enjoyable, but a cat can manage all too well in the wild, at least when considering its prolific breeding capabilities.
With no intervention from humans, two cats and their offspring can become hundreds in just a few years, overcrowding the community and its shelters in short order.
Carol Pultorak loves cats, but she wants to see a lot fewer of them. Over a decade ago, she founded Catnip Acres, a cat sanctuary and low-cost neuter clinic located beside her home on Dark Hollow Road, Franklin Township.
“I started doing this because I saw a need and no one else was doing it,” Pultorak said.
Her clinic has spayed or neutered well over 7,000 cats. Last year, Pultorak built a state-of-the-art clinic, which is almost indistinguishable from a full service animal hospital, except for the price it charges cat owners and its limited scope of animal care. The clinic only treats cats and it is primarily focused on neutering or spaying the animals.
Pultorak said she loves managing the organization, even though many of her wilder “patients” reward her efforts with hisses and growls.
Feral cats are descendants of pet cats whose owners abandoned them. But unlike a friendly house cat, a feral has no use for affection from people. However, it will occasionally enjoy a bowl of kibble left by a well-intentioned human.
To snare a feral, volunteers use the cat’s hunger and perhaps its affinity for tuna to their advantage. The scent of fish is irresistible, luring the cat through a wire enclosure until – SNAP – the door to the cage slams shut, trapping the wily feline inside.
The process is repeated numerous times before a volunteer loads all of the cages into a truck, the trapped cats complaining loudly all the while.
Before the end of the day, the cats will be neutered, vaccinated, treated for any illnesses and then returned to the area where they were captured. The procedure is called Trap-Neuter-Return, and various animal organizations employ the method as a way to control feral cat populations.
“We really rely on our volunteers,” Pultorak said. “People are interested and they want to see an end to the overpopulation of these cats, because they are just treated like vermin.”
A clinic day can be quite hectic, especially when a large number of ferals filter through the facility’s doors. Two months ago, the clinic sterilized 109 feral cats, the most it has treated in a single day.
When neutering that many animals, volunteers and paid technicians frantically work in assembly-line fashion to anesthetize and prepare the cats for the veterinarians, who made quick snips and incisions to remove the animals’ reproductive organs.
“If you’re going to offer a (low-cost) spay, you have to have a procedure and you have to have a vet who’s able to do it at high speed,” Pultorak said. “We have a vet (Dr. Marina Siegert, a Catnip Acres board member) who can do it in as little as two minutes. She’s that good.”
After the cat recovers from its high-speed sterilization procedure, a volunteer returns it to the wild, where it can live out its life with other feral cats as part of a colony. Eventually, the number of feral cats is supposed to dwindle since they can no longer reproduce.
Catnip Acres sponsors several feral cat colonies around the county by providing cat food and animal care. Volunteers agree to act as caretakers, looking after the colony and providing food and shelter.
Helen Smochek has been a cat colony caretaker for about eight years. She watches over about 20 to 30 cats in Waynesburg’s South Side neighborhood. Smochek said overpopulation was a real problem before she met Pultorak. Tom cats would viciously fight each other and kill newborn kittens. Other cats would become sick with disease.
But, after Smochek used Catnip Acres to neuter most of the animals, the cat population gradually declined and there are now a lot fewer problems.
“They were just everywhere, multiplying and multiplying,” she said. “If not for Carol, there would still be dead cats and sick, straggly cats.”
Pultorak started Catnip Acres in part to manage cat overcrowding at Greene County Fairgrounds. The effort was modest at first, with Pultorak taking a single cat to an animal clinic in Pittsburgh to be spayed.
“That was my goal when I started this, to clean up the fairgrounds. And now (my goal) has kind of moved to Greene County,” she said.
Pultorak’s trips to the vet clinic started becoming more frequent. Then, she progressed to contracting with a mobile unit to come to the area to neuter the animals. But eventually, Pultorak came to the conclusion that Greene County needed its own permanent facility, so she pooled donations and her own savings to build it.
The two-story clinic opened in January.
Catnip Acres also operates a shelter filled with cats that are available for adoption, but most of the animals aren’t trapped in tiny cages. Instead, they are allowed to roam a large enclosure with a patio, porch and a few rooms of a house. Numerous cats perch atop elaborate cat condos, beds and other feline-friendly furniture. Catnip Acres employs two people to clean up after the animals.
“They even have their own DVDs that they watch. Basically, it’s a lot of birds flying around,” said Angela Wilson, a full-time caregiver. “They’re spoiled.”
