This year, the Santa Fe Animal Shelter (SFAS) locked its doors to homeless cats in need of safe shelter.

The explanation? According to statements by CEO Jack Hagerman, “It’s usually best to keep healthy free-roaming cats in their neighborhoods.” Instead, SFAS has refocused its resources on keeping already-homed cats in those homes.

This alone is completely inadequate to address our community’s feline shelter needs. Santa Fe badly needs and deserves essential shelter services for homeless cats. These include:

• An effective Trap-Neuter-Release program
• Free Spay-Neuter for ALL homeless cats,
  including trapped, stray, lost, and surrendered
• Readily-accessible safe shelter for ALL homeless cats
• Assessment for ALL homeless cats, so that social cats can be adopted

Instead, the largest shelter in Northern New Mexico dropped its long-successful Gatos de Santa Fe Trap Neuter Release (TNR) program. It dramatically increased the spay/neuter fee paid by the public and other rescues. It is routinely refusing public surrender of free-roaming (e.g., trapped, stray, and lost) cats, redirecting the public to Animal Control. And open admission has been replaced with managed admission, leaving Santa Fe with few safe places to surrender cats that suddenly become homeless due to owner death, loss of housing, or economic hardship.

Santa Fe needs and deserves better.

To be effective, a TNR program must sterilize a critical number of cats in a colony, neighborhood or other defined location within a short period. Numerous studies estimate that at least 60 to 80% of intact cats must be sterilized annually for a colony’s population to decline. After losing Gatos de Santa Fe, our community is experiencing a homeless cat population explosion.

According to the ASPCA, return-to-location programs should never supersede robust and aggressive adoption programs for social cats that have been trapped. iCatCare believes that shelters need to identify “inbetweeners” and work towards outcomes which suit each cat’s requirements. While some cats may find household living stressful, it is impossible to identify the best solution for each cat without intake and assessment. Refusing direct intake for all trapped and stray cats may cut the shelter’s costs, but it is inhumane.

Finally, eliminating shelter services for homeless cats aggravates already-huge challenges. Unsterilized free-roaming cats will still breed, rapidly undoing past population reductions. Residents facing illness or death or loss of pet-friendly housing will still need to immediately surrender their beloved cats somewhere. Smaller rescue organizations are now left taking up the slack, until they drown. Homeless cats that might be otherwise surrendered to the safety of a shelter and potentially re-homed are being killed or dumped, left scrounging for food, fending off predators, and battling avoidable illness.

Leaving ALL healthy homeless cats to free-roam isn’t a novel solution. It is a return to the distant past, before humane shelter services, when homeless cats mostly suffered and died. It is nothing short of cruel.

Santa Fe needs and deserves better. Now.

We the undersigned demand that the Santa Fe Animal Shelter Board of Directors restore essential services for Santa Fe homeless cats. We acknowledge that funds are not unlimited, but available funds should be more fairly and effectively utilized to deliver the essential shelter services listed above to ALL Santa Fe cats – including homeless cats.