Operation Colony Cats Statistics January 1 through December 31, 2023 

• 1,009 spays and neuters 
• 580 cats and kittens transported to Sweet Paws Rescue (Groveland, MA)
• 2 private adoptions (medical cases)
• 12 cats and kittens transported or adopted through OCHS

Operation Colony Cats has been working to better the lives of felines for over five years now.  In this time, we have grown our foster and trap program with a dedicated team of women with a common goal:  saving the lives of as many felines as possible through an intensive TNR approach and partnering with a northern rescue (Sweet Paws Rescue) to transport homeless cats and kittens north for adoption.  We have also been blessed to build a partnership with Oktibbeha County Humane Society.  They help aid us with medical advice and care while also allowing us to participate in their low cost spay and neuter program.  OCHS helped OCC gain access to services provided by the College of Veterinary Medicine at Mississippi State University for our feral cats and foster kittens.  This has been a true blessing for our program.

The mission of Operation Colony Cats is to foster a sense of responsibility to aid cats and kittens living in feral colonies, to provide the community with ideas and practical solutions on how to spay and neuter stray and feral cats/kittens, and outreach to citizens maintaining feral cat colonies.  Our trap team is hard at work most weekends getting ready for spay clinics each week.  Our goal is to reduce suffering in Columbus and other areas of the Golden Triangle through our efforts at sterilizing, vaccinating and deworming as many cats as possible each week.  Know that we ear-tip both tame and feral cats and kittens when we put them back out in their colony or neighborhood to show they have been vaccinated, treated for parasites and neutered.  

Operation Colony Cats began when a few local women were doing TNR in Columbus, Mississippi. They identified the need for more extensive TNR efforts after finding many litters of kittens dying, succumbing to environmental hazards, or contracting feline diseases. We did not want to see these kittens be relegated to the same life as the generations before them. We wanted to offer those kittens a chance their mother may never have been given. At the same time, we also had to educate ourselves on what TNR does for the community and how to go about bringing change. In doing this, we discovered that simply removing the kittens only allowed the mothers to produce more litters of kittens, especially the mothers who were receiving food at regular intervals. We also learned that if you removed the adults from the feral community, other cats would simply move in and take their place (vacuum effect). The need would continue. In order to stop unwanted litters of kittens, we would need to make sure that every cat within the colony was sterilized (spayed or neutered). Trap-Neuter-Return is the humane and effective approach for stray and feral cats. Now in practice for decades in the US after being proven in Europe, scientific studies show that Trap-Neuter-Return improves the lives of feral cats, improves their relationships with the people who live near them, and decreases the size of colonies over time. Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR), the humane approach to addressing community cat populations, works. It saves cats’ lives and is effective. TNR improves the lives of cats, addresses community concerns, reduces complaints about cats, and stops the breeding cycle. TNR improves the co-existence between outdoor cats and humans in our shared environment. This is why so many cities are adopting it.

We are still in need of volunteers who have a flexible schedule during the week.  We often have access to a van for transporting cats to Starkville as most of our efforts to sterilize and vaccinate happen there (services are not easily accessible locally in the large volumes we serve).  We keep a good relationship with all area shelters by offering to take in some of their intakes when we have space.  This year alone we fostered and transported 71 cats and kittens for Oktibbeha County Humane Society, 40 for Amory Humane Society, 30 for Columbus Lowndes Humane Society and 34 for Lauderdale County Animal Shelter.  This may not seem like much, but it frees up space/kennels when the shelters need us most.  Most often we get called for neonates and bottle babies as those are the most critical need in most shelter environments.  

Supplies we could use:

• Traps (live, humane traps)
• Trapping food (sardines, tuna, smelly cat food)
• Towels (used to cover the traps, keeps cats calm)
• Separators (used to clean traps while cat is housed in it)
• KMR (bottle babies are year round)
• Purina One Adult Cat Food (for our adult foster cats)

What have we accomplished in five years?  Below you will see the numbers.  

In five years, we have spayed and neutered 5,529 cats and kittens. 2,543 have been returned to their original sites meaning that those cats will not have any unwanted litters of kittens.  A small group of women in Columbus, MS decided to make a change in animal welfare in 2018.  Some days it feels like we have barely made a dent in things but when I look at these numbers I know that we have changed the lives of so many.