Editor’s note: This is part two of a series of articles in relation to the health and welfare of community cats in San Marcos and Hays County.
In early June, at the peak of “kitten season” in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Bill 3660 into law. The bipartisan bill extends protection from facing criminal charges when returning sterilized cats to the wild.
The bill aims to protect people who participate in Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) programs in the state. According to the nonprofit organization For All Animals, a Trap-Neuter-Release program (also known as Trap-Neuter-Return) is “an animal control management practice where community cats are humanely trapped, sterilized by a veterinarian, vaccinated against rabies, eartipped and returned to the trapping location. These cats can range from feral, in which they have no interaction with humans at all — to a community cat, one that is a tame stray living within a human-protected colony.
