Montreal volunteers work to contain stray cat population
Most evenings and weekends, you can find Nancy Leclerc crouched behind an apartment or some abandoned industrial building, trying to catch a cat.
Leclerc and three of her friends make up “Pussy Patrol,” a volunteer-run group that aims to help Montreal’s hundreds of thousands of stray and feral cats that often suffer slow and painful deaths on the streets.
But as populations rise and with kitten season around the corner, Leclerc says it will take more than a handful of dedicated volunteers to get a handle on the overpopulation problem.
“We want to help but we get burned out and exhausted when we’re working full-time jobs, taking care of our own animals, trying to trap at night, running back and forth to the SPCA,” she says in an interview.
“It becomes exhausting and we’re never going to put a dent in the problem if the city doesn’t get involved.”
Using a strategy called “trap, neuter, release, maintain,” or TNRM, Leclerc and her group, which relies on public donations, will catch the cats, have them sterilized, vaccinated and dewormed, foster and adopt out the tame ones and release the rest back onto the streets.
It’s a task that involves significant time, fundraising and, sometimes, heartache — but when enough people get involved, Leclerc says it can work.
On Saturday, she pointed out a colony that lives behind an apartment building in the Rosemont Petit-Patrie borough, where six well-fed cats popped in and out of a series of makeshift Styrofoam shelters covered by a tarp.
The cats, all females, were trapped and sterilized by her group last year after several years of having multiple kittens, many of which died or were taken and sold by local teens, she says.
While the cats are too shy to adopt, Leclerc’s group says their improved living situation benefits both their health and the neighbourhood, by reducing unwanted behaviours such as spraying, fighting and howling from male cats that come to breed.
Due to their elusive nature and quick reproductive cycle, it’s almost impossible to know how many stray cats are in the city.
The Montreal SPCA points to an American study that suggests the number of stray cats equals the number of domestic ones, which would put Canada’s number at about 9.3 million, based on 2017 cat ownership data from the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies.
Montreal Coun. Craig Sauve, who oversees animal issues for the city, says he has heard estimates of between 250,000 and 500,000 cats in Montreal, although some say it’s as high as one million.