MOUNT VERNON — An episode of “Confessions: Animal Hoarding” on the Animal Planet network will feature Whisker Connection, a local feline advocacy group.
The show will air Jan. 28 at 10 p.m. and feature Whisker Connection’s involvement in a cat hoarding situation in southeastern Ohio in 2010.
Whisker Connection was contacted last summer by a producer from the Animal Planet program “Confessions: Animal Hoarding” to assist with a hoarding case involving more than 85 cats.
Part of Animal Planet’s plan was to try to find homes for the cats involved. Whisker Connection agreed to use its facilities to be a holding area for those rescued cats that were healthy enough to be adopted.
“They spayed and neutered all the cats that had not been spayed and neutered,” said Tara Smith, co-founder of Whisker Connection. “They flea-treated them, treated them for internal parasites, the whole works. And we took them to rehab them to get them up to adoption condition.”
Whisker Connection took in a total of 63 cats from the home. It is still caring for 30 cats from the case.
The episode will also feature an incident of pit bull hoarding.
In addition to working to correct the case of hoarding, Whisker Connection has been keeping busy with a local feline project.
“We are working with two farms on the south side of town to reduce their feral cat populations,” Smith said. “We are doing some trap neuter return work. This is where we come in and live trap the cats, take them to be spayed or neutered, and then return them to their farms. We have already worked with another farmer in Fredricktown to trap and alter all the cats he found living in his barn.
“We are interested in doing this in town as well, but the process is slow because we need to work with the owners of the properties where the cats are living and this can sometimes involve multiple properties that are close together.”
For more information on the organization visit www.whiskerconnection.org.
