Originally posted by womble In the UK TNR is a chain called "The Natural Remedy". Assuming you aren't giving the cats over priced herbal remedies I did a bit more googling to find out what the acronym stood for!
<haha> No, (for those reading along) it stands for "Trap, Neuter, Return". It's a program to spay/neuter strays, ferals, "community cats", sponsored by one or another agency. Here, the program is run by the county's "animal services" department, the service is no-cost to county residents. One has to trap the cat, take it in , the county will perform the surgery, administer some vaccine -- including rabies, tip the left ear* and call you to come get the cat. Or, if you choose, they will return it to the address on the intake form. We always picked up the cats ourselves, for "delivery" might take days and days. The surgery usually took 1-2 days. There are other outfits that do free or no-cost spay-neuter for these kinds of cats. The idea, of course, is to reduce the population of stays...it worked for us. At one time we had a bunch of kitten factories, we shut them all down, learning rather a lot about trapping cats in the process. Some were a lot easier than others! We also have some Good Samaritan organizations whose volunteers will trap cats in areas where there are many ferals, take them to the county's TNR service and return them. Very often, when we would take our two or three in, one or another of these organizations would show up with a dozen, two dozen, trapped cats from some location or other. The county will provide traps, too (deposit refundable). We did that for a while but eventually invested in two good traps so we didn't have to hassle with the "rental" issues.
*ear tip: they remove a small bit of the ear tip, so the cat is permanently identifiable as having been spayed/neutered. One can tell at a glance which cats are done and which need to be trapped.
The traps came in handy later on for trapping and removing some nuisance raccoons and possums.
Anyway, TNR is A Very Good Thing!