I spent years helping with TNR, and now I'm told I can't feed the cats.

I am writing this message because I recently received, for the first time, a complaint request from the city asking that I stop feeding the cats.

Over the past several years, I have made sincere efforts to reduce the number of cats in the complex where I live and to prevent mother cats from going through repeated pregnancies. Trapping cats who live outdoors and sending them for spay and neuter surgery has never been easy. Each time I trapped a cat, sent it to the clinic, and waited for it to return, it was emotionally difficult. Still, I continued because I believed this effort would ultimately give these cats a better life.

I believed that the city was also making efforts to manage the cat population humanely rather than euthanizing them, and that is why I participated in the TNR program with a sense of responsibility. I carefully kept track of the number of cats that had already been spayed or neutered and tried to do my part so that more kittens would not continue to be born only to suffer on the streets. However, I have now been told that I must not feed the cats. Hearing this left me feeling deeply discouraged. After all the effort and emotional difficulty involved in trapping and sending these cats for surgery to prevent repeated pregnancies, being told that I cannot feed them makes me question what all of those efforts were for.

If the purpose of spaying and neutering is to reduce the population and prevent suffering, I believe that allowing the cats who already live in the area to have at least minimal access to food and stability should also be part of that responsibility. If the goal of TNR is for sterilized community cats to remain in their territory and no longer reproduce, then being told not to feed them feels, to me, like another form of cruelty. Recently, I was also asked by the responsible party to resubmit my personal information in order to renew my trapper permit. In the current situation, however, I have found myself losing the motivation to continue trapping. After all the effort I have put into helping these cats, this situation has left me with a deep sense of disappointment and discouragement. Right now I feel a mixture of sadness, frustration, and helplessness. I believed I had done my best for the cats, but it feels as though those efforts are not being recognized.

Even so, I do not want to believe that the work I have done was meaningless. The cats that have already been spayed and neutered will no longer go through repeated pregnancies, and many kittens who might have been born into suffering will never have to endure that fate. I hope that this alone means that the effort was not in vain. However, what weighs most heavily on my mind right now is tomorrow morning. I am unsure what I should do about feeding the cats that I have been caring for. They have always come at the same time each day to eat and then go on their way. Suddenly stopping their food feels very difficult for me.

If anyone has had a similar experience, or if you have advice to offer, I would truly appreciate hearing it. At the moment I feel very exhausted emotionally, and it is difficult for me to know what the right decision is.