What is TNR?

I was asked recently to explain TNR to someone who was interested but had never heard of the term.

It’s always interesting to have to take the 10,000 word essay you could write on a topic and try and condense it into a short few paragraphs, elevator pitch style. This is my effort trying to explain modern TNR.

A lot of what is said about cats in Australia are sort of urban legends; a study by PIAS of the metropolitan cat population showed they ate less than one native animal a year, while one from Murdoch showed one in four people fed a cat they didn’t own, hence the development of the ‘Who’s for Cats’ (don’t feed a bigger problem) campaign.

So rather than be hated native animal eaters, metropolitan community cats are actually pretty harmless and not only not disliked by a significant segment of a community, but cared for by.

TNR is based around the idea that people who love cats can be given a small task (like desexing the cat they’re feeding) to bring about great change. In colony situations (in places where cats congregate because of a food supply), small non-profits can be started to manage the cats through targeted free desexing for non-compliant owners in the area, and for any stray cats living supported by the environment (usually garbage or other sources not easily removed).

There’s two ways to approach cat management really;

You can try and coerce those who’ve shown they really don’t care, have cat haters trapping maverick-style along with the few animal management officers available put on the task (knowing that any cats removed, will only be replaced soon by more, undesexed animals drawn by the newly available territory and resource)….

or, you can look to get the entire community of cat lovers desexing and protecting every cat in their neighbourhood.

In the US, TNR has become the new way of managing cat populations. As society becomes less tolerant of the idea of thousands of animals being killed, they’re being asked to act to bring about the change needed. They mop up on behalf of ‘irresponsible’ owners and by improving people’s regard for cats whether owned or orphans, cat welfare is improved.

The good news is, these programs work without new laws or enforcement. Iin fact they work better when there is less legislation.

There’s an excellent video from the HSUS on TNR here.

And some of the best resources for vets and setting up a program can be found here.

There are going to be a lot more people asking questions about TNR in the near future. If you were asked to describe TNR to a complete newbie, how would you pitch it?