Last winter we had 20 cats on the development. The number had increased from around 10 two years before. During Coronavirus restrictions we were unable to travel here and the increase in the cat population inexplicably occurred during that period. Before I left to return to the UK I spoke to an animal loving neighbour who lives here full time and we discussed trying to catch some of them with a view to getting them neutered.
When I returned 4 months later the vast majority of the cats had gone, only about 6 remained. One was pregnant and one had a swollen eye. On speaking to another neighbour it was intimated to me that the people at number 6 and number 12 had done something about the cats, my neighbour implied that they might have been disposed of but she was very vague and non-committal and said she didn’t know exactly what had happened. Since it is very hard to catch Feral cats in order to move them on elsewhere, especially in the numbers that were on the development, the only other possibility was that they were poisoned and disposed of. I told my neighbour in no uncertain terms that if anyone had killed the cats it was a disgusting thing to have done. Sadly mass poisonings do happen out here where people just want to get rid of the stray cats and don’t care about using inhumane methods to achieve their aims.
I decided to start a cat neutering project in order to keep the stray cat numbers on the development as low as possible and hopefully as a result the people that live here would then not seek to harm the cats that remained. I borrowed a couple of animal crates from my friend Suzan. who runs K9 Country Kennels where my rescue dogs had stayed prior to travelling to the UK and set about the difficult task of trying to tempt the cats into the crates so I could take them to Animates Vets where my other friend local vet Sybil could operate on them.