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Best Friends September:October 2011 Issue -Tangier Island
1. September/October 2011 Leading the way toward No More Homeless Pets $4.95
Official magazine of
SPECIAL REPORT:
How Chicago became a model city
for fighting animal cruelty
The community cats of
Tangier Islandpage 22
2. BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011 3
Features
The community cats of
Tangier Island 22
Reducing their numbers through
trap/neuter/return takes planning,
perseverance ... and doughnuts.
The comprehensive approach 30
How Chicago became a model city
for fighting animal cruelty.
Departments
Best Friends news 8
Best Friends Animal Sanctuary 38
Pet health & behavior 56
The animals’ bookshelf 60
In Every Issue
From the CEO 2
From the editor 4
Letters to the editor 6
Members & pets 62
Saying hello 66
Saying goodbye 67
The final word 72
Cover photo of a
Tangier Island cat
by Gary Kalpakoff
Check out Best Friends online
bestfriends.org/allthegoodnewsSeptember/October 2011 contents
6. 24 BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011
Shaye Olmstead, director of Operation Catnip in Gainesville, Florida, is on kitten duty. Standing in the kitchen,
she plucks Tangie from the folds of a purple towel and clutches the flailing and mewling kitten to her chest. Will she
take the bottle now? Will she eat?
The day before, Tangie was one of the estimated 400 community cats roaming the island — and one of the 400
reasons Shaye and a few dozen animal welfare professionals from around the U.S. boated over from Crisfield, Mary-
land, to do a trap/neuter/return (TNR) project on Tangier. The resident who found the kitten orphaned in her front
yard didn’t know a lick about cats but figured the “kitty people” she’d heard were on the island could help. Because
everyone knows everyone on Tangier, the visitors with their logo T-shirts, mainland accents and hundreds of cat-sized
traps stacked in front of the old health clinic weren’t exactly hard to track down.
Tangie sucks down a few ounces of formula, her M.O.
for the coming days. Shaye will try this again in the
morning. But first: back to bed for both of them. It’s
Shaye’sjobtogetthespay/neuterclinicsetupandrunning,
and she’ll need all the rest she can get. By anyone’s math,
399 cats still need to be located, trapped, sterilized and
returned to their homes or colonies by the weekend.
And — yawn — it’s already Tuesday.
Seasonal ferries from Virginia and Maryland bring
visitors by the hundreds to Tangier, a fishing village in
the Chesapeake Bay. They’re attracted to the abundance
of soft-shell crabs at the island’s eateries and the back-in-
time feel that comes from decades of isolation. Tourists
usually come knowing, too, that the 500-plus residents of
this waterman’s community are interrelated. Generations
of families with the names Crockett, Parks and Pruitt have
run the restaurants, fished the bay and filled the church
pews on Sunday mornings.
It’s because of the islanders that the TNR project got
past the good idea stage. They’re fiercely protective of the
cats who’ve been roaming their narrow three-mile-long
strip of land for decades. Some are in colonies managed
by big-hearted people who can’t stand to see them hungry
or ill. Some are considered pets, slipping in and out of
houses all day but called back by name for supper. And
still others are nomads — no known address, no caregiver.
Most aren’t spayed or neutered. When spring comes, the
pregnant cats give birth, boosting the numbers even more.
Last summer a tourist noticed the tremendous number
ofcats,manysickwitheyeandrespiratoryproblems.Could
something be done for them? She called her co-worker
Debbie Bull of Joppa, Maryland, who called Best Friends.
Robin Politowicz, senior specialist with Best Friends’
Community Animal Assistance department, talked to
At the Mimosa guesthouse on tiny Tangier Island, Virginia, the rooster is
two hours from crowing folks awake, but little Tangie — a two-and-a-half-week-old black
kitten who’s all legs and lungs — is demanding breakfast. It’s time for her 3 a.m. feeding,
and everyone in the cottage knows it.
7. BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011 25
Debbie and later got in touch with Mayor James “Ooker”
Eskridge of Tangier. Their conversation went something
like this:
Robin:
cat population?
The mayor: Yes!
TNR is a method of humanely controlling community
cat populations. Cats are trapped, spayed or neutered, and
then returned to their colonies, where they are fed and
watched over by volunteer caregivers. Successful TNR
projects take months of planning. And when the project’s
on an island that’s 18 miles off the mainland and has no
veterinary clinic, logistics are tricky at best.
In February the mayor met with the town council to
get buy-in. “Ooker was very supportive from the begin-
ning, and made it evident that the islanders valued their
cats but the population was out of control,” Robin says. In
early March, Shelly Kotter, national specialist with Best
Friends’ cat initiatives, ferried over in the blustery cold
to “figure out if this project should be a go.”
“From that point on, things just snowballed,” Robin
says. “I spoke with Shaye in February about the possibility
of her running the clinic, and we had a meeting at Star-
bucks where we hashed out all the specifics over about 10
cups of coffee. Then she was in touch with the project’s
head vet, Dr. Jon Reiss of Caring Hands Animal Hospital
in Virginia, about the clinic, the setups, the protocols
they wanted to use and everything medical. After that,
it was mostly logistics: finding housing, transportation,
traps, transportation for the traps, the food situation, the
recruitment of other vets, arranging for vet techs and
5,000 other things.”
The first group of staff and volunteers arrived on the
island by chartered boat on Sunday, May 8. It wasn’t two
minutes before someone saw the first cat — sitting on
the dock — and snapped a photo.
Early in the week, Robin visits Tangier’s only school
and talks with the students. She asks the younger ones
to close their eyes.
“Imagine you’re homeless,” she says. “You have no
shelter, no place to sleep, and no food. You have to fight
every day to survive. Now imagine that you have children
with you — six, or eight, or even 10. You’re responsible
for their survival, too. You can barely feed yourself, let
alone all of them. Now imagine there are 500 just like
you, all within a mile or so. You’re all competing, every
day, for the same scraps of food, the same places to sleep,
the same places to raise your children. Any idea what I’m
comparing that to?”
TNR is a tough sell to the island kids. They’re used to
the cats. They’ve grown up seeing them trotting down the
streets at all hours, lounging on the docks like they own
the place and rubbing up against their bicycles. They hear
them cat-calling at night and smell their urine markings in
the morning. Four hundred cats and counting? Big deal.
To some of these kids, though, they are a big deal.
First-grader Bridgette brightens when talking about her
Cats are a familiar sight around the docks.
8. 26 BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011
three outdoor cats. There’s gray and white Toby, black
and white Chief and an orange guy named Tiger. And
eighth-grader Summer counts 16 cats in her animal-loving
family. She’ll spend the week getting to know the TNR
team and joining them for dinners and surgeries. Summer
wants to be a veterinarian.
Principal Nina Pruitt and a couple of teachers clamor
around a TNR team member who’s been taking notes
during Robin’s presentation. They pepper her with names
of islanders:
your list?
At the town meeting that night, Shelly talks about the
list. In February, she emailed a survey to the island resi-
dentsfordocumentingthecatpopulation.Anyonewhohad
cats needing spay/neuter surgeries just had to let Shelly
know, and they’d be added to a database. When the team
came to the island in May to do TNR, Shelly had 35
names and addresses marked on a map. Her job for the
week: split the island into sections and leave baited traps
at each location.
Edna Brown and Duane Crockett are two of the couple
dozen residents at the Swain Memorial United Methodist
Church parish hall that night listening to Shelly, Robin and
Shaye talk in detail about what they’re doing with the cats.
For weeks Pastor Patricia Stover talked up their arrival
from the pulpit. “The whole island’s been waiting for you,”
Duane says after the 40-minute chat wraps up. “We’ve
so been looking forward to your coming. We realize we
have an overpopulation problem.”
Some of the islanders don’t like the cats or are just
plain scared of them, Edna says, but feed them anyway.
She takes the ferry over to Crisfield — a 45-minute ride
each way — and comes back with huge bags of kibble
from Walmart. Edna has four cats inside, five outside.
Duane doesn’t have any pet cats but feeds a bunch in
the neighborhood. “I’m not a cat person, but I can’t let
them go hungry,” he says.
Duane is a lifelong islander and a teacher at the school.
He looks around the room, recognizing faces. If folks
start feeding the cats, he says, they feel a responsibility
to them. “But you can’t afford to get all those cats fixed.
[If] you have 10 cats — that’s $400, plus the hassle of
getting them on boats to the mainland. It discourages
people from spaying and neutering.”
“You’ve taken a huge burden from us,” he says simply.
It was a wind-whipped, brisk March day when Shelly
set foot on Tangier for the first time to, as she says, really
understandhowmanycatswerethere.Eyeballestimates—
fromthewomanwhoreportedthecasetoBestFriends,and
from the islanders themselves — were all over the place.
Two hundred? Five hundred? A thousand cats? “There was
no conclusive number we could grab hold of,” Shelly says.
Before her trip, Best Friends emailed a survey to the
town office that was distributed all over the island. The
questions included how many cats are you feeding, how
often and when, and how many cats does your neighbor
have. Anyone who sent back a survey got a coupon good
Some islanders brought their cats directly to the clinic for surgery.
Watch the video!
video.bestfriends.org
or click here in our digital edition
9. BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011 27
for $5 off a meal at one of the local restaurants. About a
third of the island households replied.
“Wewentstreetbystreetandhousebyhouse,andtalked
to anyone who would open their doors,” Shelly says. The
Best Friends team timed their visits to the morning and
evening feeding times gleaned from the survey and got
a good look at the cats, who, by comparison to typical
community cat populations, are tame and friendly.
Physically, the cats looked good. “They had thick,
wonderful coats and were a healthy weight,” Shelly says.
Between the survey data and the home checks, Shelly
estimated the population between 400 and 500, with about
400 unaltered. “I knew this project was something doable
for Best Friends.”
Best Friends’ staff and volunteers arrived in May ready
to get to work. That Monday, Shelly and the team loaded
up their golf carts and an old pickup truck and started
trapping. By Wednesday, the first day of surgery, they
had caught more than 100 cats.
And then it got a whole lot harder. The island flooded,
repeatedly. Higher-than-usual tides crippled the trapping
efforts mid-week and beyond. “The flooding put a huge
wrench in our plans,” Shelly says. But with the help of
an islander who knows tide charts, the team adapted the
trapping schedule. Instead of leaving traps around the
island, to pick up later, they simply waited for the cats
to trip them.
From day one, islander Ronnie Colburn was Shelly’s
shadow. What he didn’t know, he learned, and quickly.
“He worked tirelessly,” Shelly says, sometimes 13-hour
days, shuttling Shelly around, setting and collecting traps,
and being the go-to guy for all things island. “He literally
knew everything about everybody.”
And he genuinely likes the cats. One night around 10
p.m., someone called about a mother cat who had moved
her babies under a house. The tide was coming in, and
it wasn’t safe. “Ronnie waded through water, got on his
hands and knees and pulled out all those cats,” Shelly says.
Zipping around the island in their golf carts, the trap-
pers attracted attention wherever they went. Islanders are
known for their friendliness and extended that — and then
some — to the trappers. “At every stop, everyone came out
and talked to us,” Shelly says. “They were so grateful.”
One morning around 7 a.m., a woman came out on her
porch and flagged down Shelly and Ronnie, who were
starting rounds. She couldn’t wait to tell them that her
“famous homemade doughnuts” were up at the parish
hall. “Make sure you get up there and get them while
they’re hot,” she insisted. “So of course we went up to the
church,” Shelly says. “That was super sweet.”
Every day at noon, the ladies of Swain Memorial brought
lunch up to the parish hall for the TNR staff and volun-
teers. Homemade salads, sandwiches, casseroles, cakes
and cookies filled the army of rumbling stomachs.
Almost everything on Tangier is convenient to every-
thing else, but it was pretty lucky for the TNR team that
the parish hall was just across the street from the old health
Kyla Hollar, an employee at Caring Hands
10. 28 BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011
clinic, which was being used as the feline surgery center.
Notices posted around the island for weeks warned
residents that the “kitty people” needed the musty old
clinic cleaned out. Its replacement, the David B. Nichols
Health Center, had opened in August.
Project staff and volunteers got right to prepping the
place for surgeries. Shaye, who runs a high-volume spay/
neuter organization in Florida, made sure the supplies and
equipment that had been boated over from the mainland
got where they needed to go and that the Virginia health
departmentagreedthatthemakeshiftclinicwasuptocode.
It was no small feat, to be sure.
“We only had two days to set up the space and had to
get started spaying and neutering at once,” Shaye says.
“The old human clinic offered an extremely cramped
and less than ideal space for what we were doing, yet an
outsider looking at the operation might have thought we
had been working in that space for years. By lunchtime
on the first day of surgery, everyone had tweaked their
station’s operations and was excelling at their tasks.”
Maybe no task was as important as Blanca Carbia’s.
The Operation Catnip volunteer drove hundreds of traps
from Gainesville, Florida, to Crisfield, Maryland, in an
18-foot Ryder truck.
No traps, no trapping.
No trapping, no surgeries.
“No pressure!” Blanca says.
On the island, she was never far from the clinic, and in
addition to roles as trapping master, cat recovery checker,
trap cleaner and volunteer coordinator, she made a fine
public information officer. Blanca went into PIO mode
with passing tourists, chatting them up about the project:
Blanca: We need to keep the cats in check, to keep
them healthy and happy.
Tourist: Do you tag them in some way?
Blanca:
cat before?
Tourist:
very much.
Blanca:
By the weekend, the numbers were in: 250 cats had
been spayed or neutered. As surgeries tapered off, the
volunteer vets and vet techs took their last passes around
the island and ferried or flew home.
For some of the volunteers, their work was just starting.
Virginians Rick and Sarah McDonald arrived Friday
night for two days of trap cleaning, laundry, and packing
and loading supplies for shipment back to the mainland.
The pair knew the drill and spent Saturday dunking traps
into kiddie pools filled with bleach and water.
In the days since Robin introduced the TNR project at
school, some of the island kids decided to make it their
project, too. Promised a dollar for each trap they collected,
they worked alongside Rick and Sarah, cleaning. “They
were helping and loving it,” Rick says.
Kids curious about the trapping helped Shelly and
11. BEST FRIENDS MAGAZINE September/October 2011 29
the team from day one. “The kids blew me away,” says
Shelly, who delivered and collected traps all week with
an entourage of five elementary-school-age boys. “They
were out there, excited and helpful — pulling traps and
riding them on their bicycles. They were so excited to
learn about what we were doing.”
“I believe this is how you influence our society about
animal welfare,” says Blanca, who saw plenty of kids
pitch in with the project. “Even though this was a small
community, I am sure wherever those kids go, they are
goingtorememberthebunchof‘kittypeople’whoinvaded
their island that spring and took care of their cats.”
Which brings us back to Tangie. By week’s end, the
kitten who’d been nearly run over by a lawnmower had
been bottle-fed, burped, cuddled and cooed over by just
about everyone lucky enough to meet her. Debbie and her
sister Christina Bartnik of Hampstead, Maryland, who
also was volunteering on the island that week, made sure
of it. Walk into the room and got a minute? Take Tangie
and have your turn. It was an easy sell, really. No one
could resist the kitten.
Christina was a goner.
“IwasaskedifIwouldfosterher,”Christinasays.“Since
I have seven other rescued cats at home, and feed six to 10
ferals at my office every day, and have been raising six
kittens that an unspayed feral gave birth to April 8th, I
decided fostering would be feasible.”
But not for long.
“When I got her home, my husband said, ‘You know
you’ll never be able to let her go.’” And he was right.
“We love Tangie,” Christina says. “She has never-ending
energy, piercing eyes and a coat that feels like mink.
She jumps up in our bed at night and loves to cuddle
next to us.”
Tangie will never be alone again. “Since I had six
kittens to find homes for,” Christina adds, “I decided to
bring one home as a forever playmate for Tangie. They
are best friends!”
the “return” part of trap/neuter/return.
sunsets like this for more than 200 years.
Canyoureallyhumanelystopthebreedingofferal/
free-roaming cats? And can those cats and native
wildlifeco-exist?TangierIslandwillprovideanswers
as we monitor the cat community there following our
successful 2011 TNR project.
Best Friends staff and volunteers are returning to
Tangier in mid-September after spaying or neutering
250 cats in May. Virginia-based veterinarians Drs.
Jon Reiss and Jeffery Newman and their team will
provide surgeries and parasite treatment for the
remaining un-neutered cats and kittens.
Read a full account of the Tangier Island TNR
project’s second phase at network.bestfriends.org.
Learn more about Tangier at tangierisland-va.com.
