Episode 4: Transcript

The Cost of Caring

Sassee: If you was to come out here at four o’clock, ‘cause that’s when I go trapping the most, four o’clock in the morning, it is cats everywhere.

Virginia Marshall: This is Sassie Walker.

Sassee: And that’s S-A-S-S-E-E. So if you Google it, you’ll see my whole resume. I am a TNR person. That’s who I like to represent. I try to do as many spay/neuters as I can in inner city neighborhoods. Brownsville, East New York, and Canarsie.

Virginia Marshall: Sassee gets around the city in her Sedan, packed tightly with traps, crates, cat food and scraps of recycling that she collects and repurposes as plates and bowls at feeding time. She showed all of this to our field reporter, Sarah, one evening, as the two of them set off to make rounds in Brownsville.

Sarah: How many stops do you make? Do you ever count?

Sassee: I think it’s 18.

Sarah: How long does it take you?

Sassee: It’s probably like an hour and a half, two hours.

Virginia Marshall: Eighteen times a night, Sassee pulls over, swiftly and meticulously fills old takeout containers and lids with food and water, and leaves them where the cats will know to look for her. And if someone doesn’t come to dinner, Sassee notices.

Sarah: Do you feel bonded to a lot of the cats that are outside?

Sassee: Yeah, I got some kind of connection to all of them. Even the ones I don’t get. I feel like I understand all of their stories. I feel all of their pain. I feel bad for all of ‘em. You know, I’m missing a lot. There’s a lot that I haven’t seen for months. I feel like they’re gone, but I keep feeding.

Virginia Marshall: Sassee has already trapped most of the cats in her neighborhood and taken them in to get fixed. But fresh faces always show up. And when they do, she checks for signs to see if they’ve been fixed.

Sassee: I got my binoculars.

Sarah: To check for ear clippings, you have binoculars?

Sassee: Yeah.

Sarah: That’s great.

Sassee: Yeah, because I be wanting to know. You see though, is his ear clipped?

Virginia Marshall: If both ears are intact, that means the cat is going home with Sassee.

Sassee: I’m gonna get him. I’m gonna get the black one. I’m gonna get the orange one. Everybody ass is getting got.

Virginia Marshall: Sassee’s apartment acts as a holding space for the cats before and after surgery, as they’re waiting to return to the streets. Or, if they’re lucky, they’ll remain with Sassee in her apartment.

Sassee: I have a two bedroom apartment. So the back room is my table, and all my traps go on my table, and then I have a cage, and then my living room is cages.

Virginia Marshall: It’s impossible to keep track of how much time Sassee spends rescuing and caring for cats, because the feeding rounds are only the tip of the iceberg.

Sassee: Listen. In my house, I have all of mines and I have all of the cats in traps. So I have to clean them twice a day, feed them twice a day. I go to ASPCA maybe three times a week.

I go to Saint Nina’s, which is a vet place, maybe twice a week. That’s for dental. I go to Cat Cafe twice a week. So, imagine that schedule. Nine to five, nine to six, nine to seven, I work my job. And then after that I’m constantly moving around.

Sarah: But how far do you travel to get a cat?

Sassee: Oh, everywhere! I go to Queens. I just did two parts in Jamaica, Queens. I did Bronx, more than one area in the Bronx. I’ve done Coney Island. I did over 500 cats in Coney Island.

Virginia Marshall: So, why does Sassee do it? It’s the same reason we’ve heard over and over again from volunteers, feeders, and fosters alike: Sassee cares. And she just can’t turn that off.

Sassee: You would be so heartbroken. I am very heartbroken, very heartbroken. And that’s what makes me keep doing it too, because I’m like, all these cats gotta be fixed.

Virginia Marshall: Last episode, we connected the dots between the high cost of pet ownership and the cat overpopulation crisis in New York City. But another cost of those systemic failures is the burden this places on individuals who are stepping up.

Will Zweigart: People like Sassee, and countless other volunteers and nonprofits, are filling a vacuum created by a lack of municipal support. Trapping cats and getting them vaccinated, fed, spayed, or neutered, all at their own expense.

That takes time, dedication, and a big heart. We have to ask: what happens when a city relies on unpaid volunteer labor to manage such a critical, large-scale public issue? And how do we rescue the rescuers?

Virginia Marshall: That’s what we’re gonna tackle on today’s episode. I’m Virginia Marshall, Audio Producer.

Will Zweigart: And I’m Will Zweigart, Executive Director of Flatbush Cats.

You’re listening to Underfoot. A podcast about the hidden cat crisis in New York City and how we can solve it.

Sarah: How much of your free time would you say is taken up by--

Sassee: All of it! This is all my time. I used to work out, which was a great stress reliever. I used to go out a lot. I used to, you know, have a life.

Virginia Marshall: Sassee Walker is many things. She’s a mother, a grandmother, and a vital community member in Brownsville. But most days, she feels like just one thing: a cat rescuer.

Sassee: I can’t even tell you. Countless times that I didn’t feel like going out to feed, and I just wanted to stay home and relax and watch TV and just chill. I feel like, wow. How did this happen?

Virginia Marshall: Sassee took our field reporter, Sarah, to the place where it all began, nearly 15 years ago, by a dumpster right near her apartment. That was where, back in 2011, she found a litter of three kittens. Sassee remembers that they looked hungry.

Sassee: It was Spotty, Torty, and Goldie. So first I was bringing scraps from the house, and then I went and bought a little bag of cat food and I would come and put the food under here.

Virginia Marshall: It started with feeding, but soon Sassee realized that the problem was much bigger than that. She noticed the mama cat was back and pregnant again.

Sassee: I was like, this is gonna be a problem. It’s gonna be more kittens. This mother getting ready to have another kitten. I started Googling it. Everything came together.

Virginia Marshall: Eventually, Sassee learned about TNR and she got connected with Mary Tschinkel, who runs Friendly Ferals, a TNR organization in Queens.

Sassee: And she wouldn’t help me until I took that class. I was like, just tell me what to do. I’ll do it. She was like, nope, you gotta take the class. And that was the best thing that I could have ever did.

Virginia Marshall: After the TNR class, Sassee was certified to trap on her own, and her first time out in the neighborhood she rallied her community to help.

Sassee: My first trapping, I had my daughter, I had my nephew. I had people who lived in the back of the projects, my homeboy. I had everybody with their phone: when you get a cat in the trap, call me. I had everyone in different spots because I didn’t know what was out there.

Twenty-eight cats we trapped the first time, I didn’t even know it was 28 cats out there. Imagine that.

Virginia Marshall: To Sassee, those were the good old days. She could feel her neighborhood coming together and the litters of kittens dwindling. That was back when she was only focusing on what she’s really good at: trapping.

Sassee: So let me just tell you. Mary, who owns Friendly Ferals, she used to tell me every month, Sassee, do not become a feeder. Stick to TNR. The cats need you to Trap Neuter Return. Don’t be going rescuing everybody. Don’t go filling your house up with a bunch of cats. She told me that.

Virginia Marshall: As Sassee recounts the story, she cracks open cans of cat food and puts them on the ground. Cats peek out hungrily from behind bushes and fences.

Sassee: They depending on me. How do you stop? Even if I wanted to stop, I can’t stop. I am practicing saying no a lot more because I say yes too much. So saying no is hard for me.

Virginia Marshall: That’s probably how Sassee ended up with 18 feeding spots. It’s also how she ends up driving around the city every day, back and forth to the ASPCA and even booking surgeries for her neighbor’s pets.

Sassee: Everybody in my building, all their cats are fixed. People where I live at, the stores, all of them are fixed by me. I fix all of them. And I make all of them take the class. I’ve gotten over a hundred people to take the TNR class. Even the old ladies, I’m talking about 80, 90 year-olds, they all TNR certified.

Virginia Marshall: More than anything, Sassee wishes she had more help from her neighbors. That’s part of the reason that she tries to get more people TNR certified and educate them about the benefits of fixing their pets.

Sassee: This should be something that we all have our hands involved with because it affects all of us. And I think a lot of people don’t understand that I don’t work for the city. This is not my job. That’s what I would like to convey to the whole world. I don’t have to do this. People act like I have to do this.

Virginia Marshall: Hearing Sassee’s story, it’s important to point out that burnout can happen so easily. The system that we have is built on the backs of people who feel like if they stop, no one is gonna take care of these cats. They are the safety net and it’s too much for one person to hold.

Will Zweigart: This is ultimately a discussion about labor and our values as a society. We fund things that we value. So what does it say about New York City that we don’t value this work enough to hire people? And given that the current situation is unacceptable, who should be doing this work?

Virginia Marshall: Right. So I’m curious Will, just broadly speaking, we’re relying heavily on this volunteer labor, but what are some of the long-term consequences of that?

Will Zweigart: Yeah. And just to be clear, I think our listeners have picked this up already, but almost all cat rescue across the entire city is volunteer based. All of it.

Virginia Marshall: Wow.

Will Zweigart: So think back to what Rosario said, like, I thought I could call someone. All of it is volunteer based.

Virginia Marshall: Yeah. I mean, you have experience with this firsthand, right? ‘Cause the way you got into this work in the first place was doing TNR yourself, just having another job and going out there and rescuing cats. Right?

Will Zweigart: Our lives changed when we got into TNR and rescue, and not fully for the better. I think a lot of things tended to fall away. Hobbies, free time, exercise, relationships. I was getting up at 4:00 AM on a weekday to go pick up a rental van, ‘cause we didn’t have a car. Take that back. Pick up 10 cats that I had trapped the night before, then drive to the nearest clinic, which was in Queens. Drop them off for surgery by like seven. Then drive back through traffic, change clothes, take the subway into Midtown like nothing else is going on.

Just the car time alone, it’s like four hours round trip. This is the kind of work that rescuers and TNR volunteers are doing all the time, and they’re not complaining about it, they’re just doing it. All they’re asking for is support, and they don’t even get that. They have to pay for all of this stuff.

Virginia Marshall: Like we heard from Sassee, she was saying that she drives all around the city to different rescue organizations, to get these spay neuter appointments. All in her own car, on her own time.

Will Zweigart: Yeah, a hundred percent. And the work really does just continue. That’s like, a single snapshot. Then, of course, you’re also fostering the friendlies that you picked up the weekend before. So you’re giving them medicine, then you go out and you feed the colonies where you found all these cats in the first place. When you go out to feed the colonies, you’re seeing new sick cats and then, eventually, you hit a wall.

Everyone hits a wall. I think you can hit burnout and then just stay there for years because, again, as you’ll hear from Sassee and so many others, they need me.

Virginia Marshall: The cats still need me, yeah.

Will Zweigart: They, the cats, still need me. And so, it keeps you stuck in that place. So you can’t just be like, I’m done.

Virginia Marshall: I’m wondering though, for those who are stuck in that place as you say, they’re out there rescuing, spending all their free time doing it: do you have any advice or guidance since you’re sort of on the other side of it?

Will Zweigart: It’s really tough, and so there are definitely no easy answers. I have a lot of empathy for being in that situation, and I’ve had a lot of long conversations with folks like Sassee where we can’t really reach an easy solution because she does feel stuck and she really is in a position where a lot of cats need her help.

But a lot of our conversations have focused on boundaries. And the fact that, regardless of what you do, whether you’re a volunteer trapper, whether you’re a heart surgeon, everyone needs boundaries, and every body needs space and rest and time to recover. And so a lot of this comes back to how we value ourselves and our time and our work.

I don’t have any silver bullet or quick advice that would solve it. I would say, the work that you’re doing, if you’re a rescuer right now and you’re feeling tired and you feel like you’re headed towards a wall, understand that the work that you do is life changing, but your life and your wellbeing matters too. And your value is not based on this work. Your value is inherent as a human being and you deserve real rest. And rest is not just the absence of movement, it’s the presence of safety.

Virginia Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. So how do we get to a place where people like Sassee can have rest, feel secure as you were saying, in that? From this volunteer model to something more sustainable.

Will Zweigart: I think the solution involves the city funding these as salaried roles, just as we have Parks employees to protect and maintain parks. The same is true here. We barely even have animal control in New York City, but that function should exist. But it needs to be now centered more around community engagement and support. That might look like people who are connecting with neighbors around surrender prevention, helping seniors trap the cats in their backyard. These are cool jobs and these are very impactful jobs. Again, that someone’s doing, just not getting paid for it, not getting recognized for it.

Virginia Marshall: So I wanna zoom out a little bit actually, because at this point in the series we’ve heard a lot from caretakers and volunteers in Brooklyn. We’ve heard from people in Flatbush and now just from Sassee, who works mostly in East New York and also in Crown Heights, both in Brooklyn.

I was wondering what the work is like in other boroughs and, in particular, the Bronx, because that’s probably the area that has the highest need in terms of the number of cats on the street. To answer that question, we reached out to an organization called Bronx Community Cats and spoke with Tanya Copeland, who’s one of the founders.

Tanya said that when she moved to the Bronx almost a decade ago, she was surprised by two things. First, the sheer number of cats on the street. And second, how few cat rescue organizations were able to help. She said that in the entire borough of 2 million people, there were only three or four established rescue organizations, none of which were focusing on TNR.

So Tanya and a few other dedicated rescuers decided to do something about it, and they founded Bronx Community Cats in 2020. When I sat down to talk with Tanya, she told me more about what it’s like to trap in the Bronx.

Tanya: One thing you have to realize, this is all happening sort of in the context of poverty. You can’t just ask someone to go pick up a cat. They can’t compromise feeding their kids to go feed a cat. They may be able to trap the cat. They may have a good relationship with the cat so that they can actually get it into a carrier, but they’re unable to transport the cat to the clinic, or they’re unable to feed and house it for the days that are required for the recovery.

So when it comes to Trap Neuter Return, it still remains controversial. And it’s also still in its infancy, even the language around it. This came up when we’re trying to translate some materials, because the concepts don’t even translate that well into Spanish sometimes. And then also this idea that, oh, you’re trapping cats just to abandon them, without taking into consideration that their life expectancy virtually doubles simply from being fixed and vaccinated.

Virginia Marshall: Is there a barrier to getting spay/neuter appointments in the Bronx?

Tanya: There are definitely a lack of spay/neuter appointments. We don’t have any low cost clinics, only the ASPCA which is nonprofit. But there are no low cost vets like Flatbush Vet or BBAWC Rescue Clinic, where pet owners can access spay/neuter at a reasonable cost. So that’s one reason: no low cost clinics.

The second reason would be the way people are acquiring their cats. People think that they’re either adopting or buying them, when in reality what’s actually happening is people are assuming responsibility for animals when people have to move abruptly due to, like, eviction. So because they see so many cats outside, and they see people feeding them and caring for them, they don’t inherently know that this is not the best solution for their cat. They think they’ll be safe and that they’ll just join the rest of the outdoor cats. That’s the second reason.

Then the third. I would say there are some religious and cultural beliefs that sort of inform attitudes about things like termination spays. Those are the three prevailing themes that I see in the Bronx. The data that I’d seen from a health statistics report was something like 40% of the cats in the Bronx are fixed, and this is versus 93% in Manhattan.

Among owned cats there was a huge deficit. So we thought one way to turn the faucet off, at least in one direction, would be to increase the number of owned animals that we were fixing. And so at this point, about 30% of the cats we fix every month are actually owned cats. We largely rely on the ASPCA as our primary clinic partner and, since our inception, we’re approaching 4,500 cats. Next week it’ll be 1,000 in 2025 alone.

Because we’re working class too, the people that we encounter are our peers to a degree, and so we understand some of the challenges that they’re facing. We’re very sympathetic to them, and we are trying to create infrastructure where people feel supported and that they can do something like this.

Virginia Marshall: Yeah, that seems really important. And congratulations on 4,500 spay/neuters.

Tanya: Yeah, thank you.

Virginia Marshall: That’s incredible.

Tanya: I don’t think people who live outside of New York City can really appreciate how hard it is to actually fix on average, like, 110 cats a month. One of our volunteers actually said, it’s the most important thing I do all month, wake up at 6:00 AM and try for spay/neuter appointments. Because in terms of pushing the needle, advancing our goals, it’s really important that we have at least some subsidized appointments.

So that’s sort of what drives us. Being able to look back at a colony, have people approach you in the neighborhood when you’re going to check on the cats, and then they say, do you remember when there used to be 50 cats around here? Yeah, I do remember.

Virginia Marshall: So I’m hearing so many things in that interview, Will. For one thing, the challenges of getting affordable spay neuter appointments. To the point of, the volunteers there are pooling resources, people sitting at their computers and just getting as many slots as they can.

But that’s how Flatbush Cats started too, right? It’s a group of people coming together, pooling their resources and trying to get things formalized. From your perspective, how did Flatbush Cats make the jump between that group of volunteers, and maybe you out rescuing cats, to scale up in terms of becoming a nonprofit and being a real organization?

Will Zweigart: Our very first hire, our very first full-time role as an organization was the Trapper/Community Engagement role. We made that our first paid salary role and Ryan, who you’ve already met in the show, is our first employee.

Virginia Marshall: Yeah, he’s everywhere on the show.

Will Zweigart: Ryan’s everywhere and he still is, right? He was our first employee in 2020 back during the dark and confusing days, and we’ve done our best to support him ever since. And now we’re expanding that team. We’re hiring for new community engagement roles that will help us be even more proactive. If you think about trapping and engaging with neighbors, those are two different sides of the coin.

The more you get to know neighbors on a block, ideally you’re preventing these large scale TNR projects from ever needing to happen. Because we can now connect them with resources at Flatbush Veterinary Clinic, and we regularly chat with Rescue and TNR volunteers about this. We have done formal surveys and we’ve asked them, what do you need?

Number one, by a mile, is vet care. Everything under vet care. Because, again, if Sassee or Tanya need to take a cat to a vet, that is just more labor for them and that is often a high cost. So with the help from our supporters, we were able to bring Flatbush Veterinary Clinic online in 2023, and in less than two years we’ve had over 800 rescuers and TNR volunteers signed up. Those are TNR certified folks. They’re coming through to get discounted care, and I would love to think that is solving the problem, but it’s really just the next step. We’re not close to Tanya. We’re not super close to Sassee. These folks need clinics like this in their borough, in their neighborhood as well.

Virginia Marshall: Yeah, and what you were saying about focusing in on relationships, building trust with neighbors, is one of those things that makes a rescue organization thrive. It also reminds me of a story we heard a couple episodes ago from Sabbie, who was that colony caretaker in Flatbush.

Sabbie is someone who really benefits from having Flatbush Cats and Flatbush Vet as a support. She’s been doing this work of caretaking and feeding since 2020, and because of the resources at the vet clinic, she was able to help one particular outdoor cat who took a real liking to her.

Sabbie: Look at her! She knows she lives here, right? I’m pretty much her owner, but not inside. So this happens every single day.

Virginia Marshall: Field Reporter, Sarah, met Sabbie on the steps of her building over the summer. Where, every day after feeding the neighborhood cats, a little gray tabby named Wander paces around Sabbie. She rubs on her, and flops in front of her, waiting for pets. Pretty much anytime you hear Sabbie’s voice, Wander is right by her side.

Sabbie: Now it’s annoying because I cannot come outside without her running around here. Like, I’m walking and then she come and she running. She try to lure me to sit right here. This is every single day.

Virginia Marshall: Wander is part of the original litter Sabbie rescued years ago. The two have a long history together.

Sabbie: Actually, Wander, something happened to her like two summers ago. I don’t know, she was looking like she was about to die. I don’t know if she was being dramatic. So we was like, oh my God, Wander is sick. So we called Ryan. Ryan came, got Wander

Virginia Marshall: Sabbie waited anxiously for word from Flatbush Cats, and then she got a call from Ryan.

Sabbie: So he was like, oh, Sabbie, I don’t think Wander’s gonna make it. I’m like, what?!

She haven’t eaten for days. I’m like, what?!

Virginia Marshall: Sabbie thought maybe it was all the stress from being pulled off the street.

Sabbie: Because she was away from this area, and she was in an enclosed place, so she didn’t know where she was. So I’m sure she shut down because of that experience. And she shut down by not eating. But they said, Sabbie, you gotta come down here, ‘cause if she’s not eating, she’s not gonna make it.

So when I went there, she was in the holding space in the cage. And she looked so sad, like she was on death’s door, and she didn’t even light up when she saw me. It’s like she gave up, like, okay, I don’t understand why I’m in this cage, what the hell’s going on with my life. And she shut down.

Virginia Marshall: But Sabbie kept trying to get through to Wander.

Sabbie: So I had to be like, oh, Wander it’s me, Sabbie! Cat talk, blah, blah, blah. Every day I would go to see Wander, and every day I would take her and bring her outside and just spend time with her. Like, keep her in the cage and just sit down and talk to her. She understood who I was and then she started eating. She started allowing me to give her stuff to eat, and she started eating. And then Ryan was like, oh, I think she’s okay to come back.

Sarah: So you kind of nursed her back?

Sabbie: I nursed her back. From shutdown to comeback.

Virginia Marshall: But no matter how much care Sabbie and others have for these outdoor cats, the reality is that cats are just not meant to live outside in New York City. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks after Sarah met Wander, Sabbie called her crying.

Sarah: So, tell me what happened.

Sabbie: She just didn’t show up one day and I’m like, where’s Wander? I was looking for her everywhere. I knew something was wrong, because I never, ever go so many days without seeing her. She greets me every single morning. Every single night I go to walk my dog, she’s there.

So I didn’t see her from Tuesday till I found her on Friday. And then, what’s so funny is that she was in the yard right by the steps that we sat to do the first interview.

Virginia Marshall: Right by those steps, by the bushes where she met Sabbie every day for years, Wander had quietly passed on.

Sabbie: Now, I don’t know what happened to Wander ‘cause she was healthy. She was in good spirit. I would’ve never thought that, from the last time when we spoke, Wander would’ve been dead two weeks later.

I’m really devastated because I feel like she was my cat. And so I’m having a hard time coping because, every time I pass the house, I find myself calling her name. Wander, Wander! I can’t get her out of my memory. Out of all the hundred cats, Wander is the one that’s most special.

Virginia Marshall: This is another part of the emotional weight that colony caretakers and cat rescuers have to carry. Occasionally, they come face to face with just how inhospitable this city can be for a cat.

Sabbie: I am never allowing myself to get attached to a street cat again. Nope. I mean, I’ll always help them, but not that personal attachment where I feel like it’s my cat. It’s too hard. It’s too hard because, if you don’t have complete control in the house all the time, anything could happen to them. Once they’re outdoor, they’re not really safe.

Virginia Marshall: That’s a really emotional story to end on, Will, and I just wanna take a moment to recognize Sabbie’s loss after she channeled so much time and energy and love into making sure that Wander was going to be okay.

Unfortunately, that story paints a picture of the kind of grief that volunteer cat rescuers can experience. These cats just aren’t meant to live outside, and it’s heartbreaking to work so hard to keep them safe and form relationships with them, and then have this be the end of the story.

Will Zweigart: Absolutely. This is yet another example of the toll that this work is taking on those with the biggest hearts. Perhaps the solace here is that, while we can’t prevent every cat from encountering harm, we can do a lot more to support the people who are caring for them right now.

Virginia Marshall: Right, you and the team at Flatbush Cats have actually built a volunteer structure that can take the burden off of individuals like Sabbie, and help carry some of the practical and emotional weight of this work.

So tell me a little bit more about that structure. If there’s a cat on the street that needs help today, what kind of support is Flatbush Cats able to provide?

Will Zweigart: Yeah, so let me give you an anecdote that kind of explains how things work now, as opposed to a couple years ago. A couple years ago, on that rare Sunday afternoon where everything’s quiet for a second, I start getting texts from numbers I don’t know, with sick cats with visible gaping wounds on their neck.

You can’t just put your phone down because this is someone asking you for help. And there’s a click that happens in your brain for a rescuer where you immediately feel like, I’ve got to be the one to get this. And it is often true.

So, we’re now out scouting the situation. We’re figuring out, how elusive is this cat? Do I need to stake out this cat all night and try to get them, because it’s a medical issue. Trying to find a vet appointment on a Sunday. You’re calling for a Monday, and figuring out how you can move your schedule to get them in. Figuring out supplies, transport. Do you have a trap? How are you gonna get them in? How are you gonna care for the cat? Where are they gonna go? Is it friendly? Can you foster it? This is like your mental processing going on overload, and it’s exhausting.

That was happening every single weekend, frankly every day, for years. Now let me explain how that situation looks with a distributed volunteer system. So now, when I get a text and they’re sending me that same injured cat, now I say, hey, visit flatbushcats.org/help and tell us about the cat, and we’ll be in touch to see how we can help. We have volunteer case managers and this is their job. They just review cases and they make decisions about how we’re gonna use our trapping resources for the week.

They are then in touch with the person who filled that out. Hey, tell me more about the cat. Tell me about the feeding schedule. Now we’re scheduling. Okay. We’re gonna be out there on Thursday morning. Here’s the rules. No feeding the day before, this is how you can help. Blah, blah, blah.

We’re trapping. That’s a different volunteer. Then transport. I’ve got someone else with an SUV who maybe just has an hour. Perfect. Come pick up these six cats, plus this injured cat. Bring them to Flatbush Vet. Let’s get it going.

Another volunteer remotely kicking in on records. Okay, you got cats? All right, gimme all the information. I’ll get them in the system. Who needs what? Do we have availability at our clinic? Do we send them somewhere else? Another volunteer shows up that night, cares for them, gives them food, gives them meds, what they need, all at our clinic.

Then you kick into foster systems. They’re getting placed. Foster volunteers are pre-approved, ready to go. Another volunteer is screening people who want to adopt that cat. And so we’re now able to move this cat through the system in two weeks, and I didn’t do any of that. The only thing I did is text someone, hey, go to this link.

But, you saw, that was like a dozen jobs done by a dozen different people, and it is an interim solution. Long term, this should be done by paid employees, but this is a way that we can distribute the labor so that we’re not burned out and we can have a little bit of fun working as a team together.

Virginia Marshall: Yeah, that’s really amazing to hear. And as you were pointing out, each of those roles is now a different person, and so it allows just a Joe Schmo on the street to say, I can actually do that. I can come in for two hours once a week and help. And that’s actually what a lot of people do.

I met a couple of the volunteers who work in the holding space at Flatbush Cats. That place you just described where cats go once they get trapped and picked up off the street. And I spoke with Steve and Zoe there, who were both volunteering early one Thursday morning.

Steve: I am cleaning out some of the traps here, and then usually also prepare food and check if any need medications.

Virginia Marshall: This is Steve, a volunteer with Flatbush Cats who has been picking up shifts at the holding space a couple times a week for the past six months. While we talked, he was cleaning cat poop out of a trap.

Virginia Marshall: So this is kind of gross work.

Steve: Yeah, it is a little gross.

Zoe: It’s like, two extremes though.

Virginia Marshall: That’s Zoey. She’s been volunteering with Flatbush Cats for about a year.

Zoe: There are these two extremes of incredibly gross, and then incredibly cute, sometimes all in one trap.

Virginia Marshall: So yes, this volunteer position includes some smelly parts, but also some really amazing snuggles.

Virginia Marshall (on field tape): Who’s this up here?

Zoe: This is Tea Party. And he is a beautiful, very dignified gray cat. He’s been very quiet, very patient.

Virginia Marshall: While she talked, Zoe was scratching Tea Party’s head, and Tea Party was relaxing into the touch.

Zoe: The socializing, the enrichment, that part is the best. So yeah, these cats, I think they’re all ready for foster and they’ll all go pretty quickly.

Virginia Marshall: Deciding whether a cat is friendly or feral is one of the most important parts of the holding space shift. By now, Steve knows the signs well.

Steve: If they are immediately hissing and shying away from the other corner, then that’s a sign that they’re probably not gonna be particularly friendly. If they’re sort of approaching you for contact, then that’s a good sign. And then the usual next step is to try them out with a little bit of a treat, like some Churu on a spoon or something through the bars.

Virginia Marshall: Aside from all the cleaning, feeding, and doling of medication, there is some triaging that the volunteers have to do in order to move animals through the holding space quickly. Because, the holding space is just that, a temporary spot for cats to spend a little time before moving on.

Zoe: They come in, they get the first available spay/neuter appointment. They stay only as long as they need to be sure that they’re recovered. And then if they don’t have any medical problems and they’re not friendly, they’ll go back to where they came from, which is where they have a designated feeder, colony caretaker. But if they show that they’re friendly, if they’re communicative, interactive, not scared, then they will get moved over. (laughs)

Virginia Marshall: Zoe was laughing at one of the friendly cats in a kennel, Mr. Scott, who had a very unique voice.

(Mr. Scott meows)

Zoe: Mr. Scott!

Virginia Marshall: Mr. Scott was on the friendly side of the holding space, which means he would be very happy sharing an apartment with a kind-hearted New Yorker. Next to him was another friendly cat.

Zoe: This is Medium Stan. What a name indeed. He’s the one who came in with an eye infection, I guess. He’s just a shy boy ‘cause he just moved over to sit inside his litter box, which I haven’t cleaned out yet.

Virginia Marshall: Aside from the cat cuddles and the unique satisfaction of cleaning out a dirty trap, there’s a deeper reason that Steve and Zoe keep coming back to volunteer at Flatbush Cats.

Zoe: The holding space is just somewhere you can come and you immediately can feel the impact that you’re making. You come in, you feed some cats, you clean some cats. There’s so much going on that we don’t feel like we can do anything about. Not just in the realm of cats, but in the world and in New York and whatever. So this feels like, okay, I can’t fix everything, but I can come in and spend three hours really doing something that feels helpful.

Virginia Marshall: Doing a volunteer shift at a holding space a couple of times a week is a much healthier way to interact than getting burnt out by carrying too many parts of the system. So that model of shared roles really is preventing that burnout.

Will Zweigart: Yeah, it’s a way of making the best of where we’re at right now, knowing that we cannot rescue the rescuers at an individual level, and we cannot solve this problem at a rescue level. So we’re trying to hold things down while we build something better.

So we’ll be launching a training program next year to help more New Yorkers and folks around the country who want to build a little bit more of a sustainable, volunteer based, community centered model so they’re not burning out so quickly. And long term, we need to work ourselves out of a job. These roles should not exist at a volunteer level. They should be staffed by the city.

Virginia Marshall: That’s next time on Underfoot.

Come back next week to learn how the city can help us solve this problem, and the mechanics of what we call “cat math.” We’d love to hear from you, our listeners. Share your questions, reactions, or stories with us by visiting flatbush cats.org/underfoot and leaving a note or a voice message. Your voice might even make it into a future episode or newsletter.

Will Zweigart: Underfoot is brought to you by Flatbush Cats and is made possible by our generous donors and supporters who want to get to the root of this problem. If that sounds like you, subscribe to our newsletter and become a supporter. You can learn more at flatbushcats.org.

Virginia Marshall: Underfoot is hosted by Will Zweigart and me, Virginia Marshall.

Our field reporter is Sarah Gabrielli. Additional Reporting by Priscilla Alabi. Episodes were recorded at Good Studio in Brooklyn and mixed and mastered by Will Whatley. Podcast art was created by Lazy Chief, and the series was Executive Produced by None Other.

Cat appearances in this episode by Wander, Mr. Scott, Medium Stan, Ignatia, and Romanza.