PACIFIC • At Faces Salon, Harriet Clark doesn’t deal only in facials and haircuts.
If customers want, she’ll hand them a new kitten on the way out the door.
Clark and her friend Vicki Leah are among the dedicated folks in Pacific, a community of about 6,000 on the edge of farms and suburbs, who care for a burgeoning stray and feral cat population.
“When I first started feeding them, I fed about 13, and then they started having kittens and a lot of them died, and it broke my heart,” said Clark. She adopted one that landed on her doorstep and named her Katalina.
Some of the ownerless cats in town — now estimated at up to 400 — are abandoned or lost strays craving attention. Others are shy ferals that have lived outside all their lives. They stroll the old downtown area and along old Route 66 meowing for humans to give them food and sometimes shelter. Many make homes in colonies in the fields and woods.
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The residents of Pacific are split over a proposal to slow the population explosion by trapping and neutering the cats and then returning those that aren’t sick to their neighborhoods. The proposal is now before the Board of Aldermen.
The current ordinance, which the aldermen have agreed to amend, allows the city to pick up the cats, hold them for five days and then kill them.
Tracie Quackenbush, who runs the no-kill in Jefferson County, said the shelter would be willing to spay, neuter and vaccinate the Pacific strays, cut their nails and give flea treatment, all for $25 a cat.
She called the situation in Pacific, along Interstate 44, a “nightmare.”
“Their way of working now is not working — there are cats everywhere in that city,” Quackenbush said. “I haven’t seen anything like it. I got a call for four cats at a Mexican restaurant and I looked at a field and there were about 400. It’s not their fault that they were born.”
Around the ӣƵ region, in suburbs and urban alleys, many efforts are under way to help these ownerless domestic cats — also called community cats, neighborhood cats or alley cats. More than a dozen local groups and shelters in the region dedicate themselves to rescuing stray cats and trying to find homes for them.
Even with rescue efforts, thousands of the cats a year end up dead, killed in animal control facilities or victims of cars, predators, starvation and disease. The life expectancy of the strays and ferals is far shorter than cats that are adopted.
More and more, animal groups and some governments are turning to TNR — which stands for Trap, Neuter, Release (or Return) — as an alternative to capture and kill, to try to control the population.
Trap-neuter-return is practiced in ӣƵ and ӣƵ and St. Charles counties. The Jefferson County town of Herculaneum allows it. Other areas allow it on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis.
St. Charles County government has a “sterile feral” clinic, where the county spays and neuters feral cats.
Theresa Williams, director of the division of Humane Services in St. Charles County, which runs a pet adoption center, said the TNR program there had been a success. Over 12 or 13 years, “we’ve gotten so many spayed or neutered we have been able to reduce the number of kittens coming into the shelter and open it not only to the county but to cities and to neighboring counties,” Williams said.
She said many of the younger strays brought in could be tamed and adopted.
Elizabeth Frick, executive director of describes the cat overpopulation as “overwhelming.” Her ӣƵ-based group focuses on caring for and adopting out cats with special needs.
“Everybody wants to see the cats happy, healthy and safe, but unfortunately that’s not reality,” she said. “The alternative should not be rounding them up and killing them. TNR saves a lot of cats who would likely be euthanized because they’re unadoptable. TNR lets them live as they have been without continuing to procreate.”
But there’s considerable opposition to TNR. Some people say that leaving the cats in the wild leaves them subject to predators and difficult lives. Some bird organizations describe the ferals as “opportunistic hunters” of birds and small mammals.
PACIFIC CONTROVERSY
The row over what to do with the cats is in full swing in Pacific. Earlier this week, at a heated meeting, the aldermen advanced the Trap, Neuter, Release bill toward a final vote at an upcoming meeting. Residents and aldermen debated the bill for at least an hour.
Some opponents told the board that the cats had damaged the seats of motorcycles and the tops of convertibles. One man told the story of a cat who terrorized his family dog. City officials say they’re receiving phone calls from residents who don’t want the cats near their homes.
“Sooner or later, we’ll have more cats than we have citizens,” said resident Bob Short.
Resident B.J. Lawrence is taking a lead in trying to get the bill passed and to get city funding for the Open Door Animal Sanctuary to neuter and spay. She says that some bad behavior will change once the cats are neutered or spayed.
“Pacific has a serious problem, and nothing has been done,” said Lawrence. “People are the reason we have this problem. They get that cute adorable kitten — but the kittens don’t stay kittens, and for whatever reason the people abandon them and they turn them out and say, ‘Good luck.’ It’s not the fault of the cats that this happens.”
Florence Shinkle, an advocate for animals and a journalist who worked for years at the Post-Dispatch, said she was hoping Pacific could be a “cat-alyst” for a new era of policy by local governments. She calls extermination of the cats inhumane and says the bill being considered is an enlightened approach.
Shinkle, who helped stabilize a colony behind the Eureka Walmart by neutering and releasing a decade ago, praised the townsfolk in Pacific who are helping the cats.
“Their efforts are admirable but totally inadequate to stem the rising tide,” Shinkle said.
