitties, get them fixed.”
She adds, “If you don't like [cats], it is even a bigger reason to do it, so they're not marking all over your territory and then there's fewer fights and issues around your home.”
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Some cats prefer a life outdoors, making them candidates for community cat programs like those offered by Humane Fort Wayne and Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control.Advocates of TNR, like Rennaker, say that to be successful as a means of controlling populations, community cat programs must be a collaborative effort between animal welfare organizations, volunteers, and the public.
“We need more funding,” she says. “We need a more organized TNR program. We need to teach people how to TNR and make a difference in their own community. We need someone to put together a list of people willing to TNR as this would take a burden off of me and several others who do this weekly. If we could have a group of people that could start going around in different parts of the community to start doing this... but then we need the surgery space.”
Rennaker says 25 to 30 appointments a day would be a more reasonable amount to make a difference in the cat population, but she understands that Humane Fort Wayne needs funding to be able to do that.
Doyle from Humane Fort Wayne says that while the local community cat program has not been without challenges, her job is to listen to the community and their feedback and work through these challenges.
“The response [to the program] has been incredible,” she says. “We are inundated with caretakers who want to use our advocacy and TNR services, so much so that demand far outweighs our capacity.”
Which is what appears to be the problem — local community cat programs are not currently adequate to fulfill the needs of our community. Even with what Rennaker and other volunteers like her have been able to accomplish, and the services available at Animal Care & Control and Humane Fort Wayne, there are still too many animals.
“We can’t spay and neuter community cats fast enough to reduce the population significantly,” explains Doyle. “This is known as the birth replacement rate. We are unable to fix more cats than the number of live births that replace them each year.”
A
kitten calculator from the website for a sanctuary and adoption center in California provides a prime example of why spaying and neutering are critical to controlling pet overpopulation. It shows how even just one pair of unaltered cats can lead to dozens of kittens in a year, and hundreds more when their offspring reproduce.
In talking to Rennaker, she is quick to say how much she appreciates Humane Fort Wayne while making suggestions of how it could be better. She says she sees comments on social media from people who are mad at Animal Care & Control and Humane Fort Wayne for not adequately addressing the feral cat problem.
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Kittens Rennaker has rescued this year in need of homes.But Rennaker is looking for a way to solve the problem, not point fingers, and says the community needs to be involved in the solution. While she continues to work to address cat overpopulation, she hopes for more funding and more solutions, and she encourages others to get involved in whatever way they can.
“Not everybody needs to TNR,” she says. “We need people praying for the kitties. We need people feeding the kitties. We need people watering the kitties. We need people trapping and we also need... people to pick up and take [cats to be sterilized]. So, it's truly an army to make it all happen.”
Rennaker adds one last way people can help – by adopting cats that volunteers like her find and are not suitable for community cat life. At the time we spoke, she had 11 kittens in her care from her latest cat colony project.
For more information about local Community Cat programs, visit
Fort Wayne Animal Care & Control’s Community Cat page or
Humane Fort Wayne’s website.
Community cat appointments at HFW are offered at the agency’s spay and neuter clinic located at 1333 Maycrest Drive in Fort Wayne. For questions, email
[email protected] or leave a message at
260-440-8699.