Waiting to release -the importance of post surgery recovery time in TNR programs

During the three years I lived in a two-family house in an urban New Jersey city, right across the river from Manhattan, I was a feral cat colony care taker and operated a trap, neuter, monitor and release program out of our home. I never applied for the job the cats found me. It was easy for them, we lived in an area well populated by all sorts of roaming felines, from the street cats, the indoor-outdoor cats and the ferals. I am convinced they can all sniff out a handout and pass the word around. A random cat appears at the back door and stares in, you leave out some food and the rest is history.

When I noticed how popular we were becoming (we had both opossums and cats showing up for kibble), I mentioned it to my pet sitter, who being committed to all things animal rescue, initiated me into the world of outdoor cat houses. How to insulate - filled with straw to burrow in, not hay which gets wet or blankets which freeze. The right traps for the right occasions to catch wary cats, from spring loaded, gravity or drop. The need to monitor and limit time spent in traps. To cover but not block air to cut stimuli and limit panic. When to trap, after the winter and before the fall. Who not to trap, nursing mothers and young kittens. How long to allow for recovery two days for males at least a week for females. And how to set up a litter pan in a kennel while kitty is recuperating, in the front so you can reach it without terrorizing the both of you.

I was fortunate to have both a back yard for my cat houses and a separate basement to set up my holding and recovery kennels. As the years went on and where I lived changed, I never stopped seeing roaming cats and wondering about them but I no longer had the physical set up to duplicate my efforts. (Keep reading below)

When I moved back to Manhattan for grad school in animal behavior, the rents in New York City were so high at the time, the only neighborhood we could afford was East Harlem. You don’t see many roaming cats in most areas of New York City but in those areas you do see them, there are a lot. East Harlem is one of the neighborhoods where feral cats flourish. I was now faced with reconciling my experience in feral cat population management, more formal knowledge of what was going on with these cats and the reality of how differently things were being done without basements and back yards. Lacking space to house recovery kennels or cages, cats were being routinely neutered with disregard to time of year, age, sex, or adequate time for recovery with awful impacts for welfare, especially with the most vulnerable group of all, kittens.

Not routine for many years prior, pediatric spay and neuter is now a well-established practice in the shelter system. Whatever the disadvantages of the practice for the animal’s development and welfare, the benefits in limiting overpopulation are believed to far outweigh them. Pet owners are simply not believed to be responsible enough to spay and neuter kittens or puppies after adoption. Additional considerations for how pediatric neuters impacts long bone growth, fractures, limits the development of the lumen or impacts the collagen fiber density of the penis in male cats and how this may possibly contribute to future blocking in these cats has yet to be sufficiently investigated or thoroughly resolved as to their welfare. The main reason the practice is believed to work in practice as well as it does is that kittens (and puppies) can be spayed and neutered as young as eight weeks and cared for as they heal from these invasive and complicated surgical procedures within shelters and homes. The care in home and shelter environments allows the infants to be monitored, sufficient time to recover in a supportive environment and if needed, adequately address any post-surgical complications as they arise.

All surgery carries risks in how well it is done and in the condition of the patient. In the world of neutering feral cats, more risks are put into play. Because their environments are less protective, feral cats may come into surgery with upper respiratory tract infections and/or parasites increasing the risks of anesthetic complications. Feral kittens, like all kittens, have lower body fat, reduced ability to generate heat, and need less fasting prior to surgery, more risk factors. Despite such serious risks, the prevailing wisdom concludes:

“the opportunity to neuter any individual animal may not present itself again in the future. Thus, the benefits of neutering such animals when the opportunity arises generally outweigh the risks posed by such medical conditions.” (Looney, Bohling, et al., 2008)

Another added risk for TNR cats, is a shortened period of both anesthesia, sedative and pain medications. As these cats are not allowed time to fully recover in place once out of surgery, these medications are chemically reversed depriving the cat of pain relief and flooded with the body’s reaction adrenaline or “catecholamine” as the task force further notes:

“However, it must be remembered that reversal of analgesic and sedative agents may cause pain and anxiety. In particular, IV administration of reversal agents is commonly associated with sudden catecholamine release. Hence, rapid IV administration should be avoided if at all possible, except in emergency situations when rapid reversal is required.” (Looney, Bohling, et al., 2008)

TNR programs when properly implemented with care and compassion, are effective at controlling feral cat populations in a compassionate and humane way. Programs that administer pain medication post-surgery, allow males 2-3 days, and females 7-10 days, to convalesce under their direct care before being released, and avoid spaying lactating mothers until after kittens are weaned, are both welfare-focused and have better outcomes. Programs that routinely release neutered kittens and lactating mothers 24 hours of less after invasive surgeries back to their natal environments have greater risks with possibilities of more suffering and greater fatalities.

Deprived of adequate recovery time, the necessary sufficient time to heal post-surgery, many kittens are simply too young to survive the process. Lactating mothers are taken from dependent kittens for the span of the TNR process and released back to their habitats fresh from an invasive procedure with a fresh sutured incision close to the site of the mammary glands they need to nurse their young with. Complications post-surgery and release are mostly not monitored or attended to.

I have seen firsthand, evidence of what can go wrong when shortcuts to wellbeing and welfare considerations are taken. While living in that East Harlem neighborhood and becoming familiar with the robust abundance of its feral cat colonies, I came to know very well each of the individual kittens living in the vacant lot next door to my building. When I came home one evening to see the kittens being trapped, I was worried. I struck up a conversation with the trapper who said she was working under The New York City Feral Cat Initiative (an umbrella agency working under the Mayor’s NYC Alliance for animals). Whether she was trained by them or an actual employee was not clear. During the conversation, I talked about my experience, reasoning and ended up cautioning the women doing the trapping about how important age limits and recovery are to a kitten’s welfare. However, she informed me she was observing the protocols and practices of the program. Space considerations in NYC are constrained and the program considers the volunteers doing the work at the expense of recovery time, monitoring and space for the animals, all supportive care which are essential. Kittens can be released the next day after a neuter.

Once back in the vacant lot the kittens sickened visibly every day. Whether lack of recovery time or post-surgical complications was to blame is unknown. These kittens died a slow and painful death within a matter of weeks after being released. My sister brought the last kitten we found in severe distress to be euthanized. How much more humane it would have been to euthanize these animals directly after trapping.

I contacted the mayor’s office, was contacted and spoken at length with the Veterinary Services department of the NYC Department of Health, and exchanged a string of e-mails with the then feral cat program director for the Humane Society of the United States. The initial response to me was that kittens in TNR programs are not released back to colonies but adopted out. The last response I received, quoted a veterinarian who stated that “surely some kittens will die if returned to their colonies after neutering” and who cited a Florida study on the survival rate of TNR cats (as if weather is a not a significant variable in survival).

Some thirty plus years ago when the practices of pediatric spay and neuter was first introduced into the shelter system there was much debate over the impacts (delayed closure of long bone growth plates, immature secondary sex organs, incontinence in females, behavior and development changes) on immature animals. At no point in the debates, the studies, and the conversations was a variable ever raised that it might somehow be acceptable medical practice to surgically alter infants and leave them in vacant lots without convalescent care. Additionally, rescuers, in direct communications, have reported that blocked male cats who have been neutered as infants, routinely sicken without medical attention, and suffer long and painful deaths.

Recent studies on the effects of early neutering in dogs has raised concerns within the veterinary community which is communicated more for private owners and has yet to reach the shelter or TNR communities. That more attention is being paid to the individual effects along with population control is necessary progress. That the research is focused mainly on dogs and not cats is a concern.

In addition to recovery issues raised here, cat anatomy presents a health and welfare concern. Two often cited older studies discount the effect of pediatric neuter on the development of the penile lumen. While those studies need to be replicated, there is evidence of other adverse effects of neutering. Borges, Periera-Sampaio (2017) found castration to decrease the density of collagen fibers in the corpus spongiosum:

"This suggests that the compliance of the periurethral region is reduced, and these changes could be a predisposing factor for urethral obstructive disease." (Borges, Sampaio, 2017)

Age at the time of castration was not studied as a factor and as this may be significant and needing further investigation. Sex hormones are important to development, a third study, notes that plates closing the long bones are shown to be delayed in neutered male cats, fractures and other impacts can result.

How we view our efforts with TNR, and the legacy we leave male cats, owned and free roaming, and how more and better research with cats is not being done needs serious attention. Private owners may now be referred in these scenarios to the growing popularity of “PU” procedures, a surgery where the shaft of the penis is severed allowing an opening to urinate from that an underdeveloped or impacted urethra would not allow.

Everyone here feels they are on the side of the angels. What is being left out of the equation is that any humane conservation or management effort, must by definition, not allow humans to be the agents of direct suffering and death. It is dangerous to accept any less than this. TNR programs run on the volunteer efforts. Most if not all volunteers believe in the good of the work they are doing. Exposing the dangers in current practices can ensure that good work is done.

In my graduate program, the virtues of “adaptive management” were espoused with regard to management of wildlife programs. Adaptive management simply means we must learn from our mistakes, apply new knowledge, and that we are warned against the dangers of being reluctant to admit failures and not adapting our programs.

References

Borges N.C., Pereira-Sampaio M.A., Pereira V.A., Abidu-Figueiredo M., Chagas M.A. (2017). Effects of castration on penile extracellular matrix morphology in domestic cats. Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery. 19(12):1261-1266. doi:10.1177/1098612X16689405

Looney A.L., Bohling M.W., Bushby P.A., Howe L.M., Griffin B., Levy J.K., Eddlestone S.M., Weedon J.R., Appel L.D., Rigdon-Brestle Y.K., Ferguson N.J., Sweeney D.J., Tyson K.A., Voors A.H., White S.C., Wilford C.L., Farrell K.A., Jefferson E.P., Moyer M.R., Newbury S.P., Saxton M.A., Scarlett J.M. Association of Shelter Veterinarians' Spay and Neuter Task Force. (2008) The Association of Shelter Veterinarians veterinary medical care guidelines for spay-neuter programs. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 233(1):74-86.

Perry KL, Fordham A, Arthurs GI. (2014) Effect of neutering and breed on femoral and tibial physeal closure times in male and female domestic cats. Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery. 416(2):149-156. doi:10.1177/1098612X13502977

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