Coaching for successful cat management

A few years after it launched a community cat program, Vanderburgh Humane Society in Evansville, Indiana, had a lot to be proud of.

The private nonprofit shelter was providing low-cost sterilizations and vaccinations for community cats at its spay/neuter clinic. Caretakers could turn to the shelter to borrow traps and get advice on trap-neuter-return best practices. A recently launched return-to-field partnership had reduced cat euthanasia at the city’s municipal shelter.

But for all its achievements, “We just felt like we were treading water with cats,” says Mackenzee McKittrick, community cat coordinator at VHS. “We’re a shelter that has a full-time vet and a spay/neuter clinic, and we still couldn’t keep up with cat intakes.”

Seeking expert guidance and a fresh perspective, VHS applied for a mentorship with the Humane Society of the United States.

“I knew these problems weren’t unique to Evansville,” McKittrick says. “I needed to learn from people who have dealt with the problems that we were seeing and [have] seen solutions.”

Catalyzing progress

Launched in 2022, the HSUS Shelter Mentorship program provides one-on-one coaching and a $15,000 grant for shelters that seek to improve their operations in one of three focus areas: pet-inclusive housing, wildlife response and community cats.

In the community cat mentorship, “We start off by having conversations about what kind of programs they have,” says Danielle Bays, HSUS senior analyst for cat protection and policy. “When you say you have a community cat program, that can mean a lot of different things. We learn what they’re doing, what they’d like to do, where they need help, and set goals and expectations for the mentorship.”

Mentorships last for a year, which provides time for mentee organizations to try different approaches, evaluate their success and get advice on navigating roadblocks. It also enables them to collaborate on complex projects, such as lobbying to change public policies that don’t mesh with modern cat management methods.

This was at the top of McKittrick’s agenda when she and her team embarked on their mentorship in January 2024. The year before, VHS had started transferring healthy, unsocialized cats from the city shelter, sterilizing and vaccinating them, and returning them to their outdoor homes. Animal care and control officers liked the return-to-field program, and cat euthanasia rates at the municipal facility had decreased by 20%.

But there was a problem. The local animal control ordinance mandated a seven-day hold for all cats brought in as strays, even ones who were unsocialized and lacked any form of ID. Stressed in the shelter environment, many of the cats were becoming sick before VHS could take them, McKittrick says. The ordinance also prevented officers from returning ear-tipped cats to their outdoor homes, adding to the time those cats spent in the sheltering system.

There was also the challenge of spay/neuter capacity. Busy attending to the needs of dogs and cats inside the shelter and sterilizing animals for local rescues, the shelter’s veterinary staff could only do a few TNR surgeries a day. Caretakers and volunteers were limited to trapping two cats at a time. For people targeting large groups of cats, the system didn’t work well.

McKittrick, who previously served as the shelter’s events and outreach coordinator, was just a few months into her role as community cat coordinator when the mentorship began. The barriers seemed daunting, she says. “I needed someone to tell me which direction to turn rather than getting burnt out from trying all the directions.”

“I needed someone to tell me which direction to turn rather than getting burnt out from trying all the directions.”

—Mackenzee McKittrick, Vanderburgh Humane Society

Benefiting from an outside perspective

Shelters around the country often face similar challenges in their community cat programs, says Bays. But organizational and community resources, relationships with animal services agencies, public attitudes and municipal ordinances related to free-roaming cats vary widely. Solutions must be tailored to each organization’s circumstances.

When Danville-Boyle County Humane Society in Kentucky entered the HSUS mentorship program in 2022, its TNR program was nearly three years old. “We had the basics down, but we weren’t utilizing every tool in the toolbox,” says executive director Kari Kuh. “Danielle and the rest of mentorship team filled in the nuances.”

Early in their mentorship, Kuh and her team worked with their HSUS mentors to draft a county animal control ordinance that would facilitate TNR efforts. Later, they worked to build support for the revised ordinance and raise community awareness of TNR. At volunteer trainings and town hall meetings, staff from both organizations talked about the program and addressed residents’ concerns.

None of this was easy or quick, Kuh says. But relationships between the mentorship team and mentee shelters continue even after the formal mentorship period has ended. With HSUS and Danville-Boyle staff backing the change, the revised ordinance passed in spring 2023.

Having an outside perspective on its program also helped Danville-Boyle in other ways. For shelter staff immersed in the day-to-day demands of a community cat program, it’s easy to overlook some details. For example, when Kuh and her team mentioned that they were having trouble reaching some parts of their community with the TNR message, Bays encouraged them to have their materials translated into Spanish.

Kuh says, “We were like, ‘Well, duh, don’t know why we didn’t think of that.’” She recruited volunteers from a local college to do the translations.

In the two years since Danville-Boyle completed the mentorship program, its community cat work has continued to grow, and so has its impact. The shelter is no longer crammed full of cats, Kuh says. They’re either in foster homes or living their best (non-procreating) lives in their home territories.

Looking back, Kuh says the most valuable part of the mentorship program may have been this: “It validated what we were doing, which actually is very important. Knowing you’re on the right track and making a difference is energizing.”

Finding the right path

In late July, seven months into their mentorship, the VHS team has likewise gained a new optimism about their community cat program. “We’re really moving in the right direction,” McKittrick says.

Among their achievements so far is a draft animal control ordinance that defines TNR as a legitimate activity and, among other changes, would allow cats and kittens with no identification to be transferred from animal control to VHS for adoption or return-to-field without a stray hold. Shelter leaders are currently meeting with the animal control commission and city council members to win support for the revised ordinance, which they hope will pass this year.

By contracting with a part-time veterinarian and finessing its clinic schedule, VHS increased its TNR capacity from 10 spay/neuter surgeries a week to 35. This has enabled McKittrick to organize mass trapping days in target neighborhoods.

“It feels so great to mark off a colony,” she says. “I haven’t really felt like I was able to do that before. Now I can say those 20 cats were done this week, and I can move on and help more people.”

From her HSUS mentors, McKittrick learned how to simplify some processes, collect more data from caretakers and be more supportive of them. She now has a best practices handbook that she hands out to cat caretakers.

In June, VHS staff visited Alley Cat Advocates, a nonprofit TNR organization in Kentucky that works closely with its municipal shelter and animal control agency on community cat management. “Just seeing how closely they work with their animal control was really inspiring and gave me a lot of great ideas that I could apply to us,” McKittrick says.

One of the projects she and her team are most excited about is conducting a cat count to measure the impact of their TNR efforts over time. So far, about 30 volunteers have attended VHS training events on cat counting.

“So now we feel like we’re ready for that next step—to get some good data and to really, really do some targeted trapping and help the community in a more significant way,” McKittrick says.

There’s still plenty to be done in the months ahead. VHS staff are working on door hangers and other community outreach materials. They’ve invited local animal control officers to join them on a return visit to Alley Cat Advocates. Later this year, they’ll be working with their HSUS mentors to organize and analyze data collected from the cat counts.

But the challenges ahead no longer seem insurmountable, and McKittrick is excited about the future.

The mentorship “has helped me grow as the coordinator and the community grow as well,” she says. “I’m proud of the growth we’ve made and the cats our program is saving.”