Jolene Baldwin took the short drive one more time to the cats, to the small stand of trees in Eastern Baltimore County, as she has for nearly a year now. Months ago, she placed a barrel back there stuffed with straw and covered in plastic tarps in hopes the three cats would survive to see a spring afternoon like this.
Holding a walking stick in one hand and a pitcher of crunchy Purina kitten food in the other, she called toward the trees: "Rocky…Rocky…Hey Rocky Rock…"
The three cats that indeed survived the winter go by that name, if they go by any name at all, as "Rocky" suited the story she once told someone in the area about how she was feeding raccoons, not cats. The mention of cats might draw the wrong kind of attention.
Baldwin is being cautious, but that only goes with this pursuit — a "calling," in her word. The 69-year-old former schoolteacher is one of a small army of volunteers in the county who skirt local law and, in some cases, spend thousands of dollars a year to look after cats that in many cases are too afraid of people to be placed in a home.
These feral cats often end up with unwanted pets and other strays at the county shelter on a quiet stretch of road in Baldwin, which took in the animals at the rate of nearly eight per day in the last fiscal year, for 2,893 in all. Two thirds were euthanized at the shelter, which is about in line with national figures.
Cat advocates say those numbers demand a new approach. Some advocates, including the Humane Society of the United States, and others, are urging county officials to follow the example of Baltimore City and allow volunteers to manage the feral cat population using a practice called trap-neuter-return.
That is, trapping the cats, sterilizing and vaccinating them, treating them for fleas and other parasites, clipping their ears to mark them as part of a managed "colony," and returning them to their turf.
Baltimore City is a bit more than a year into the new practice. Juan Gutierrez, the city's assistant health commissioner for environmental health, says volunteers are now handling many cat complaints, easing the workload for the city's 13 animal control officers.
"It's worked out beautifully for us," he said. "I don't know why Baltimore County is refusing."
Samuel W. Moore, the city's interim animal control officer, gives a more mixed report. He said most of the complaints so far have involved cats using private property it as a litter box. He said there's still work to be done in teaching the public how the law is supposed to work and getting the caretakers to keep animals off other people's property.
Baltimore County officially now handles roaming cats much as the city did before the laws there were changed: Responding to nuisance reports, trying to resolve conflicts, imposing fines and sometimes lending humane traps to those who make complaints. Absent a complaint, county animal control supervisor Charlotte Crenson-Murrow said, the county does not send officers out to trap cats nor pursue caretakers.
"TNR" runs afoul of county animal control laws, which were not written to address this hybrid category: A free-roaming animal living outdoors under a person's care. But the regulations have not deterred volunteers from taking matters into their own hands.
Lisa Snyder cares for two cat colonies in the southeastern part of Baltimore County.
"It needs to be done, because there are so many being killed and thrown out," the Dundalk woman said. "People treat them like they're disposable and they're not."
Snyder was among several county cat caretakers who showed up at the Maryland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals shelter in the city a few weeks ago for one of the organization's regular clinics offering low-cost sterilization and vaccinations for feral cats. She figures she's trapped and fixed more than 100 cats in the last 12 years.
Sharon Cremen of Sparrows Point brought four cats she trapped in the county, as she has many times before. She said she probably spends more than $5,000 a year feeding her cat colony twice every day.
"People think I'm crazy, OK, whatever," she said. She traces her commitment to her childhood, when she watched as animal control officers swept into her neighborhood and took several cats away.
"It was just something a kid shouldn't see," she said, choked up with tears. "I think that's some of the reason I do it."
In 2009, the city recognized the feral cat as a separate category of animal. City officials now work with Community Cats Maryland Inc., a nonprofit organization, to maintain the volunteer caretaker system and help handle complaints about nuisance cats.
Donna Bernstein, a city resident and co-director of Community Cats, was instrumental in the city's decision, and has tried to persuade the county. She argues that the trap-and-kill approach doesn't work, and TNR — which has been practiced in a systematic way in parts of this country for about 20 years — is the more sensible and humane way to manage feral cat populations.
"What's the more rational approach?" Bernstein asked. "The question isn't whether you have cats or not," Bernstein said, "but do you have altered and vaccinated cats or unaltered, unvaccinated cats?"
She and other TNR advocates argue that efforts to eliminate feral cats by killing them one, two, 10 or 20 at a time will always be defeated by what they call a "vacuum effect:" When cats are taken away, she says, others will move into their turf for the food, supply, and the cycle begins again.
"There's nothing a county or community can do to totally eradicate these animals," said Bernstein. "Most people don't want these animals killed. They just want them to stop breeding."
Over time, the pro-TNR argument goes, if enough feral cats in a given area are spayed or neutered, if the colonies are well-managed, their numbers will diminish, while saving animal control officers the work of constantly rounding up stray cats. Advocates also say that many of the behaviors that make cats a nuisance, including yowling and male spraying, are diminished or eliminated when animals are sterilized.
Bernstein made her case in a meeting last year with county officials.
Della Leister, the county's deputy health officer, was not persuaded.
Leister said she is particularly concerned about feral cats as potential carriers of disease, including rabies, either to people or to other animals.
Typically, a cat that is trapped, neutered and released is vaccinated only once. Leister is not convinced once is enough.
"Accepting that one rabies shot is better than none is not a policy we would support," Leister said.
Bernstein said caretakers sometimes vaccinate their cats more than once if they're trapped again for another reason. Elizabeth Parowski, a spokesman for Alley Cat Alllies, a national group that supports TNR programs, said caretakers she knows of do not generally make a practice of trapping and vaccinating their animals more than once.
Opinions vary on the effectiveness of one rabies shot over time — some studies say the vaccination can last more than four years — and the risk that cats pose of spreading the disease.
Like all warm-blooded animals, cats are potential carriers of rabies. But Nancy Peterson, who manages cat programs for the Humane Society of the United States, says there has not been a case of a person contracting rabies from a cat in this country in 35 years. She noted that the World Health Organization since 1982 has recommended vaccination rather than removal to control rabies in stray dog populations.
Peterson made those arguments in a lengthy email she sent early this year to Dr. Gregory Wm. Branch, the county health officer, covering key concerns about TNR: disease, risk to birds and other wildlife, effectiveness in population control. She said she does not recall receiving a response.
Neither have county officials apparently been moved by an online petition drive organized this year by the Feline Rescue Association Inc., a Maryland organization run by Lizzie Ellis. She said about 1,000 signatures — many from people outside this area — went to Leister, Branch and County Executive James T. Smith Jr.
Leister said she has not been in touch with city officials about how the program is working there.
Many national animal welfare organizations have joined the Humane Society of the United States in supporting TNR, including the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the American Association of Feline Practitioners, the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association. The National Animal Control Association supports the method in some cases, and the American Veterinary Medical Association — the country's largest nonprofit veterinarians' organization — endorses practices to resolve the problem of abandoned and feral cats, but takes no position for or against managed cat colonies.
Research on TNR, much of it published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, can be found to support more than one point of view about the usefulness of the practice. As a former president of the AVMA said in a published 2004 forum on managing abandoned and feral cats: "At the current time, there are no easy answers."
Cat caretakers in the county say they know the rules, but they also feel say they feel compelled to help the animals. Some are afraid to make their names public, others decline to reveal their colony's exact location to protect the animals, or keep people from dumping unwanted pets into the group.
Jolene Baldwin started her TNR efforts when she lived in the city, long before the rules there changed. She remembers placing traps in tough neighborhoods and waiting there through the night so as not to leave a trapped cat stuck and vulnerable to abuse. She's been registered for years as a nonprofit cat rescue operation called Little Flower, and often works with the county shelter to help place animals and to foster cats until they can be adopted.
"Because the need is so great you have to jump in and help," said Baldwin, who started her efforts 20 years ago. "It's just a kind of calling. It's hard and it's heartbreaking. The rewards, I want to make sure the cats are not suffering…I'm particularly touched by the fact that they suffer. So I do what I do."