ABOUT TNVR
Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Return, or TNVR, is the humane approach to community cat management. TNVR involves trapping feral and free-roaming cats in humane traps, transporting them to local clinics to be spayed/neutered, vaccinated, and ear-tipped, and then returning them back to their original location.
Community Cats
“Community cat” refers to any cat who is unowned and lives outdoors. Both feral and stray cats are community cats. Community cats have a wide range of behaviors and degrees of socialization, but they generally do not want to live indoors and are unadoptable.
How to Trap a Cat for TNVR?
Frequently Asked Questions
Our Process
Before Trapping we ask Residents to help us with the following steps to have a smooth and more effective process.
1.) Restrict Access to Food
• Residents should stop feeding the cats at least 24 hours prior to trapping. Traps are baited with food, so we’ll need them to be hungry! Identify residents who feed the cats and ask them to remove food as well.
• Residents should bring any outside pets indoors, so they don’t end up in our traps.
2.) Set Traps & Monitor
• We then set traps in the area where the cats typically eat, and bait them with a strong-smelling food such as wet cat food, tuna, or sardines. Please inform residents to not make any noise and stay indoors while we wait for cats to enter the traps.
• Once a cat is trapped, we cover the trap with a sheet or towel and move it to a safe place.
3.) Transport, Recovery, & Release
• We then transport cats to and from appointments while keeping them in the covered traps.
After their procedure, cats will be kept in their traps in a safe, temperate environment for at least 24 hours unless otherwise instructed by the veterinarian.
• When it’s time, we release the cat back into its colony environment.
Palm Beach County Ordinance 98-22 Sec. 4-35. - Community cats.
(a) The Board establishes the following community cat requirements:
(1) All community cats must be cared for on the private property of the caregiver or with permission of the property owner or property manager.
(2) All community cat caregivers shall have all un-owned free-roaming cats within their care sterilized, implanted with a EAID, vaccinated against rabies, and ear-tipped for easy identification.
(3) All community cat caregivers are required to provide certain necessities to each community cat under his/her care on a regular/ongoing basis, including, but not limited to, proper nutrition, adequate quantities of visibly clean and fresh water and medical care as needed. If medical care is unavailable or too expensive, the community cat caregiver must not allow the cat to suffer. Dumping on the ground or dispensing large quantities of food more than will be immediately eaten by the community cats present is prohibited. Feeding areas must be maintained in a clean and sanitary condition.
(4) Community cat caregivers shall make reasonable attempts to remove young kittens from the field for domestication.
(b) A person returning a community cat to field must provide the Division with the cat's EAID number and any other information upon request by the Division.
(c) Community cats meeting the requirements of this section are exempt from the license tag requirements of section 4-11, Dog and cat rabies/license tags.
(d) The Division has the right to remove or authorize the removal of any free-roaming cat or community cat because of immediate public health or safety concerns.
(e) No community cat shall be released at any governmentally owned or managed park, natural area, area deemed as environmentally sensitive land or on any easement adjacent to such lands without approval from the applicable governmental entity.
(f) Healthy community cats that have been impounded at the Division may be immediately returned to field, released to a caregiver or adopted. Notwithstanding the foregoing, whenever such cat is visibly injured or diseased and appears to be suffering and it reasonably appears that such cat cannot be expeditiously cured and returned to field, transferred to a humane society or private animal nonprofit organization or placed in foster care, then the Division, acting in good faith and upon reasonable belief, may humanely euthanize the cat upon the advice of the Division's veterinarian.