EVANSVILLE — Sheri Schenk swallowed hard as a lump formed in her throat. In one terrible instant — when she realized the truth – pain and anguish flooded her face.
Schenk, the kind of animal lover who keeps cat food in her car in case she spots strays, had gotten attached to a little yellow and white furball while volunteering at Evansville Animal Care & Control. Over the course of a week, she’d cradled the cat in her lap and lavished it with treats, toys and cuddles. The animal reminded her of her three cats.
Then one day, Schenk went to the cat's cage and it wasn’t there anymore. When she wasn't working, it had been euthanized.
“I quit. I couldn’t do it anymore. It just killed me," she said, fighting back tears.
Schenk regularly donates to animal rescue groups. She pays for other people to have their cats fixed. She said she has fed more strays than she can remember, sometimes for years at a time. She knows there's a cat overpopulation problem. There are tens of millions of unsterilized outdoor cats across the country, according to Humane Society of the United States estimates.
"There are just so many cats," Schenk said.
Others are reading:Evansville volunteers, animal welfare groups help lost Kentucky tornado pets
Cat overpopulation is a problem right outside many area residents’ windows – and sometimes in their trash cans and flower beds. It's at their neighbors' houses, abandoned structures, apartment complexes and mobile home parks, in wooded areas and behind stores. It has implications for wildlife conservation. Free-roaming cats are both predator and prey in an ecosystem that isn't natural to them.
It’s a major reason why some $900,000 in local tax dollars are spent annually to fund Animal Care & Control.
Years in the making, the problem is aggravated with every litter born to a stray cat and every months-old kitten that enters the Vanderburgh Humane Society’s spay-and-neuter clinic in heat.
And while the issue has been quick to worsen, the public response has been slow. The Vanderburgh Humane Society took in nearly 2,300 cats last year – more than any other year since 2005, when the shelter moved to its current building.
Other data bespeak the enormity of the challenge.
Others are reading:Evansville area pet owners feel impact of veterinarian shortage
In 2007, the year the Vanderburgh Humane Society opened its spay/neuter clinic, North Carolina-based consultants ASPCA Spay/Neuter Alliance told the shelter making a noticeable dent in the homeless cat population would require an extended ground war waged by an army of volunteers and help from a cooperative public.
“They said it would take every bit of 15 full years – just because of the sheer number of cats that are in the community,” Vanderburgh Humane Society Director Kendall Paul said.
That was 15 years ago. Since then, the intake of cats at the humane society's clinic has only grown in size and proportion as dog appointments shrink. The number of cats fixed last year — exactly 5,300 — is more than twice the number fixed in the clinic's first full year in 2008. That year, cats accounted for 55% of animals spayed or neutered. Last year, cats were a record 75% of the total — and that was the third consecutive record-setting year at the humane society.
And still, new cats keep coming in ever greater numbers.
In 2007, VHS took in 1,449 cats from unwanted kittens and their mothers, pregnant cats, neighborhood cats, discarded pets and transfers from other agencies. That was 46% of total intakes. Last year, 64% of local humane society intakes were cats, and there were 2,272 of them.
Animal Control has received between 1,600 and 1,900 cats nearly every year since at least 2014. There's a bright spot: With a crucial assist from rescue groups, the agency has managed to dramatically reduce its cat euthanasia rate. Paul says the Vanderburgh Humane Society has not had to euthanize cats purely for space reasons in three years.
But working against the efforts of those charged with curbing cat overpopulation is one inescapable biological fact: Free-roaming, unsterilized cats multiply like crazy.
With a gestation period of two months, a female cat can have five litters in a year, said Paul, who has seen kittens as young as four months in heat at the Vanderburgh Humane Society clinic.
Kittens can have kittens — as many as five or six at a time.
"And if those new kittens aren't getting spayed or neutered by the four-month age mark, it takes just a few times and you have 1,000 cats," Paul said.
'If I don’t, they’re not going to do it'
Danielle Barnes was more than 20 minutes into her conversation with the Courier & Press when she burst into tears.
Barnes is a supervisor at Warrick County Animal Control. For nearly 25 years there and in other jobs she has battled cat overpopulation, trying to instill a sense of responsibility in people who put out food but do nothing else as one new litter begets another.
People assume they can find homes for all the kittens a cat is about to have, Barnes said — only to come in months later, after they've failed, to turn in the litter. By that time the kittens are less marketable to potential adopters or, worse, those kittens are pregnant.
Barnes said she wants to bang her head against a wall dealing with apartment complexes that won't require tenants to get their cats fixed but once did require them to declaw cats. As if furniture were more important than living beings, she says ruefully.
Tenants move out and leave unfixed cats behind, assuming — correctly — that they can get replacements free on Facebook. Also likely unfixed.
Barnes said it's like trying to hold back water with a screen door. Years of frustration spill out in a jumble of sobs.
"Everybody’s mad. They’re mad that the neighbor has all these cats, and then you go talk to the neighbor — I mean, we’re working on a case right now that has 10-15 cats and of course, to her she only has like, three, and we’ve got all these traps set and now miraculously, none of the cats are there, so she’s probably taken them inside," she said.
"But there’s already litters of kittens there."
Warrick County Animal Control doesn't have a dog food or cat food budget, let alone money for veterinary care, Barnes said — so she founded small nonprofit rescue group Warrick Animal Guardians in 2012. She pulls cats from Animal Control into the nonprofit and works with veterinarians, discount rescues and shelters — anyone who can fix a few more cats. Warrick Animal Guardians pays for it all.
Twice monthly, Warrick County Animal Control takes a transport truck to the Vanderburgh Humane Society spay/neuter clinic. People fill out paperwork to get owned or feral cats onto the transport, drop them off at Animal Control later and pick them up the next day. It costs about $60 at most — far less than the hundreds of dollars private veterinarians charge for the procedure — and Warrick Animal Guardians often helps.
But money doesn't always move mountains.
Barnes said she once went to a mobile home park that was overrun with free-roaming cats and offered $10 vouchers for the transport and spay/neuter service. Warrick Animal Guardians would pay the remaining $50.
"Not one person signed up," she said. "People don’t want to take the responsibility. We can only do so much. We can try to make (clinic) appointments. We can offer financial assistance – and they still don’t do it. Because it would take effort."
Animal Control in Warrick County covers nearly 400 square miles with two officers and two part-time kennel workers. Barnes doesn't have time to drive around the county picking up trapped cats for the spay/neuter transport or do the trapping herself.
She said she doesn't want to give up. But there's a reality about fighting cat overpopulation that anyone who undertakes the work eventually accepts.
"The people in this country feel like owning animals is a right, not a privilege," Barnes said. "If I can’t beat them, I’m going to join them. So what can I do to help you to get these animals fixed?
"Because if I don’t, they’re not going to do it."
Nonprofit puts its back into the fight
Katie Wolf has seen eight cats for sure in the tiny space under her former neighbor's not-quite-closed garage door — five of them kittens. The neighbor moved out a couple of months ago.
Wolf feeds and waters the cats through the opening, ensuring their survival for the moment — but there's a more immediate problem: The mother looks pregnant again.
"This guy has had cats in his garage for years, and they just keep having cats and more cats, and..."Wolf paused.
"I don't know what's happened to all of them," she said.
The man placed food dishes everywhere, Wolf said, but to her knowledge he never got any of the cats on his property fixed. One of those cats, a gray tabby Wolf calls Joe, kept drifting over to her house until he wormed his way into her heart. He's one of her three fixed indoor cats now. But he's one of the lucky ones.
Wolf has wanted to call somebody about fixing the neighbor's cats for years, but she was afraid he would give her trouble. Now that he's gone and the house remains unoccupied, she aims to shut down that particular pipeline once and for all.
She called Feline Fix, an Evansville-based nonprofit trap, neuter and return organization — 'TNR' in animal welfare vernacular — to get the cats fixed. Evansville Animal Care & Control does not trap cats on request but will come get them if they are confined.
It was one of thousands of calls for help Feline Fix founder Jamie Taylor has fielded since founding the small nonprofit in 2006.
Often responding to phone calls or Facebook messages, Taylor and a volunteer drive to places where cats colonize and set humane traps. They return to pick up the animals and get them spayed or neutered and vaccinated at the VHS clinic or whenever nonprofit public health organization Public Vet brings one of its traveling clinics to town.
But if the area is not safe or callers are elderly and Feline Fix doesn't want to leave a trap unsupervised, the volunteers sit in cars waiting and watching until a cat walks into a trap. That can take two hours or more. It can mean boredom, monotony — even fear.
"I've waited countless hours in alleys, in the middle of the night," Taylor said.
The work can get hairy given the potentially combustible mix of bad neighborhood, unwanted or overprotected cats and agitated neighbors.
"I've had a gun pulled on me. Yeah," Taylor said.
Passion fuels ground-level activist
Taylor remembers, as if it were yesterday, the moment in 2006 she vowed to reduce the number of litters born to cats living outdoors.
She saw a tiny figure that looked like a paper bag fluttering in the wind. But as she approached in her car, what she saw broke her heart. It was a kitten, apparently hit by a car, struggling to stand.
Taylor rushed over – just in time for the little animal to die in her arms.
Sixteen years later, Feline Fix relies on donations of money and supplies to do what it can. Taylor and three volunteers loan out cat traps, deliver cats to the humane society's spay/neuter clinic and pay for some of the surgeries. She makes copious notes about kittens that are too young to be fixed after initial visits, returning when they're ready.
Taylor is a clinical social worker in real life. But Feline Fix is her passion. The urgency in her voice is palpable.
Adoption will always be part of the solution to cat overpopulation, she said. Feline Fix works to find homes for cats on Facebook and at PetSmart. The organization has a handful of foster homes. But adoption is a band-aid on a gaping wound.
"That’s just a thing people have to get out of their head. There is not a home for all of them. No matter what. There’s not a home for all these cats," Taylor said.
The endless cycle of cat overpopulation can be broken only when people and organizations realize the imperative is preventing more births, not allowing births and searching for new homes, Taylor said. That has to include getting pregnant cats spayed — which means abortions of unborn kittens.
It is an approach embraced by the Vanderburgh Humane Society and Evansville and Warrick County animal control agencies.
Taylor poured out her heart on the sensitive subject in a recent Feline Fix Facebook post "loved" by Evansville Animal Care & Control Superintendent Alisa Webster and Barnes and otherwise supported by 171 other people.
"If you have or found a pregnant cat the best thing you can do is still get her fixed, yes while pregnant, yes that means she won’t have the babies," it said.
The Facebook post posed a question.
"'You can’t do that.' Then can you pay for the whole litter to be fixed, pay for all of them to be vaccinated, at least one trip to the vet if they get sick, flea treatment for all, deworming for them all, take care of them all for 9 weeks or so with food and litter. And then keep them all forever so you aren’t taking away homes from cats that are already born?
"Feline Fix doesn’t think kitten season is cute or funny. Yes we love cats! We love them so much that we are tired of seeing them struggling, starving, suffering and dead on the streets, being euthanized to make room for more cats that no one fixed."