While the majority of Feral Cat Coop members are individuals caring for a two or three cats in their backyard or a nearby vacant lot, several of of the Bay Area's larger companies are beginning to see the benefits of working to humanely manage feral cat colonies on their property. Peggy Woods is a primary caregiver at one such company.

How did your company become involved in stray and feral cat care?
Employees here had been caring for the cats for many years, but always as individuals, not as part of a unified effort. I think this is true anywhere; wherever there is a needy cat there is likely to be a big-hearted person who will try to help them. The problem is that most people don't have a clue what to do and they feel daunted by the potential expense of it. So they turn away, not because they don't have compassion, but because there's no way they can do it alone. What's so powerful about the Feral Cat Coop is that it provides everything you need to actually make a difference in these cats' lives.

I became involved with the feral cats here in 1993. I often take lunchtime walks along the bay; sometime that year I began seeing some little kittens there. Someone routinely put bowls of food and water out, but when the holidays came along, suddenly the bowls weren't full, and I saw the cats sitting around looking wistful. So I charged home and got them some food -- and ended up feeding through the new year.

After the holidays, the bowls suddenly disappeared. I asked around and learned that another employee here had been feeding the cats, and was now trying to consolidate two feeding sites into one. Over the next few weeks I met a number of people who were caring for other cats on the property, or who were interested in helping. We decided to get together and figure out what we could do collectively. We put a notice on the company's electronic bulletin board, and got about 50 responses right away. (We now have about 65 people involved.)

Someone mentioned that PHS and the Homeless Cat Network had just started the Feral Cat Coop program. I read through the materials PHS sent me and then sat down with someone in our human resources department. I said, this is what I'm thinking of doing, and asked if the company was willing to be involved as well.

How did you convince the company to allow your feral cat program? What were some of their concerns?
One of the most powerful things I did was tell them how many employees were already interested and involved in caring for the cats. I told them how together we could effectively and humanely manage this colony.

Several years earlier the company had tried rounding up all the stray and feral cats, and killing them. That concerned a lot of people -- and it didn't solve the problem. If you do that you just create a niche for other cats to move in. I presented them with a very humane solution. I told them how much it would cost each year to trap, vaccinate and alter all the cats, and I suggested that instead they make donations to PHS and the Homeless Cat Network and sign the agreement so that we could join the Feral Cat Coop and receive those services for free. And they agreed to my proposal, so we've gone with it ever since.

When we first got started the company gave us use of a modular building -- just 2 rooms and a hall -- that they no longer needed. For the first few years it had no electricity or water, so we kept the kitties in my garage, and used the trailer for storing the carriers and cat food. About a year ago I approached the company about making the trailer habitable. Now we can use the trailer for the cats to recover from their spay or neuter surgery. And whenever we catch a cat or a kitten who is tame or quickly becomes tame, it's a prime place to have them viewed for adoption, because anybody with a key can walk a friend over and let them meet the cat.

What's been your experience in almost five years of working with the colony? When I first got involved we were pretty much on our own, so the number of cats were were caring for wasn't real high. But once we joined the Feral Cat Coop the numbers just went way up; we really did trap a lot. At first we had no idea how to trap a feral cat, but Coette Schmidt of the Homeless Cat Network came out and gave us a noontime training session. Coette was absolutely amazing. Every whimper, every question, she was there.

It's impossible to know exactly how many cats we had in the beginning. We estimated it at more than a hundred, and perhaps as many as 150. So far we've trapped 130 cats and kittens. We've fostered and placed 52 of the kittens -- a real high adoption rate for a feral cat colony. There are probably 60 or 70 cats in the colony right now. Our numbers are measurably going down each year.

Unfortunately, we often don't see the kittens until they're eight weeks or older, because the mom just doesn't bring them out. We have six centralized feeding spots, but this is a pretty big property so we don't really see where the cats live. A couple of times we've trapped a female and during her recovery we've realized that she was lactating. When we went back and scoured the area, we found her kittens.

How do you tame a feral cat?
The length time it takes to tame an unsocialized cat can vary greatly; it depends totally on the animal involved. Most of the time, kittens can be tamed very quickly. If you have an eight-week-old kitten, at 24 to 48 hours they're broken in -- it's just amazing. They may always be a little skittish on loud sounds, they may not welcome new people, but in terms of being socialized with their primary people, it's almost an immediate thing.

I'm not sure that we've tried to tame completely feral adult cats. Usually they've given us some kind of signal during the recovery period [after their spay or neuter surgery]. The cats are difficult to evaluate when they're frightened. Some of them are very aggressive; it's the passive ones who are hard to figure out. They may be just shy -- and with patience and time can be socialized. Or they may be terrified of you.

Not often, but sometimes, we find new cats in our colony who have been "dumped." They are quite tame and obviously were recently someone's companion. In early November we picked up a guy who has a real peculiar tail. It's so kinked, it's almost like it's tied in a knot at the end. He's a big, apple-headed tabby who's really gentle, a real sweetheart. So we scooped him up and had him checked out. When we had him neutered, we discovered he has an enlarged liver, but we were still able to place him.

We place almost all our cats with people who work here. We've created an internal webpage that has an adoptions section, and we put availble cats' photos up on the web. It's a wonderful way to get visibility.

What has been most difficult to deal with? What keeps you going?
The hard part is the long periods of dealing with nothing but really wild, angry, hostile, aggressive cats. You're doing what's best for them, you've just helped them have an operation and some vaccinations that are going to increase their lifespan significantly, but they view you as the monster from hell. That's hard for everybody. On another level, I think it's difficult sometimes for the group to always find ways to work together so that we honor each other despite our differences of opinion.

But what keeps us going is changing a cat's life, being able to create a rags-to-riches story for a kitten. I recently started e-mailing everyone who's adopted recently, asking "How's it going? Do you have any stories to share?" I always hear back from at least two or three people, and I post their news through our internal website. Good news can just make your day. Like when we heard that the cat with the crooked tail is not only sleeping on the bed with his new mom, but that he insists on digging in and sleeping under the covers with her....! It's all been very worthwhile.