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ForewordOne of the first ferals I ever met was a cat namedApollo. Before that, working in a spay/neuter clinic,I’d seen multitudes of other feral cats but they weredifferent. Those were quiet little figures huddled intraps, doing their best to make themselves invisible.Apollo, on his home turf, was a personality and apresence. He’d prowl his colony’s territory, a rusty,overgrown lot in the heart of the city, slipping frompatches of tall grass to the lot’s lone twisted tree thenback to leap easily onto the old brick wall borderingthe end of the property. Sometimes he’d bask on thesun-warmed bricks. Thoroughly feral, Apollo neverlet humans come near but he went about his businessin a purposeful, dignified way, leaving no doubt he knew he was in charge of his life andliked it that way.Apollo was born in 1999, the year Neighborhood Cats started. In those days therewere no services in New York City to manage free-roaming cat populations and littleawareness, even among animal care professionals, of what defined a feral. If you were acat born outdoors and wary of humans, you were pretty much on your own. Maybe you’dfind a nice person to feed you but Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) was still little known soyour likely fate would be a constant struggle for survival and a lot of kittens left behindon the streets. If you were brought to the city shelter, your chances of coming out alivewere near zero.The introduction of Trap-Neuter-Return by Neighborhood Cats began to change allthat. To many, the notion of catching cats, fixing them and then putting them backoutside was puzzling, even startling, but results were dramatic. Within a few years,managed colonies like Apollo’s dotted the city. Blocks and neighborhoods, whereskinny, weepy-eyed kittens had been ever-present, had no more kittens. The cats werehealthier. The 3:00 am screeching and fighting over mates, pungent tomcat urine andother nuisances that upset and angered residents were quietly gone.TNR had arrived, but for all its advantages, several more years would pass before astrong citywide network was in place. Across the country, similar advances wereunderway. Communities, from tiny specks of towns to major metro areas, were exploringthis new method that finally offered hope for forgotten animals. Neighborhood Cats ledthe way with programs and innovations that steadily fostered the growth of Trap-Neuter-Return in New York City and elsewhere. In 2002, we held our first workshop to teachNYC residents how to safely and effectively practice TNR; Neighborhood Cats TNRWorkshops have now trained and certified more than 5,000 residents and each month thatnumber continues to grow. Our website and award-winning materials, including theinstructional video How to Perform a Mass Trapping, have aided countless caretakers intheir efforts to help feral and stray cats. Among our “feral firsts”: creation of a humanetrap specifically for feral cats, design of a commercially available drop trap, authorship of1