FRIONA, Texas (KFDA) – The City of Friona has partnered with Texas Tech Veterinary School to implement the Feral Cat Program to handle overpopulation within the metropolis.
“What we’re trying to do is help with the overpopulation of the feral cats. We just want to find a humane way of helping the population and we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to help these animals become part of the community,” mentioned Lupe Salinas, Animal Control officer for the City of Friona.
Friona’s Animal Control workplace will seize the cats for the veterinary college students to coach with.
“We trap them and we take them to the school for the vet students to practice on them; they do the spays and neuters, they’ll vaccinate them and the way that they mark them is they tip their left ear so that when they get released back into the community we know who has already been fixed,” mentioned Salinas.
The program has been lively for 2 months and already almost 40 cats have been tagged by vet college students and launched again into Friona.
“The benefit to the community is that we’re taking these feral cats and taking preventative measures to make sure that they are not breeding and that we’re not increasing the population of these feral cats. The other side and benefit to the university is that these students get training, they have the opportunity to really learn on the job skills and kind of put the knowledge that they’re taking from the university and putting it into practice,” mentioned Lee Davila, Friona metropolis supervisor.
The objective for the Feral Cat Program is to proceed to humanely catch and launch these animals.
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