The Pawsies Blog

Medical · Best Practices

The Eight Weeks Before the Solstice Are TNR Season, Not the Off-Season

Between now and mid-December, fewer than one female cat in thirty arriving at a TNR clinic is pregnant, compared with a third to over half in March and April. Groups that wind trapping down for winter are giving up their most productive surgery window. Trap through it, hold cats longer instead of stopping, drop the December gift-adoption ban, and rewrite the year-end appeal around a tax change most small donors have not heard of.

Oct 24, 2026 9 min read

Medical · Best Practices

The Surgery Is the Cheapest Part: A TNR Night Costed Line by Line

Costed at replacement value, volunteer labour is about two-thirds of what a trapping night costs and the clinic donation is about a quarter. A group that is already turning down surgery slots because nobody can trap should spend its next marginal dollar paying a trapper, not buying more vouchers.

Aug 27, 2026 10 min read

Medical · Best Practices

Eighty Percent Sterilized and Still Growing: The Anatomy of a Colony That Comes Back

The 80% number is real, but it is a rate you have to keep paying, not a milestone you reach and bank. Most scattered, colony-by-colony TNR is a welfare intervention being sold as a population intervention, and the vacuum effect argument rescues use against catch-and-kill applies just as squarely to their own successes.

Aug 22, 2026 11 min read

Medical

How to Become the TNR Group Your Spay/Neuter Clinic Actually Wants to Book

Traps are cheap and cats are everywhere. The thing that actually limits how many cats you fix is surgery slots — and the clinic decides who gets them. Here's how to become the easy, reliable client who gets the appointments.

Aug 3, 2026 17 min read

Medical

You Trapped a Pregnant or Nursing Cat. Now What?

Trapping night doesn't care about your plans. Sooner or later you'll pull a trap forward and realize the cat inside is pregnant, or that her belly is full of milk and there are kittens somewhere you can't see. Here's how to make the call without hurting the cat or losing a litter.

Jul 4, 2026 10 min read

Small animals

Someone Dumped a Domestic Rabbit on You — Here's the Intake That Keeps It Alive

A domestic rabbit can't survive the field it was abandoned in, hides illness until it's nearly too late, and was probably an Easter impulse buy nobody planned for. Here's how to run the intake so it lives.

Jun 27, 2026 10 min read

Medical

How to Plan a TNR Trapping Night Without Losing Half the Colony

Trapping is the part of TNR where good intentions meet a cat who has watched you for an hour and decided not to go in the box. Here's how to plan a night that actually gets cats fixed instead of making them trap-shy.

Jun 6, 2026 8 min read