| Mildcats at ASU When I went searching for a cat, I discovered a wonderful program called Mildcats at Arizona State University (ASU) which attempts to deal positively with the stray and abandoned cat population on campus. Feral cats do not go into the adoption program. In order to reduce the feral numbers, these cats get TNR-ed. (Trapped, Neutered, and Released). If Mildcats just removes them, others wander in to take their places. With TNR they maintain their places in the local cat society, keeping new cats out, and, neutered, can't add new kittens. Students living in dormitories who keep cats sometimes abandon them when they graduate or otherwise leave ASU. Mildcats finds these cats, neuters them, updates their shots and such, checks for diseases, makes sure they are healthy and places them with volunteer foster parents who keep the cats at their own expense until someone adopts them. ASU faculty, staff and students volunteer to take care of as many as ten cats in their own apartments or homes, feeding them, giving them shots, checking for any health problems, training them and showing them to prospective owners, plus filling out all the necessary papers. They do this in addition to meeting their own scholastic requirements and working at gainful employment, needed partly to cover the cost of keeping the cats. Mildcats gladly accepts donations to support its programs. Check the website for information and pictures of available cats. The foster parents can also accept donations individually to help feed and care for the cats. You can communicate with two such homes at these e-mail addresses: [email protected] (Carmen) [email protected] [email protected] Ignatius Tsong, a physics professor at ASU, and his wife Sophie run the program. MildCats is registered as a non-profit organization in Arizona and is currently working on making it non-profit on the federal level. Click below to visit the website for Mildcats ASU: http://www.mildcatsatasu.org [email protected] Celia |