Feral cats need your help
RANDBURG – Alise Antrobus reached out to the Randburg Sun to spread awareness on the feral cat community which lives among us. Multiple feral cat colonies can be found across Randburg.
Through her non-profit organisation Cat Family Foundation, co-founder Antrobus took the Randburg Sun on a tour to the different places where the feral felines can be found and appealed to residents for assistance.
Some of the known feral cat hotspots across Randburg are Bartlett Park, Golden Harvest Park and Rhema Bible Church. The cats normally gravitate to places where they are able to have access to food. This means that they will often gravitate to places where dustbins were easily accessible. The cats were not eager to interact with people they were not used to and take a while to warm up to strangers.
Cat Family Foundation has committed to making sure feral cats are fed, trapped, sterilised and released back to the place where they were found. If cats were left unsterilised, the cats would continue to reproduce, which would elevate the number of feral cats. Antrobus explained that the way to tell if a cat was sterilised was to observe it its ear was clipped or not – if the cat’s ear was clipped, that meant that the cat was sterilised.
“The cats must be taken back to where they were found, or the vacuum will be filled with a different colony,” explained an impassioned Antrobus.
Volunteers have paid the costs of food and sterilisation out of their own pockets, where the cost to sterilise one cat lies between R500 and R2 500. The non-profit organisation was registered during the lockdown, after founders Ingrid Deacon and Antrobus.
The Cat Family Foundation has raised money through its sales from wine bottles and cat scratchers. The search for feral cat feeder volunteers and donations continues.
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