Jefferson mayor Craig Berry jumped ahead of the city council’s law enforcement committee to the end of discussion about dealing with community cats by trying to foist a trap-neuter-return program on the volunteer People for Animal Welfare Society.
At the city council’s regular meeting Tuesday, Berry said the community “cat problem” has “resurfaced quite strongly,” and he’s “encouraging and challenging the PAWS group to adopt the Alley Cat (Allies) program of trap and release [sic].”
Berry said people seem to be in support of the program presented to the council in December by Alice Burton of Alley Cat Allies. He said Burton indicated there were funds available for T-N-R programs, and that the Jefferson police department doesn’t have the personnel to attempt such a project.
He directed chief of police Mark Clause to call PAWS president Marilyn Lane and offer “the encouragement and challenge” to get the program under way. Berry said nothing about funding the project.
Berry also said, though, that it’s not the city’s intention to change the ordinance that prohibits cats running at large.
Berry mentioned community cats under the “reports” portion of the agenda; cats were not listed as an agenda item.
Following his report, council member Harry Ahrenholtz said he and council member Dave Sloan, both members of the police committee, had discussed the “cat issue” with the JPD “in continuation of the discovery process to see what all our alternatives might be, realizing that T-N-R is one alternative, but there may be another variety of issues behind this whole situation.”
He said he and Sloan would like to continue researching options and talking with everyone that might be involved.
After the meeting Berry mentioned online petitions he had seen encouraging him and the Jefferson PD to use trap-neuter-return rather than shooting the occasional cat that was trapped and deemed by an officer to be unadoptable.
Two such petitions are easy to find online. A petition at change.org has 2,620 signatures. Another petition by Care2 has more than 155,000 signatures. The petitions were both posted in April after GreeneCountyNewsOnline included in a report of a city council meeting that the chief of police had confirmed that the JPD occasionally shot cats.
That information was picked up by larger media sources and spread across the country. Alley Cat Allies, headquartered in Bethesda, MD, first learned of Jefferson’s “cat problem” then.
Burton, of Alley Cat Allies, spoke at the city council’s only meeting in December. Marlene Ehresman, co-founder and executive director of the Iowa Wildlife Center, spoke at the council’s Jan. 8 meeting. According to Ehresman, house cats are significant predators of native wildlife, and that shooting a cat is an accepted humane method of euthanasia.
The JPD in April quit lending traps and assisting residents in relocating unwanted cats outside the city limits.
