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Hiding in Plain Sight

Feral cat colonies thrive with TLC and TNR

By Sandy Miller

Late one evening in 1991, Holly Sizemore was walking home from her waitress job at a Salt Lake City sushi bar when she noticed a man limping across the street toward a church. As he neared the parking lot, cats darted out from the bushes to greet him. Most of them stayed at arm's length, though a few weaved in and out of his legs. The man bent down and spread some cat food on the ground. A feral cat colony, Sizemore realized. And it was dinnertime.

Sizemore had been introduced to feral cats just a couple months earlier when she and a woman named Susan Allred discovered a colony of cats eating out of a restaurant Dumpster. They borrowed a neighbor's rabbit trap, scooped up the cats and took them to a veterinarian to be spayed and neutered. Then they returned the cats to the home the cats had created near the Dumpster. The women didn't know that what they were doing had a name: trap/neuter/return, or TNR.

Sizemore and Allred went back to the church and helped the man to trap, neuter and return his colony of cats. And Sizemore, who was studying theater at the University of Utah at the time, found her true calling: helping homeless animals. Today, she's the executive director of No More Homeless Pets (NMHP) in Utah. Since 2002, NMHP in Utah's Feral Fix program has helped spay and neuter more than 25,000 feral cats.

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