San Jose, CA, went from saving only 28 percent of the cats who came into their shelter in 2009 to saving 83 percent in 2012. How did they do it?

At the recent Outdoor Cat Conference held in Los Angeles in December, 2012, Jon Cicirelli, the Deputy Director of the City of San Jose Animal Care & Services Department, attributed his community’s success to the implementation of a trap-neuter-return prgram known as Feral Freedom.

While the shelter used to kill large numbers of cats who were not friendly and couldn’t be adopted into pet homes, Cicirelli said the government “shouldn’t be in the cat extermination business.”

Instead, he said, his agency will spay/neuter, vaccinate and ear tip the cats, then supervise a brief recovery period before transferring them to rescue groups for release into appropriate, non-sensitive habitats.

“Unfriendly, stressed cats shouldn’t die in the shelter simply because they can’t be a pet,” he told the audience.

Cicirelli’s presentation can be viewed here (PDF). He will also be a Q&A panelist on an upcoming Maddie’s InstituteSM webcast about community cats on July 11, 2013.

The conference, presented by the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy, the Found Animals Foundation and the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association, included a number of other presentations which can be viewed here.