Purrfect solution

Meet Jake, a once-feral cat described as sweet, docile and loving. He has a home. He gets fed. He has access to a lap. Mason Cat Coalition member Amy Biderman found him a year ago as she made her rounds helping feed abandoned cats at George Mason University’s Fairfax campus. The cats are sterilized through the coalition’s trap-neuter-release (TNR) program.

Ms. Biderman noticed Jake, a domestic short-hair and a campus cat of at least eight years, living behind the physical education building.

“Over about a six-month period, he learned to trust me,” she says. “I would call him. I would hear him meowing, and he would come out to me.”

Ms. Biderman, public relations coordinator for GMU and a coalition member for the past year, worried about Jake as winter approached, so she had him trapped and taken to a veterinarian. On Dec. 4, she took him to her Vienna home and slowly acclimated him to a single room, then to her two female cats and to the rest of the house.

“This cat is truly transformed,” she says. “Feral cats can become house cats. It takes time. It takes patience and a lot of love.”

GMU, like many college campuses nationwide, is a dumping ground for unwanted cats. Elsewhere locally, Georgetown University had stray cats on campus several years ago and hired someone to trap and take them to a Pennsylvania farm, says Julie Bataille, university spokeswoman.

Spokespeople at George Washington University in Northwest and Montgomery College in Rockville say the schools do not have a problem with feral cats.

Residents of the communities surrounding a campus might believe a college is a good place for cats to find a home and leave them there. College students may bring a cat with them to campus, find a stray cat or take in a kitten they purchase or get for free. Some of the students may care for the pet while they are on campus, then abandon it at the end of the semester, realizing they cannot continue the care. GMU does not allow pets in dorms, but some students do not abide by the rule, coalition members say.

“It would be great to have a method of educating young people coming into colleges — if they take responsibility for a companion animal, they understand that it’s not a nine-month commitment but that it’s a nine-year commitment,” says Holly Hazard, executive director of the Doris Day Animal League, a D.C.-based nonprofit animal-protection lobbying organization.

Tens of millions of cats are feral in the United States — strays, lost or abandoned cats or cats born to feral mothers. Cats often are thought of as independent animals able to survive on their own, an image that is not necessarily true, says Donna Wilcox, executive director of Alley Cat Allies, a D.C.-based nonprofit that provides information on the humane handling of feral cats.

Cats used to human care that are living outdoors have to learn to hunt and compete for food, defend themselves, and find their own shelter.

Many pet owners know that the cats they abandon may end up euthanized at an animal shelter, Ms. Wilcox says. They believe that if they leave the cat outdoors, “the cat has a better chance to survive,” she says.

GMU’s feral-cat population numbered about 300 in 1994 when Joan Ziemba, a former GMU employee, started the Mason Cat Coalition, a loose organization of 12 core volunteers of faculty and staff that receives assistance from students and others.

“Mason’s administration at that time was wonderful. They recognized there was a problem, and they recognized we were willing to try to help it improve,” says Ms. Ziemba, who continues to feed the cats on weekends, even though she left GMU in 1998. She is now the director of marketing and communications at George Washington University’s satellite campus in Ashburn, Va.

“It was a project I started. It’s not one you can easily walk away from,” she says.

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