First we made logistical decisions. We'd trap outside my current apartment building, at least for the few weeks I'm still there. We'd keep the cat, still in the trap, in Jenny Volpe's bathtub once it's trapped/the night before surgery. After surgery we'd keep the cat in a large recovery carrier in Jenny Volpe's dining room. Jenny Volpe has no dominant or anxious cats like me and no wonderful but allergic husband like Jenny Morse. As with any TNR, we'd release the cat back at the trapping site once he/she recovered from surgery.

Next came financial and ethical decisions. We decided to do the "combo test" for feline leukemia and feline HIV though it costs an extra $10 and many large scale TNR projects do not do it. It will raise ethical issues if a cat tests positive for either illness but it will be a comfort if they test negative. We decided to not release a cat outdoors if we're sure he/she has feline HIV or feline leukemia. Also testing is a must for any cat that we decide to adopt out rather than release outside. These are complex ethical choices and each group must decide what's best for them. Fortunately I trapped Zen and Bambi from this same trapping site and they both tested negative with their combo tests. Before we began Tiny TNR trapping that fact supported our hope that any cats we trapped would test negative. One extra financial note. We are a tiny operation and have barely more than the cost of the spay/neuter package to spend on this. Honestly we're just praying it's enough.

With each trapping we must decide whether to do TNR or TNA, trap-neuter-release or trap-neuter-adopt out. Even with the big TNR projects they say that for friendly strays and very young feral kittens you should adopt them out and not release them outside again. We have discussed this decision but each trapping night we will have to make it on a cat by cat basis. It may involve a bit of psychic intuition since a cat's friendliness may not be too apparent when stuck in a trap. We're not your typical "I see and feed these cats in my backyard" group so we have no sense of which are friendly ahead of time. We don't even have any sense of how many are out there near our trapping site. We're glass half full people, so the mystery makes it all the more exciting.

Another ethical decision we made is that if a cat is very noticeably pregnant even to our untrained eyes we will ask the vet to check her out but let her have her babies and care for them in the recovery carrier. Then when the babies are old enough we will adopt out the babies and her too if she is tame enough. If we do not notice that she's pregnant but she is we will let the vet do a spay-abort of they feel they can do it. Again these are ethical decisions everyone must decide for themselves.

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