Trapping cats has been going on for years in Garfield County, and the methods include canned fish and humane cages. Those efforts will continue in Carbondale under the town’s new cat ordinance, and participants say their trapping won’t be used against so-called nuisance cats.
Cindy Sadlowski is a woman with a mission. On this cold Tuesday morning, she’s carrying a two and a half foot long cage, which measures about a foot high and wide. “So we’ll set some traps,” says Sadlowski, trudging towards the back of a mobile home. “There’s a female living under this trailer that I’ve been trying to catch. I caught all her kittens the last two weeks, but I haven’t caught her yet.”
Sadlowski has been doing this for about fifteen years with the Carbondale Street Cat Coalition, but this particular campaign is only a few months old. She’s in the Garfield Trailer Park, on the east side of Carbondale. She explains how her method works, as she spoons out canned fish on top of the cage.
“So we put some mackerel in the trap, and then there’s a trip plate. So when they get on it, it shuts the door. And if we catch a cat we’ve already caught then we just turn it loose.” Sadlowski comes out to this community for an hour or two at a time, usually on weekend mornings. She doesn’t leave the traps unattended, instead waiting to see whether she has caught any felines.
When she’s successful, Sadlowski covers the trap with a sheet-- to calm the cat-- and she drives up to Colorado Animal Rescue. The cat “will be held there until we get it to the vet… if I trap on Saturday, the cat will go to the vet on Monday morning. Then they recover for 24 hours up at the shelter, and then we bring them back, and turn them loose. Unless they’re little, and then we can adopt them out and tame them.”
This is what’s called a trap, neuter, and return program. Cats are spayed or neutered, and euthanized only if they’re gravely ill or injured. Of the more than seventy felines caught here in recent months, only sixteen have been returned. The others were adopted.
Starting in January, Carbondale will have a new town ordinance addressing cats. It’s been a controversial issue, spurred by a local Audubon Chapter’s concerns that felines are killing dozens of birds a day. Officials decided to expand which cats can be considered a nuisance, with qualifications like injuring people or having an owner who can’t be tracked down. The punishment for an owner ranges from ten dollars up to 180 days in jail for multiple offenses.
Sadlowski says her work with the Carbondale Street Cat Coalition can continue under the new ordinance, though they don’t plan trapping newly-labeled nuisance cats.
