No Paw Left Behind

We are working on a new initiative to help increase the impact of our interventions to increase medical care and adoption pathways for community cats in emergency need. This initiative collaborates with a wide network of trap-neuter-return volunteers across South Florida to immediately address the suffering of injured and sick community cats.

Right now, across South Florida, county shelters are supporting (and in many cases funding) large scale trap-neuter-return (TNR) programs. These programs offer reduced or free sterilization for found or feral cats and return them to the communities in which they were found. These programs also return friendly cats and kittens, and a significant percentage of these cats and kittens would be highly adoptable if resources were available to our community cat caretakers. With the generous support of the Give Miami Day 2020 contributions, No Paw Left Behind will increase our intervention to immediately stop the suffering of sick or injured community cats and further develop a support system to increase the number of cats and kittens diverted from TNR into adoption pathways. Specifically, the funds will be used to provide immediate life-saving medical care for found cats and to support adoption pathways through promotion.

This program is designed in coordination with NPLB's founder, Jacquelyn Johnston, who is completing her dissertation on free-roaming cat management programs in South Florida . Her work seeks to support the development of humane and responsible trap-neuter-return programs across South Florida and confronting situations of cruelty in areas where community cats are contested. She has published about the ongoing needs and vulnerabilities of this population of animals in our community, and continues to advocate for increased resources to help our most at-risk pets through calls for ordinance and state statute revisions. For more information, see Johnston, J. (2019) "Incongruous killing" in Contemporary Social Science