The Importance of National Feral Cat Day
National Feral Cat Day happens annually on October 16th - take a quick look at your calendar - today is the day! Today is all about raising awareness about feral cats, promoting Trap-Neuter-Return and recognizing the millions of compassionate Americans who care for them.
Alley Cat Allies
It was initiated by the Alley Cat Allies organization in 2001. Mom loves them and has been very impressed with their commitment and community outreach efforts on behalf of cats.
Alley Cat Allies have expanded the focus of this special day and now refer to it as Global Cat Day – a day of kindness for all Catkind. Their intention is to educate the populace about community and feral cats and TNR/TNA programs which are the gold standard of cat population control. Properly administered, fewer outdoor cats will be euthanized and outdoor populations will be reduced over time. Some communities have been able to get to zero population growth amongst the feral populations! They have all sorts of information and videos for everyone to reference and use with their feral and community cat populations.
They also advocate with the local communities for stricter laws that protect the feral cats with stronger anti-cruelty laws. They are working to extend this protection to all cats in every state.
The Kitten Lady
Mom also wants to highlight a very special person – Hannah Shaw who is known as the "Kitten Lady". We have never met her but we learned about her at one of the cat shows here in New Jersey. Her efforts focus on orphaned kitten rescue and advocacy.
She concentrates on neonatal kittens – the tiniest felines who are the most vulnerable when orphaned. Often their mother cat was killed by a car, or she, somehow, got separated from her kittens. When brought to a shelter, these tiny babies are the first ones euthanized as they cannot survive without fosters stepping up within the first 12 hours. The shelters have no resources or staff to care for neonatal kittens who need feedings every 2-3 hours. Thankfully fosters and cat caregivers like the Kitten Lady will connect with their local shelters to rescue these little ones.
Hannah’s site goes one step further and has many instructional videos, educational media and training resources about how to save the lives of these precious little babies. She walks you through the care and development of the kittens until they are weaned and able to be adopted.
She is fun to watch and holds your attention with all of her insight – to say nothing of the amazing photos and videos of the tiniest wee ones.
Hannah is a very special lady and truly does all that she does for the love of the animals. The kitten community is lucky to have such a committed advocate! Meow!
What are you going to do for your feral cat community? Let us know in the comments or if you need guidance send us over an email and we will try to steer you in the right direction!