Dallas, Texas

KittiCo Cat Rescue

The organization: KittiCo Cat Rescue (kittico.org) takes care of feral and stray cat populations in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and 72 surrounding cities.

Year established: 1998

Resources: KittiCo’s annual operating budget is $350,000. The group employs 12 to 15 people and receives assistance from up to 140 volunteers (including a core team of 30 active ones).

The mission: KittiCo strives to make trap-neuter-return (TNR) the accepted model for feral cat care in the United States, says Executive Director Angie Thomas.

What they do for ferals: Volunteers go to neighborhood parties, schools, and college campuses to educate the community and demonstrate the use of traps. For a deposit of $30, members of the public can borrow a cat trap for two weeks from KittiCo, which keeps 200 loaner traps on reserve. Citizens bring cats they’ve trapped to KittiCo’s “one-stop shop” veterinary clinic, where they are spayed and neutered, vaccinated, treated for illness and injury, and ear-tipped to show they’ve been altered. People pick the cats up the following day and release them back to their territories.

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