“Trapping feral cats is not exactly glamorous work,” said Selinger, who says he’s trapped about 400 cats in five years. “But when you do it, you can really improve their lives. ... When I see their faces, I can’t not help them.”
Selinger refused to say exactly where his recent catch came from — he feared someone might poison the cats or they might end up in a shelter.
As the clinic bustled around him, veterinary technicians, some clad in paw-print T-shirts, prepped the cats for surgeries at two stations. In a separate, glass-enclosed theater, three veterinarians in full scrubs bent over cat-size operating tables performing sterilizations.
A technician jabbed two of Selinger’s cats — a gray male with tiger stripes and a black female — with syringes full of anesthetic. The cats were then vaccinated for rabies and distemper.
“He’s scrappy — he’s only got a half a tail,” a tech said of the gray cat.
Once in the operating room, a clothespin-like sensor was clipped onto the female cat’s tongue, which measured her oxygen intake and heart rate. She was stretched out on a gurney and her splayed legs were restrained as if she was on a medieval rack.
As the sensor beeped, a veterinarian finished surgery in about 10 minutes. The male cat’s surgery was less involved — it only took two minutes. Both were a success; the cats’ ears were notched to show they had been sterilized.
The process was repeated again and again throughout the day — a total of 35 cats were neutered in a matter of hours. Last year, the clinic sterilized about 1,300 cats; 5,300 cats have been neutered since the program opened in 2007, officials said.
The clinic might not have come about if it were not for Becky Robinson of Arlington and the feral colony she stumbled upon in an Adams Morgan alley on her way to dinner one night in 1990.
“They were these three, beautiful black-and-white tuxedos,” Robinson recalled. “I wanted to help them.”
Robinson, who was aware of trap-neuter-return programs in Europe, trapped the cats, got a veterinarian to sterilize them and then returned them to the alley. Her name got around and she began helping other people trap and sterilize feral cats, locally and nationally.
Her efforts grew into Bethesda-based Alley Cat Allies, a nonprofit organization that has been instrumental in pushing TNR. Allies has a $5.2 million budget and high-profile celebrity supporters including actress Portia de Rossi and comedian Paula Poundstone.
Robinson said simply trapping feral cats and removing them creates a “vacuum effect.” Once the old feral population is gone, new cats move in to take advantage of food and shelter. She said TNR allows the colony to keep its turf but also shrinks its population.
‘What’s right for them, not for the cats’
Like Selinger and Robinson, Dana Madalon has a long record of working on cat-related causes, but she’s no supporter of TNR.
The Georgetown resident and animal rights activist has spent 15 years volunteering in local shelters, organizing charity balls for animal causes, fostering cats and conducting pet-adoption counseling. She is also the president of the board of directors of the Sauk County Humane Society in Wisconsin, where her home town is located.
Madalon, who sold a government contracting firm two years ago, said she has donated $50,000 to $80,000 a year to animal organizations. But she said she’s curtailed her giving to Washington Humane Society and the Animal Welfare League of Arlington. She said they do great work, but their support of TNR caused her to close her checkbook.
“The TNR folks are doing what’s right for them, not for the cats,” Madalon said. “If you really love an animal, you will do everything you can to ease suffering in its life. The life of a feral cat is a slow kill.”
Madalon said she’s seen feral cats poisoned with antifreeze, used for target practice, hit by cars and plagued with painful urinary tract infections.
She is supported by some veterinarians and what might seem an unlikely ally: PETA. PETA describes the life of a feral cat as harsh and supports TNR only under extremely limited circumstances: A cat colony must be is isolated from roads, people, wildlife and be in a temperate climate. PETA president and co-founder Ingrid Newkirk said practicing TNR in Washington amounts to “trap-neuter-abandonment.”
She said TNR activists often miss an important point: Many people don’t want feral cats around, because they can carry diseases and parasites such as rabies and toxoplasmosis, and can be pests. This makes the animals targets for abuse.
“They don’t die peacefully out there in the wild wonderland of D.C.,” Newkirk said.
Back to the wild
After the cats’ surgeries, Selinger said he took some of them back to the industrial site in suburban Maryland. It was about 11 p.m. and no one was around. Selinger lifted the doors on the cages and most of the cats shot out “like cannonballs.”
Selinger declined to let a reporter ride along with him to the site — careful, as always, to protect his cats. He said most skittered out in a green, wooded area.
“They can live a pretty good life out there,” he said.
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