This Sunday is Feral Cat Day, and to raise awareness, the Teal Cat Project started The Teal NAIL project. Paint your nails teal, and then when people comment on the lovely color gracing the tips of your fingers, you have an opening to tell them about feral cat awareness and trap-neuter-release programs. It's a genius idea, and hopefully it will help spread the word about how necessary TNR programs are and how many cat lives they could save.
So many cats are euthanized each year in animal shelters because of our archaic programs for dealing with overrun feral cat communities. Killing cats is never okay. It's never a solution, and in this case it doesn't even remotely solve the feral cat problem. When animal control rounds up a bunch of feral cats and euthanizes them, the ones that evaded capture will reproduce until the community is the same size it was before. The only way to really approach this issue is to capture cats, spay and neuter, and then release them back to live their lives in peace. They won't be able to reproduce, so the feral cat communities will decrease. Less cats will then be brought into shelters, so less cats will be killed.
For more information about TNR you can visit the about page on The Teal Cat Project's website, here.
ps! To create the cat on my nail, I just painted a little half-circle at the bottom of my nail and used a thin paintbrush (or you could use a sharpie or black nail art pen!) to draw the ears. Then I used the tip of a straight pin to do the eyes and whiskers in white =^..^=
