I'm glad you qualified the statement with
"most," Megan. I work at the Dane County
HS in southern WI. We have a feral
program that practices alter and release
where the cats can't be rehabilitated and
moved into foster homes. Somewhere
around 200 cats were saved last year with
that program.

That's good to hear. Too bad there aren't more of them. :-(

I realize it doesn't exist everywhere, but
are there no foster homes that would be
willing to work with what amounts to an
undersocialized kitten?

Everybody is full. There is no room at the inn. And when space opens
socialized cats are the first to fill them because those are the ones
that can be adopted out the quickest so more can be rescued. We had a
terrible kitten season this year because of a mild winter with not a
whole lot of snow and the shelters and animal control were/are
overflowing. The smaller rescues took out as many as they could, but it
didn't make a dent. The flow didn't stop and mothers and entire litters
of kittens have been euthanized regularly non stop.

When you're dealing with this kind of situation, rescues can ill afford
to give space to a cat that may take weeks/months to socialize and
sacrifice *several* cats as a result of not being able to take them, and
many rescues have no resources/experienced people to do this in the
first place. I have a friend that runs a rescue and took a feral into
her program that she herself had trapped. It's been a year and a half
and he is *still* in a foster home, now waiting to be adopted, filling a
space that possibly 20 or more cats could have used. I'm glad he's
there, alive and doing well and don't begrudge him that for a moment. He
deserves to have a happy life as all cats, feral or not, do.

I'm just illustrating the bigger picture, the philosophy of which most
rescues is to save as many lives as they can. Nobody likes or wants to
see cats and dogs rot away at animal control, then be killed because
there is nowhere for them to go. It sucks that rescues are unable at
this time to do more in the area of socializing ferals, but it's,
unfortunately, reality.

I don't ever promote relying on rescues to take care of someone's stray
cat problem anyway. With the vast resources available on the net and in
newsgroups such as this, I would rather see someone that has found an
undersocialized kitten take the responsibility for socializing it and
finding it a home themselves. That relieves the rescues of an extra and
unnecessary burden and the people that take the responsibility for the
cat will have done a really good thing. It's win-win. :-)

Megan



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