New organization works to give feral cats a new lease on life
While the pandemic has put a damper on many activities, for Peyton Skaggs it marked the beginning of a new endeavor born of her love for helping animals. Since March, the 20-year-old psychology and neuroscience student has devoted much of her free time to helping find homes for some of the hardest-to-save felines: feral cats that lack in human socialization and are not suited to live in domesticated homes. While 2020 hasn’t been an easy year to start projects, in just a few short months, Skaggs has turned a half-baked idea into an officially recognized and successful nonprofit called the Working Cat Project.
The Working Cat Project removes feral cats from county shelters and unsafe outdoor living conditions and places them on Central Kentucky farms that allow them to live safely and happily as barn cats. The placements create a mutually beneficial relationship between the cats and their caregivers: Not only does the program help the cats find a safe and suitable place to live, but it also helps the farms gain chemical-free rodent control.
Skaggs vividly recalls a night when some of the first seeds for the project were planted.
“It was raining, and I saw this cat darting across my street…it looked really underweight and unhealthy,” she recalled. “Of course, I had to get out and chase it down.”
Working Cat Project founder Peyton Skaggs, pictured above, started the program in the midst of the pandemic and a busy pre-med academic career. In its first year, the program helped find new homes for more than 150 cats in its first year. Photo by Ayna Lorenzo
Because Skaggs knew there wasn’t a secure source of food or care for the cat in her transient college neighborhood, she didn’t feel like TNR [trap-neuter-return] would be the right option. She didn’t know of any other choices and feared for the cat’s health and safety, so she called the president of Spay Our Strays, a local volunteer-run TNR agency that she had volunteered for.
“She agreed that there wasn’t much else to do other than to try TNR anyway – unless I wanted to find a barn for it to go to,” Skaggs said.
Skaggs wasn’t able to trap the cat, and she never saw it again. But she didn’t forget about it. After her own beloved kitten, Jack, died unexpectedly a few months later, she decided to honor his memory by getting more involved with Spay Our Strays. Soon after, she was traveling in Europe when an idea, influenced by all of these experiences, suddenly struck her.
“I was on a train from Germany to Paris, and and I looked at my friend Izzy and I was like, ‘You know what? I think this year I’m going to start a barn cat program when we get back to Lexington,’” Skaggs recalled. “I just said it in passing. [But] I got back, and that’s what I did.”
The Working Cat Project began as a program within the local animal foster placement organization Halfway Home Rescue. Busy with school (she was recently accepted into the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine), Skaggs didn’t initially feel like she had the time to run an organization on her own. However, it was clear after the program’s early response that local demand for barn cats was high. While that’s good news for cats, it was also clear that coordinating the trapping, spaying/neutering and farm placement of these animals would be taxing on Halfway Home Rescue’s limited resources. Skaggs quickly took the necessary steps to create the legal framework for the Working Cat Project: She set up a meeting with an advisor from SCORE, a volunteer network of business mentors who help small businesses and nonprofits get started, and within days had completed the 501(c)(3) application.
Feral cats provide great rodent control for the local barns with which they are paired. Photo by Ayna Lorenzo
When Vicki Sword, a Working Cat Project board member and committed foster parent for Halfway Home Rescue, heard that Skaggs was planning to take the program out on its own, she offered her phone number, in case Skaggs needed help.
“The very next day, she texted me with the IRS information and asked me to be on the board,” Sword recalled. “In a night, she did what most people take months to do.”
Since March, the Working Cat Project has placed more than 150 barn cats on over 50 farms in Central Kentucky. At the current rate, they expect by year’s end to have given 170 cats a second chance at a happy life.
And a second chance is truly what these cats are given.
“Cats in the shelters have no chance at survival if they aren’t adoptable,” Sword explained. “They won’t be released. They can’t be adopted – they will only be euthanized. This is their last stop.”
The program only accepts feral cats – cats that don’t expect a human being to take care of them or to provide for them.
Relocating a wild cat from its environment is always a last resort and a step that is only taken when it is deemed their outdoor living environment is unsafe. The program also accepts shelter cats that are considered unadoptable due to lack of socialization or other issues that prevent them from adapting to a new domestic habitat. Once applicants who are looking for barn cats are screened, the organization makes sure the cat is spayed or neutered and has received any vet care it needs. A volunteer then transports the cat to its new home, setting it up in a large kennel, where it will remain for four weeks while it has time to get accustomed to its surroundings and caretakers before it’s allowed to come out. After a cat is finally released into a barn, the organization does follow-ups visits to make sure that things are going well. Caretakers are expected to set our food and water for the cats on a daily basis and provide some kind of shelter or cathouse for them during the winter. The cats are largely self-sufficient other than that.
“They aren’t expected to be totally free range, but they need to know how to hunt,” Sword explained.
That’s their appeal to farm managers, and the cats’ primary job.
“They are really seen as part of the team at these farms,” said Skaggs.
Photo by Ayna Lorenzo
While the introduction process is lengthy, it’s been highly successful.
“There are risks with any outdoor cat, that it may wander off and not be able to find its way back, be caught and kept by someone else, or become a victim to a predator,” Sword explained, but Skaggs added that the familiarity garnered with the kenneling process has proven to yield positive results, with upward of 90 percent of the cats having stuck with their new homes thus far.
Another measure of success is how often adopters return for repeat placements.
“We’ve placed cats in many barns, and once they are settled and things go well, the owners reach out [again], because the cats are so valuable and they know they have room for more,” Skaggs said.
Eventually, these cats become more than just “employees.”
“The majority of the cats end up warming up to people they interact with to some degree,” Sword said. “They don’t become as friendly as a housecat, but they do bond with their caretakers.”
“They end up being adored and loved, but they also have a purpose beyond being a pet. They are workers,” Skaggs said. “They are members of the team.”
The Working Cat Project primarily works with applicants for barn cats in Fayette, Madison, Jessamine, Woodford, Scott, Bourbon and Clark counties, though other counties are considered for an additional transportation fee. For more information on the organization, visit www.workingcatprojectky.org.