Campaign Specialist, Focus on Felines

Shelly Kotter, feral cat program manager

As the national campaign specialist for Best Friends Animal Society’s Focus on Felines campaign, I often advise communities across the country on humane methods of dealing with cat overpopulation.

Focus on Felines partners with grassroots organizations and municipalities around the country to help achieve a time when there are No More Homeless Pets.  With 72% of the cats that enter shelters being killed, the campaign aims to keep feral cats out of the shelter system by implementing Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs, relocating at-risk “community” cats, and establishing microchip programs.

I've worked at Best Friends since 1998 and have helped define our stance on free-roaming cats generally known as “ferals.” Best Friends refers to these cats as “community cats,” because no one description fits all free-roaming cats and because the solution for their plight rests with individual communities.

I enjoy guiding a number of local model programs across the country. The programs include:

 - Southern Utah Four Directions Community Cat Program, which maintains colonies of more than 3,000 cats across Southern Utah and Northern Arizona.

-       Feral Freedom – a pioneering partnership between public and private animal shelters, Best Friends, and animal control in the city of Jacksonville, Florida to stop the killing of feral cats

-       Fix Nation – very first full-time spay-neuter clinic in Los Angeles dedicated primarily to serving feral cat caregivers and implementing TNR county-wide.

For me, the most rewarding thing about my job is helping people make a difference in their own neighborhoods and communities and teaching them to take the right steps. One of my favorite projects was helping the community of Randolph, Iowa, to take leadership in solving their situation of “runaway stray cat population.”  thanks to our success there, word has spread and I've since been contacted by numerous rural communities for advice. After the Iowa floods of 2008, I was asked to conduct a TNR program in Oakville, which was completely destroyed, leaving hundreds of barn cats behind.