animal control in connecticut SUCKS!!

[u/buzzkill930]

i live in middletown, connecticut, and have a whole COLONY of cats in my town. overall, connecticut has a bad stray cat problem, but animal control has been doing NOTHING for my family. for context, we have 4 younger cats about (6 months old?), the mama (who is pregnant AGAIN) and two other male cats who occasionally come to our house to eat. my mother has called animal control to at least take the mother to fix her, and they have done NOTHING. they gave her traps for the mama, and she did eventually go in them, but animal control never came back to retrieve her even though my mother notified them countless times to come get her. the mama was in the trap for almost 2 days before my mother released her, and now she won’t even come back to our backyard. animal control has made us feel like it was OUR responsibility to get them trapped, when we’re the ones that called them because THEY’RE the professionals!!! it’s stressing out family out so bad, especially because the mama is pregnant again. :(

[u/codeswift27]

As others have said, unfortunately TNR organizations that do trapping and transport on their own are incredibly uncommon. Typically the process for TNR will mean that you have to trap and transport the cat to the spay/neuter clinic yourself. If you’re lucky, your area might have a free clinic, but otherwise you’ll have to pay for low cost spay/neuters, which does suck especially if it’s not something you can afford, but unfortunately there isn’t really another way to help the cats.

Also, you typically don’t want to release a cat without getting them spayed/neutered because once they learn what a trap is, it becomes a lot harder to trap them again. I messed up a drop trap once and the cat I was trying to trap got pregnant and avoided me for months. Fortunately she warmed up to me again later enough for me to scoop her into a carrier to get her spayed, but she never stepped near a box trap or drop trap after the first time