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9. TrappingYou’ve educated the community about TNR, established a feeding pattern for yourcolony, counted the cats, made plans for any who are adoptable or sick, arranged forholding space, scheduled your spay/neuter date, borrowed traps and lined uptransportation. Now it’s time to trap! While you can never predict exactly what willhappen once the trapping begins, your preparations will help keep surprises to aminimum and make the project go as smoothly as possible. This chapter will go over allthe tricks and techniques you’ll need to get your cats into the traps and to the clinic. Mass trapping“Mass trapping” refers to the TNR of anentire colony at once. This approach is farpreferable to a gradual “one-cat-at-a-time”approach for several reasons. First, by the timeyou come upon the colony and decide to get thecats fixed, the situation is often in crisis. Thereare too many cats and kittens, neighbors arecomplaining and threats to call animal controlor worse are being made. Spay/neutering all thecats quickly results in an immediate anddramatic decrease in the kinds of nuisancebehaviors which provoke these reactions. Noisefrom mating and odor from the spraying ofunaltered males abate, no more kittens are bornand the cats tend to roam less and so becomeless visible. What started as a very hostilesituation calms down, almost overnight.Another advantage to mass trapping is itphoto: Meredith Weissmakes it easier to catch every cat in the colony.When you get down to the last few cats during a mass trapping, they’re the only ones leftin the territory. You can keep withholding all food and, with each passing day, they’regetting hungrier and more likely to go into a trap. Compare that to catching and fixingone cat at a time. When you’re down to the last cats, they’re not the only ones out there.All the other cats you trapped previously are also at the site. You have to pick the onesleft out of the crowd, which can be difficult.Mass trapping is also a more efficient method. You only have to find a holding spaceonce, take care of the cats while they’re confined once, transport the cats back and forthfrom the clinic once, etc. If you alter the colony gradually over time, these efforts have tobe continually repeated and in the meantime reproduction and nuisance behaviorscontinue. While it’s more intensive, mass trapping takes less time in the end.67