BEATRICE – It’s a problem for cities and towns large and small….and an elusive one to deal with. Now, the City of Beatrice and Beatrice Humane Society will try a new approach to handling a feral cat population that can get out of control.


The City and Humane Society will jointly operate a live trap, neuter, vaccinate and release program. Executive Director for the Humane Society, Carlee Fiddes explained, "This is our real-world efforts to actually be able to get to the base of the problem, by providing those spay-neuter services on those outdoor, unfriendly cats that we can't catch....that wouldn't make good house cats...and be able to actually stop the problem at it's source. With our new clinic, we have been as cost effective of a program as you will find anywhere. That provides every animal that comes in our door to be spayed and neutered, vaccinated for rabies and distempter...micro-chipped and ear-tipped."


The city council Monday night renewed a funding agreement that provides $20,000 annually to the Beatrice Humane Society and covers some of the utility cost at the local animal shelter.


City Administrator Tobias Tempelmeyer says the trap, neuter, vaccinate and release program proposed by the society would be for seven years. The city would pay $40 per cat or up to $6,000 a year. Fiddes says the program could have a big impact on the shelter’s operation.


The shelter had a situation last year where a deadly disease spread by cats came into their shelter, forcing a shutdown of intake for about three weeks....resulting in a loss of about 21 cats. Fiddes said by putting more vaccinated cats out in the community, it can serve as a buffer against a similar occurrence in the future.


The society has tried a smaller version of the program in Hickman, where a business was being overrun with stray cats. An auto dealership's operations were affected, and the program served to ease that problem.


In some cases, people who feed stray animals are encouraging the cats to produce more litters of kittens. Fiddes says about a third of stray cats are friendly enough they can be brought into a shelter and efforts can be made to adopt them out. But for the majority, that’s not possible.  Fiddes says there’s been some inquiries from smaller towns in the area about the option of trapping, neutering, vaccinating and releasing animals for managing cat populations.


"I was actually just talking to the executive director at the Capitol Humane Society. Comparatively, they have a very small program for the size of their city....but even with the two to three hundred animals that they are doing through their T-and-R program each year...they've actually seen almost a thousand animal difference in their number of intakes over the course of that same period of time they've been doing those T-and-Rs."


Live box traps are used in the program, or in some cases, a drop trap in areas where there are a large number of cats congregating. Fiddes estimates there could be as many as 750 to one-thousand feral cats in Beatrice.