Terri Doumit and Jill Johnson sit at the kitchen table in Jill’s home on Old Aberdeen Road. They’re discussing what kittens are in the care of their foster-based nonprofit, Operation Colony Cats, when a knock on the door makes them pause. When Jill opens the door, a man stands there with a pet carrier in his hands.

“Do y’all do the cat neuters here?” he asks tentatively, seeming unsure of how a random house in a small neighborhood could be helping with such a service.

“We help schedule them, yes” responds Jill. “Come on in.”

“How many cats do you have?” Terri adds as she gets up from the table to help. “If it’s more than one, make sure you bring them in their own carriers and put their names on the carriers. They need to be dropped off in Starkville at the Oktibbeha County Humane Society Spay and Neuter Clinic at 6:45 a.m.”

He explains that his son heard about Operation Colony Cats’ free spay-and-neuter program on Facebook, and that he was hoping to have his two male cats neutered but he only has the one carrier.

“You can borrow two of ours for dropoff,” Terri offers. “Just be sure to bring your own when you pick them up in the afternoon.”

After the gentleman has the information he needs, Terri calls her assistant and gets his cats “on the books” for surgery. As they settle back down at the table to pick up where they left off, Terri looks at Jill and laughs as she says what she calls their unofficial catchphrase: “A wing and a prayer.”

The group informally started in 2018 when locals noticed a feral cat colony at a gas station on Gardner Boulevard in Columbus had gotten out of control. Cats were everywhere, and their numbers were increasing as they had litter after litter of kittens. There was even a mama cat who had her kittens on the roof of the gas station. The locals, Terri included, who had been feeding the cats knew that things had to change.

According to the ASPCA, one unspayed female cat can have three to four litters of kittens in one year, with each litter having an average of four to six kittens. Because cats can reproduce as early as 4 months of age, a single cat and her offspring can theoretically result in thousands of cats over a few years. Multiply this by the hundreds of community cats in the area, and that number grows exponentially.

Terri and the others knew they were looking at a dire situation. The cats needed to be spayed and neutered before they ran out of resources, but there were so many. Where would they begin? Who could help them? How would they pay for it all?

“I had been volunteering at the (Columbus-Lowndes Humane Society) for a while at that point,” Terri said. “So I leaned over on the counter at the shelter and said, ‘Y’all have got to help us, we’ve got to fix these animals …’ and I was like, ‘What’s the best price I can get?’”

The shelter told Terri about Fido Fixers, a growing national fleet of mobile veterinary clinics, and about a vet, Dr. Brenda Westbrook, who worked with the Oktibbeha County Humane Society to provide large-volume spay and neuter surgeries at affordable prices. The catch? She needed to bring in at least 40 cats in one morning to qualify for the large-group discount. She immediately got to work sourcing traps to begin the process of trap-neuter-return, or TNR, a method she knew would work.

Trap-neuter-return is exactly what it sounds like: Cats are humanely trapped and taken to a veterinarian to be neutered. After recovery, the cats are returned to their home — their colony — outdoors.

Terri says this is the moment that Operation Colony Cats came to fruition.

“I joke with everybody in our group about a wing and a prayer, this was my first wing and a prayer,” she laughed as she recalled the memory. “I just got to work to find those (40 cats) and during that I got suckered into taking (kittens) for rescue, and I was at the very beginning stages of trying to rescue. It has escalated a lot since then, and really, that’s how (Operation Colony Cats) started.”

Now, Operation Colony Cats has started to become infamous in the Golden Triangle. From its fledgling stages as a volunteer TNR group, OCC is now a large, foster-based operation functioning as an official 501(c)(3), and this past spring, OCC was the beneficiary for the St. Patrick’s Pawty at Zachary’s in Columbus. It was an honor to be chosen, Terri said, and every dime of those funds has gone toward their free spay-and-neuter efforts for the community.

This year alone, Operation Colony Cats has spayed more than 1,200 cats and 130 dogs — many of them pets of citizens who could not otherwise afford the surgery.

But Terri said their group is getting older and they need local support more now than ever. She said May to October is the hardest time of the year for them because of kitten season, and they are in dire need of fosters to help them house orphaned kittens until they are big enough to be spayed or neutered for adoption. Jill’s house alone is housing at least four different litters of kittens — an effort that takes hours of care and cleaning each day.
With more fosters, the work could be more evenly spread and more kittens could be saved. They also need someone to help them drive animals to surgeries in Starkville from Columbus, as well as more folks willing to help with their TNR efforts.

“We really need more help on the TNR front, because the colonies are huge, and they’re growing,” Terri said. “People are like, ‘Well, I’ve reached out to you several times for help’ and it’s probably true, but we don’t have any trappers hardly anymore that are able to get out there quickly, you know, we’re an aging group. We started this almost 10 years ago, and we have people who are in their 70s that are still out there trying to carry big old traps around, it’s just difficult. So, really, what we’re looking for is the community to step forward and say, let us borrow the traps, and then we can drive those cats to clinics.”

It’s a lot of late nights, early mornings and hustle. Not to mention heartbreak — orphaned kittens don’t always make it, some cats are too sick to return to their colony and they sometimes have to say “no” when they are asked for help due to limited space, resources and funding. But ultimately, for Jill and Terri, all of this physical and emotional labor amounts to one goal: less suffering.

“The amount of suffering these cats and kittens can go through is unreal,” she said. “The fight for resources, the dangers of being outdoors, the diseases and fighting in overpopulated areas … We can reduce suffering with population control. Cats have got to be spayed and neutered before we can move on to whatever their next stage is, which I call ‘their best possible outcome.’ Whether it’s returning to a colony, coming to a foster home for adoption, whatever their best possible outcome looks like, that’s what we’re focused on.”

You can read more about OCC on its website, operationcolonycats.org. The group urgently needs foster homes and volunteers. All supplies are provided and there is no cost to foster. Reach out to OCC via its Facebook page, Operation Colony Cats, for more information.