Best Friends September:October 2011 Issue -Tangier Island

September/October 2011 Leading the way toward No More Homeless Pets $4.95

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The community cats of

Tangier Islandpage 22

BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011 3

FeaturesThe community cats of Tangier Island 22Reducing their numbers through trap/neuter/return takes planning, perseverance ... and doughnuts.

The comprehensive approach 30How Chicago became a model city for fighting animal cruelty.

DepartmentsBest Friends news 8Best Friends Animal Sanctuary 38Pet health & behavior 56The animals’ bookshelf 60

In Every IssueFrom the CEO 2From the editor 4Letters to the editor 6Members & pets 62Saying hello 66Saying goodbye 67The final word 72

Cover photo of a Tangier Island catby Gary Kalpakoff

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bestfriends.org/allthegoodnewsSeptember/October 2011 contents

From the Editor

Carla Davis, Editor

[email protected]

5001 Angel Canyon Rd. Kanab, UT 84741

Tel: (435) 644-2001 Fax: (435) 644-2078

email: [email protected]

September/October 2011

BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE (USPS 24862) is published six times per year, in January, March, May, July, September, and November, by Best Friends Animal Soci-ety, 5001 Angel Canyon Road, Kanab, UT 84741. Periodicals Postage Paid at Kanab, Utah, and at additional mailing offices. Vol. 20, issue 5 © 2011. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Best Friends Magazine, 5001 Angel Canyon Road, Kanab, UT 84741.

BEST FRIENDS ANIMAL SOCIETY

Chief Executive Officer: Gregory Castle

BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE

Editor: Carla Davis

Art Director: Eric Evans

Production Manager: Arnie Bishop

Sanctuary Editor: David Dickson

Assistant Editors: Estelle Munro,

Anne Zepernick

Copy Editor: Mary Girouard

Staff Writers: Ted Brewer, Sandy Miller, Cathy Scott

Photos: Sarah Ause, Gary Kalpakoff, Molly Wald

Graphics: Jason Hegwood

Illustrations: Tom Dougherty

Best Friends Animal Society® is a nonprofit organization building no-kill programs and partnerships that will bring about a day when there are No More Homeless Pets®. The so-ciety’s leading initiatives in animal care and community programs are coordinated from its Kanab, Utah, headquarters, the country’s largest no-kill sanctuary. This work is made possible by the personal and financial support of a grassroots network of members and com-munity partners across the nation.

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Collaborating for community cats

This month’s cover cat is from Tangier, Virginia, a tiny island with a huge community cat population. I’m a Virginia native and this spring made my third visit to Tangier. Arriving by boat, I immediately saw a brown tabby trotting around a docked fishing boat like a seasoned deckhand. He graciously allowed me to snap his picture. By week’s end my companions and I had taken more than 4,000 photos … whew!

I was immensely fortunate to be part of a group of Best Friends staff and volunteers from around the U.S. who in early May set up a spay/neuter clinic on Tangier for a trap/neuter/return (TNR) project. We estimated there are 400 to 500 community cats on the island, and by week’s end the team had sterilized 250. No small feat! Read a full account in this month’s feature, “The Community Cats of Tangier Island” (p. 22).

We couldn’t have pulled off the project without the contributions of volunteer vets and vet techs. Drs. Jon Reiss and Jeffery Newman of Caring Hands Animal Hospital in Virginia were on board from the get-go, recruiting veterinary staff and generously giving both their time and resources. Many months later, Jeffery continues to take an interest in the island cats, and

we couldn’t be more thrilled.I’m also excited by the response to this issue’s

“person on the street” question, posted on Face-book. Judging by the hundreds of emails, posts and “likes,” we struck a nerve when we asked, “How do you feel about the term ‘pet owner’ and why?” We heard from a lot of folks who shared Sandy Biederman’s opinion. She wrote, “I don’t like the term ‘pet owner’ because a pet is supposed to be a member of the family, and you don’t ‘own’ family members. Mine are my

children, and I am their mom.” Eve-Marie Kuntzman was one of several people championing the term “pet guardian.” Read more on this topic in “Your Thoughts” (p. 6) and in the “Members & Pets” section (p. 62).

A quick reminder: The 2011 No More Homeless Pets Confer-ence is October 21–23. Get a sneak peek at what speakers Shawni Larrabee (p. 20) and Pam Johnson-Bennett (p. 72) have to say in this issue.

See you in Las Vegas!

4 BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011


Features

BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011

T angier Island


Shaye Olmstead, director of Operation Catnip in Gainesville, Florida, is on kitten duty. Standing in the kitchen, she plucks Tangie from the folds of a purple towel and clutches the flailing and mewling kitten to her chest. Will she take the bottle now? Will she eat?

The day before, Tangie was one of the estimated 400 community cats roaming the island — and one of the 400 reasons Shaye and a few dozen animal welfare professionals from around the U.S. boated over from Crisfield, Mary-land, to do a trap/neuter/return (TNR) project on Tangier. The resident who found the kitten orphaned in her front yard didn’t know a lick about cats but figured the “kitty people” she’d heard were on the island could help. Because everyone knows everyone on Tangier, the visitors with their logo T-shirts, mainland accents and hundreds of cat-sized traps stacked in front of the old health clinic weren’t exactly hard to track down.

Tangie sucks down a few ounces of formula, her M.O. for the coming days. Shaye will try this again in the morning. But first: back to bed for both of them. It’s Shaye’s job to get the spay/neuter clinic set up and running, and she’ll need all the rest she can get. By anyone’s math, 399 cats still need to be located, trapped, sterilized and returned to their homes or colonies by the weekend.

And — yawn — it’s already Tuesday.

Seasonal ferries from Virginia and Maryland bring visitors by the hundreds to Tangier, a fishing village in the Chesapeake Bay. They’re attracted to the abundance of soft-shell crabs at the island’s eateries and the back-in-time feel that comes from decades of isolation. Tourists usually come knowing, too, that the 500-plus residents of this waterman’s community are interrelated. Generations of families with the names Crockett, Parks and Pruitt have run the restaurants, fished the bay and filled the church pews on Sunday mornings.

It’s because of the islanders that the TNR project got past the good idea stage. They’re fiercely protective of the cats who’ve been roaming their narrow three-mile-long strip of land for decades. Some are in colonies managed by big-hearted people who can’t stand to see them hungry or ill. Some are considered pets, slipping in and out of houses all day but called back by name for supper. And still others are nomads — no known address, no caregiver. Most aren’t spayed or neutered. When spring comes, the pregnant cats give birth, boosting the numbers even more.

Last summer a tourist noticed the tremendous number of cats, many sick with eye and respiratory problems. Could something be done for them? She called her co-worker Debbie Bull of Joppa, Maryland, who called Best Friends. Robin Politowicz, senior specialist with Best Friends’ Community Animal Assistance department, talked to

At the Mimosa guesthouse on tiny Tangier Island, Virginia, the rooster is two hours from crowing folks awake, but little Tangie — a two-and-a-half-week-old black kitten who’s all legs and lungs — is demanding breakfast. It’s time for her 3 a.m. feeding, and everyone in the cottage knows it.


Debbie and later got in touch with Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge of Tangier. Their conversation went something like this:

Robin: cat population?

The mayor: Yes! TNR is a method of humanely controlling community

cat populations. Cats are trapped, spayed or neutered, and then returned to their colonies, where they are fed and watched over by volunteer caregivers. Successful TNR projects take months of planning. And when the project’s on an island that’s 18 miles off the mainland and has no veterinary clinic, logistics are tricky at best.

In February the mayor met with the town council to get buy-in. “Ooker was very supportive from the begin-ning, and made it evident that the islanders valued their cats but the population was out of control,” Robin says. In early March, Shelly Kotter, national specialist with Best Friends’ cat initiatives, ferried over in the blustery cold to “figure out if this project should be a go.”

“From that point on, things just snowballed,” Robin says. “I spoke with Shaye in February about the possibility of her running the clinic, and we had a meeting at Star-bucks where we hashed out all the specifics over about 10 cups of coffee. Then she was in touch with the project’s head vet, Dr. Jon Reiss of Caring Hands Animal Hospital in Virginia, about the clinic, the setups, the protocols they wanted to use and everything medical. After that, it was mostly logistics: finding housing, transportation, traps, transportation for the traps, the food situation, the recruitment of other vets, arranging for vet techs and 5,000 other things.”

The first group of staff and volunteers arrived on the island by chartered boat on Sunday, May 8. It wasn’t two minutes before someone saw the first cat — sitting on the dock — and snapped a photo.

Early in the week, Robin visits Tangier’s only school and talks with the students. She asks the younger ones to close their eyes.

“Imagine you’re homeless,” she says. “You have no shelter, no place to sleep, and no food. You have to fight every day to survive. Now imagine that you have children with you — six, or eight, or even 10. You’re responsible for their survival, too. You can barely feed yourself, let alone all of them. Now imagine there are 500 just like you, all within a mile or so. You’re all competing, every day, for the same scraps of food, the same places to sleep, the same places to raise your children. Any idea what I’m comparing that to?”

TNR is a tough sell to the island kids. They’re used to the cats. They’ve grown up seeing them trotting down the streets at all hours, lounging on the docks like they own the place and rubbing up against their bicycles. They hear them cat-calling at night and smell their urine markings in the morning. Four hundred cats and counting? Big deal.

To some of these kids, though, they are a big deal. First-grader Bridgette brightens when talking about her

Cats are a familiar sight around the docks.


three outdoor cats. There’s gray and white Toby, black and white Chief and an orange guy named Tiger. And eighth-grader Summer counts 16 cats in her animal-loving family. She’ll spend the week getting to know the TNR team and joining them for dinners and surgeries. Summer wants to be a veterinarian.

Principal Nina Pruitt and a couple of teachers clamor around a TNR team member who’s been taking notes during Robin’s presentation. They pepper her with names of islanders: your list?

At the town meeting that night, Shelly talks about the list. In February, she emailed a survey to the island resi-dents for documenting the cat population. Anyone who had cats needing spay/neuter surgeries just had to let Shelly know, and they’d be added to a database. When the team came to the island in May to do TNR, Shelly had 35 names and addresses marked on a map. Her job for the week: split the island into sections and leave baited traps at each location.

Edna Brown and Duane Crockett are two of the couple dozen residents at the Swain Memorial United Methodist Church parish hall that night listening to Shelly, Robin and Shaye talk in detail about what they’re doing with the cats.

For weeks Pastor Patricia Stover talked up their arrival from the pulpit. “The whole island’s been waiting for you,” Duane says after the 40-minute chat wraps up. “We’ve so been looking forward to your coming. We realize we have an overpopulation problem.”

Some of the islanders don’t like the cats or are just plain scared of them, Edna says, but feed them anyway. She takes the ferry over to Crisfield — a 45-minute ride each way — and comes back with huge bags of kibble from Walmart. Edna has four cats inside, five outside.

Duane doesn’t have any pet cats but feeds a bunch in the neighborhood. “I’m not a cat person, but I can’t let them go hungry,” he says.

Duane is a lifelong islander and a teacher at the school. He looks around the room, recognizing faces. If folks start feeding the cats, he says, they feel a responsibility to them. “But you can’t afford to get all those cats fixed. [If] you have 10 cats — that’s $400, plus the hassle of getting them on boats to the mainland. It discourages people from spaying and neutering.”

“You’ve taken a huge burden from us,” he says simply.

It was a wind-whipped, brisk March day when Shelly set foot on Tangier for the first time to, as she says, really understand how many cats were there. Eyeball estimates — from the woman who reported the case to Best Friends, and from the islanders themselves — were all over the place. Two hundred? Five hundred? A thousand cats? “There was no conclusive number we could grab hold of,” Shelly says.

Before her trip, Best Friends emailed a survey to the town office that was distributed all over the island. The questions included how many cats are you feeding, how often and when, and how many cats does your neighbor have. Anyone who sent back a survey got a coupon good

Some islanders brought their cats directly to the clinic for surgery.

Watch the video!video.bestfriends.org

or click here in our digital edition


for $5 off a meal at one of the local restaurants. About a third of the island households replied.

“We went street by street and house by house, and talked to anyone who would open their doors,” Shelly says. The Best Friends team timed their visits to the morning and evening feeding times gleaned from the survey and got a good look at the cats, who, by comparison to typical community cat populations, are tame and friendly.

Physically, the cats looked good. “They had thick, wonderful coats and were a healthy weight,” Shelly says. Between the survey data and the home checks, Shelly estimated the population between 400 and 500, with about 400 unaltered. “I knew this project was something doable for Best Friends.”

Best Friends’ staff and volunteers arrived in May ready to get to work. That Monday, Shelly and the team loaded up their golf carts and an old pickup truck and started trapping. By Wednesday, the first day of surgery, they had caught more than 100 cats.

And then it got a whole lot harder. The island flooded, repeatedly. Higher-than-usual tides crippled the trapping efforts mid-week and beyond. “The flooding put a huge wrench in our plans,” Shelly says. But with the help of an islander who knows tide charts, the team adapted the trapping schedule. Instead of leaving traps around the island, to pick up later, they simply waited for the cats to trip them.

From day one, islander Ronnie Colburn was Shelly’s shadow. What he didn’t know, he learned, and quickly. “He worked tirelessly,” Shelly says, sometimes 13-hour days, shuttling Shelly around, setting and collecting traps, and being the go-to guy for all things island. “He literally knew everything about everybody.”

And he genuinely likes the cats. One night around 10 p.m., someone called about a mother cat who had moved her babies under a house. The tide was coming in, and it wasn’t safe. “Ronnie waded through water, got on his hands and knees and pulled out all those cats,” Shelly says.

Zipping around the island in their golf carts, the trap-pers attracted attention wherever they went. Islanders are known for their friendliness and extended that — and then some — to the trappers. “At every stop, everyone came out and talked to us,” Shelly says. “They were so grateful.”

One morning around 7 a.m., a woman came out on her porch and flagged down Shelly and Ronnie, who were starting rounds. She couldn’t wait to tell them that her “famous homemade doughnuts” were up at the parish hall. “Make sure you get up there and get them while they’re hot,” she insisted. “So of course we went up to the church,” Shelly says. “That was super sweet.”

Every day at noon, the ladies of Swain Memorial brought lunch up to the parish hall for the TNR staff and volun-teers. Homemade salads, sandwiches, casseroles, cakes and cookies filled the army of rumbling stomachs.

Almost everything on Tangier is convenient to every-thing else, but it was pretty lucky for the TNR team that the parish hall was just across the street from the old health

Kyla Hollar, an employee at Caring Hands


clinic, which was being used as the feline surgery center. Notices posted around the island for weeks warned

residents that the “kitty people” needed the musty old clinic cleaned out. Its replacement, the David B. Nichols Health Center, had opened in August.

Project staff and volunteers got right to prepping the place for surgeries. Shaye, who runs a high-volume spay/neuter organization in Florida, made sure the supplies and equipment that had been boated over from the mainland got where they needed to go and that the Virginia health department agreed that the makeshift clinic was up to code.

It was no small feat, to be sure. “We only had two days to set up the space and had to

get started spaying and neutering at once,” Shaye says. “The old human clinic offered an extremely cramped and less than ideal space for what we were doing, yet an outsider looking at the operation might have thought we had been working in that space for years. By lunchtime on the first day of surgery, everyone had tweaked their station’s operations and was excelling at their tasks.”

Maybe no task was as important as Blanca Carbia’s. The Operation Catnip volunteer drove hundreds of traps from Gainesville, Florida, to Crisfield, Maryland, in an 18-foot Ryder truck.

No traps, no trapping. No trapping, no surgeries. “No pressure!” Blanca says.On the island, she was never far from the clinic, and in

addition to roles as trapping master, cat recovery checker, trap cleaner and volunteer coordinator, she made a fine public information officer. Blanca went into PIO mode with passing tourists, chatting them up about the project:

Blanca: We need to keep the cats in check, to keep them healthy and happy.

Tourist: Do you tag them in some way?Blanca:

cat before?Tourist:

very much.Blanca:

By the weekend, the numbers were in: 250 cats had been spayed or neutered. As surgeries tapered off, the volunteer vets and vet techs took their last passes around the island and ferried or flew home.

For some of the volunteers, their work was just starting. Virginians Rick and Sarah McDonald arrived Friday

night for two days of trap cleaning, laundry, and packing and loading supplies for shipment back to the mainland. The pair knew the drill and spent Saturday dunking traps into kiddie pools filled with bleach and water.

In the days since Robin introduced the TNR project at school, some of the island kids decided to make it their project, too. Promised a dollar for each trap they collected, they worked alongside Rick and Sarah, cleaning. “They were helping and loving it,” Rick says.

Kids curious about the trapping helped Shelly and


the team from day one. “The kids blew me away,” says Shelly, who delivered and collected traps all week with an entourage of five elementary-school-age boys. “They were out there, excited and helpful — pulling traps and riding them on their bicycles. They were so excited to learn about what we were doing.”

“I believe this is how you influence our society about animal welfare,” says Blanca, who saw plenty of kids pitch in with the project. “Even though this was a small community, I am sure wherever those kids go, they are going to remember the bunch of ‘kitty people’ who invaded their island that spring and took care of their cats.”

Which brings us back to Tangie. By week’s end, the kitten who’d been nearly run over by a lawnmower had been bottle-fed, burped, cuddled and cooed over by just about everyone lucky enough to meet her. Debbie and her sister Christina Bartnik of Hampstead, Maryland, who also was volunteering on the island that week, made sure of it. Walk into the room and got a minute? Take Tangie and have your turn. It was an easy sell, really. No one could resist the kitten.

Christina was a goner.“I was asked if I would foster her,” Christina says. “Since

I have seven other rescued cats at home, and feed six to 10 ferals at my office every day, and have been raising six kittens that an unspayed feral gave birth to April 8th, I decided fostering would be feasible.”

But not for long.“When I got her home, my husband said, ‘You know

you’ll never be able to let her go.’” And he was right. “We love Tangie,” Christina says. “She has never-ending energy, piercing eyes and a coat that feels like mink. She jumps up in our bed at night and loves to cuddle next to us.”

Tangie will never be alone again. “Since I had six kittens to find homes for,” Christina adds, “I decided to bring one home as a forever playmate for Tangie. They are best friends!”

the “return” part of trap/neuter/return.

sunsets like this for more than 200 years.

Can you really humanely stop the breeding of feral/free-roaming cats? And can those cats and native wildlife co-exist? Tangier Island will provide answers as we monitor the cat community there following our successful 2011 TNR project.

Best Friends staff and volunteers are returning to Tangier in mid-September after spaying or neutering 250 cats in May. Virginia-based veterinarians Drs. Jon Reiss and Jeffery Newman and their team will provide surgeries and parasite treatment for the remaining un-neutered cats and kittens.

Read a full account of the Tangier Island TNR project’s second phase at network.bestfriends.org. Learn more about Tangier at tangierisland-va.com.

Best Friends September:October 2011 Issue -Tangier Island

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