Can You Find A Nice Barn Home For Them?

When first addressing a colony of unmanaged feral cats, people’s initial thought is often to relocate them to a nice barn home in the country. What they don’t realize is that this proverbial barn home is extremely difficult to procure as most barns are already fully stocked with barn cats.

The process of relocating feral cats to barns or any other new environment is extremely time consuming, difficult on the cats, and not always successful. Relocation is always a last resort and should only be undertaken when the cats are in imminent danger.

Relocated cats must be caged in their new home for two to three weeks in order to adjust to their new surroundings and even then, many of them run off in search of their old home territory, getting hit by cars, eaten by coyotes, or worse.

While you may consider the cats’ current location less than ideal, the cats consider it their home and they know their territory’s ins and outs like the back of their paw. While you may feel that they would be safer “someplace else” this is not the case. The cats are in their current location because the environment provides what they need to survive.

Once a colony is TNR’d, the cats can live long, healthy, satisfying lives right where they are……in their home. In addition, if you remove feral cats from an environment, new cats will move into the territory (since the environment provides what is needed for them to survive) and the cycle will repeat itself. By contrast, if the current population is TNR’d, the resident cats will be territorial and keep new cats from intruding, thereby stabilizing the population.