What are community cats?

Community cats—also referred to as feral cats—are cats who have either never had any contact with people or their contact with people has diminished over time. They are not socialized to people and survive on their own outdoors in family groups called colonies. Most community cats are not likely to ever enjoy living indoors.

What is TNR?

Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) is a humane and effective approach to controlling populations of community cats.

In TNR, cats and kittens are trapped and taken to a local shelter or veterinarian to be neutered, vaccinated & microchipped. After recovery, feral cats that are not socialized to people are returned to the outdoor location where they were trapped.

Friendly cats and kittens that are socialized to people may be adopted into homes.

How Does The Dancing Cat Support Community Cats and TNR?

You might notice that many of the adoptable cats at The Dancing Cat have ear tips. These are former community cats that for one reason or another made their way to the San Jose Animal Care Center. These friendly cats were rescued and made available for adoption at The Dancing Cat.

The Dancing Cat presents workshops that are free to the public to give practical, hands-on education to people who are interested in supporting cats in our community. These workshops are offered 3-4 times per year and are conducted by volunteers who have decades of TNR experience.

Finally, The Dancing Cat supports our community by providing food, veterinary care and other supplies to members in our community who feed, trap and care for community cats. 

Individual volunteers, everyday people just like you, care for these cats. 

We can accept donated bags of dry food during our regular hours (noon to 6pm, Wednesday through Sunday). Just stop by to drop off what you can!

Your donation will allow us to help them.

Taylor’s story

The Dancing Cat’s volunteers have been helping the caregivers of a small colony of feral cats near our downtown San Jose location. The original caregivers were overwhelmed with the growing population of cats and kittens and sought our assistance. Together, we have been working to get all cats and kittens spayed and neutered.

One day we got an urgent call that there was a very sick kitten found in the colony. Because the call came late in the evening, we took the kitten to an emergency vet for treatment. The diagnosis was severe anemia due to fleas.  The poor little kitten was crawling with fleas and near death. At the vet's office he was given sub-cutaneous fluids and an antibiotic. We hoped for the best.
 
We named the kitten Taylor for the street he was found on. Supporting his will to live, we brought him home to one of our emergency foster homes for tender loving care. While Taylor was under-socialized, mistrustful, and scared, his new foster mom was not deterred.  She continued to give him fluids once a day, bathed him multiple times to rid him of fleas, and fed him baby food and kitten formula via a syringe until he could eat on his own.

Taylor is now in good health! He is a playful little kitten and available for adoption.

Taylor is one of many community cats that need our care. We continue to support these colony caregivers with rescuing, fostering the other sick kittens and trapping cats and kittens for spay/neuter at the San Jose Animal Care Center.
 
This is only one colony of cats and caregivers we support; we get calls every day from community members who are struggling to care for cats in their neighborhoods. Please consider a gift to help us help. A donation of any size to our Community Cat Fund will be used exclusively for the cats of our community.

Photos from our Community Cat Workshops