Working Cats
The four, caged feral cats in the back of our Subaru wagon were speechless. We’d collected them a few minutes before at the Jackson County Animal Services, where they had been neutered rather than euthanized and granted a ninth life. Now, freshly anointed “working cats,” they were on their way to their new assignment: rodent control on a small farm tucked in the hills above Talent (pop. 6,500).
“Why aren’t the cats meowing?” I asked Madeline, our guide on this expedition and feral cat expert. I was used to the ruckus our cats raised on a trip to the vet. “They’ve learned to be quiet as a matter of life and death,” she said.
Back in November, a leaflet posted on the huge, chaotic bulletin board outside Ashland’s Shop ‘n Kart had caught my eye.
Working Cats!
Working Cats is a new program at Jackson County Animal Services that seeks to find suitable adoption placement for healthy adult cats that are not suitable for a traditional adoption due to social/behavioral reasons. Working Cats provide a service to the community as pest/rodent control and deterrent. Previously deemed ‘unadoptable,’ these cats now have an option of a positive live release outcome. Adopting Working Cats saves lives!
The flyer sought volunteers to “hire” a cat to patrol their barn, farm, or garage; volunteers to match cats and adopters; and volunteers to help transport cats from the shelter to their work assignment. Tony and I signed up for the last, and this cloudy Friday was our first training run.
We reached the farm ahead of schedule with instructions to settle the cats in a small barn behind the house, surrounded by meadows. We’d stuffed the Subaru with everything the cats needed to move in: large metal crates, small plastic carriers, old blankets, tarps, cat food, litter, bowls. We grabbed the cats first—still silent and motionless—and set out for the barn.
“Look who’s come to meet us!” Madeline shouted back.
Nine alpacas, a llama, two young goats, and a passel of chickens and guinea fowl emerged from the open barn door. The alpacas stared at us through tassels of dense fur, the chickens paced and clucked, and the goats weighed making friends. Soon the alpacas nuzzled our outstretched hands and the goats sniffed our boots.
“Did we just get a barnyard welcome?” I asked.
In the hour that followed, Madeline, with our help and nonstop kibitzing from the barn’s residents, set up living quarters for the working cats. The cats, she explained, would spend the first four weeks in their new home sequestered in joined metal crates, counting on one another for comfort. Unlike domesticated cats, feral cats thrive in packs.
Madeline studied the empty stall where the cats would go. She positioned the crates next to each other and, crawling inside, used tie wraps to fasten them together into a single unit. She tucked old blankets into the four small plastic carriers we’d brought, one for each cat, and positioned them inside the crate structure. She covered the crate with tarps so that the cats would absorb the barn’s sounds and smells in the dark before meeting their roommates in daylight.
This four-week adjustment period, Madeline explained, insured that the cats, once freed from the crate, would stick around as they got to work. Feral cats aren’t like stray cats that hang around for handouts.
By now the barn’s owner, who had retired from an urban life in Portland to start a small farm here in Southern Oregon, had joined us. She is raising the alpacas, she told us, mostly as a hobby and partly for their fur, which can bring in as much as $40 per pound. She gives the eggs away.
The time had come to release and coax the cats from their individual cages into the crate. Up until now, we hadn’t seen our feline cargo. When we collected the cats at the animal shelter, they were already in their cages, darkened so that they could not see out and we could not see in—our “phantom passengers” Tony called them.
Madeline plotted her moves. “A misstep and these cats will climb the rafters,” she said. Their instinct is to attack or flee.
We held our breath as Madeline opened the door to each cage and its occupant summoned the courage to leave and enter the crate, all four slinking into the same small carrier case. (Would the cats take up separate residences, we wondered, when they gained their footing?) We caught a glimpse of our phantom passengers: two big kitties and two small; two calicos, a grey, and a mix; one long hair and three short.
We were done.
“I promise to give these cats the life they deserve,” the woman told Madeline, as they talked through instructions for the cats’ care.
The idea of putting feral cats to work started at the Flower Market in downtown Los Angeles twenty years ago. The area was plagued by rats, and the extermination methods risked making the humans sick and wasn’t doing much for the rats. Ditto for the city’s police stations. The new program, a spokesperson said, would be a win “all the way around”: unsocialized cats that no one wants would be saved, the humans wouldn’t be poisoned by rat spray, and the rodents would get a reprieve. “The rats are repelled by the cats’ odor, and leave the site,” she said.
The Working Cat program has since spread nationwide, from New York City to Austin.
The founder of Jackson County’s effort—a rural outlier in the national movement—is a young woman named Madeline, who works without a salary but with a heart bigger than most. She’s a cat person, for sure (and credits one for saving her life), but she’s a feral cat person, in particular. Having dropped out of school at fifteen and left home to live on her own, worked her way through college and contemplated graduate school, she knows what it’s like fend for herself, scratching for everything she has. She “gets” feral cats, and saving them means the world to her.
Last Saturday, Tony and I went on a second training run with Madeline. This time we had a pair of deliveries: two calicos to a barn built in 1880 up a canyon east of Ashland and two older males to a garage attached to a modern house in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains. Feral cats don’t do well alone and even two cats was barely enough for Madeline; she likes to place four cats at a time, as we had at the alpaca farm.
The retired couple attached to the nineteenth century barn had also recently moved from Portland to the hills of Southern Oregon, though the wife had grown up on a farm in the Midwest. The barn was a massive structure, filled with a century’s worth of farming relics and cracks in the walls. The couple had secured a corner in the barn where the cats could live uncrated through their month of adjustment. But Madeline shook her head as she spied openings at the top of the chicken wire intended to keep the cats in. “The cats will have to be in crates until every inch of the space is nailed down,” she said. They agreed, and Madeline repeated the steps she’d followed at the alpaca farm.
When we finished, the couple’s appreciation reached the rafters. Their four-year-old granddaughter whispered, “It feels good to save a kitty.”
We drove on to the gated mansion in the woods where garage duty awaited the last two cats. A young woman greeted us warmly but tentatively, explaining that she and her family had moved from San Francisco just six weeks earlier. On her adoption application, the woman had indicated that she had two dogs who came and went through the garage. Madeline quizzed her about the dogs’ predator instincts. “Feral cats, unlike domesticated cats, assume they are prey,” she explained. “If threatened, they don’t stick around.” The woman reassured her that the dogs would be respectful.
Madeline released the two cats into the crate she had erected in the garage, next to a snowboard and weightlifting equipment.
As we left, the woman thanked us repeatedly, as our other adopters had. “I’m in it for the cats, not the rats,” she said.
If you’re like me, you worry (a lot) about making a difference in the world. Madeline, working almost single-handedly, has successfully put 120 cats to work in the past 12 months, lifting the cats and their adopters alike. For feral cats, the kill rate in most shelters is close to 100 percent. At the Jackson County shelter, Madeline is shooting for zero.
When Tony and I went to the orientation for the Jackson County Working Cats, Madeline made it clear that hers was a labor of love, but that she needed volunteers to help her sustain the program. The county donates the neutering, but everything else that makes the program run Madeline forages on her own. Every week, without fail, she matches feral cats with adopters and transports the cats to barns, garages, and more across an expanse of more than 500 square miles.
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