Walk through any back alley of surrounding OSU campus neighborhoods, and you will notice an abundant number of homeless cats.

Cat overpopulation and wild cats roaming Central Ohio is the issue being addressed by several animal organizations.

Beginning last Friday and ending today, national groups Alley Cat Allies and Humane Ohio traveled to Cleveland, Athens, Cincinnati, Columbus and Toledo to demonstrate humane methods in reducing the number of unwanted cats.

“It’s a big problem. Life’s hard when you’re outside. A lot of people don’t think much about it until a rabies epidemic or something shows up,” said Peggy Kaplan, host of the weekly show ‘Pet Tips’ that offers animals for adoption.

One of the solutions to reducing wild cats is the trap-neuter-return (TNR) concept.

Kelly Rada, an organizer of the workshops and a 3rd year veterinary student at OSU, helped to popularize this process in Ohio.

“I was familiar with the TNR concept and the campus area is absolutely overrun with stray cats,” Rada said. “Just driving by there and seeing so many wild cats and litters of kittens being born, watching half of them die when the first frost hit, I just felt like there had to be something done about it,” Rada said.

Unfortunately the concept of TNR was new in Ohio, and Rada had trouble finding anyone with much experience in the field.

“I had all these wonderful contacts at the veterinary school who are world renowned for their health knowledge, but none of them knew anything about TNR,” Rada said.

Luckily a doctor from preventative medicine had told Rada about Capital Area Humane Society, the oldest and one of the largest humane societies in Ohio, which had started a similar program to TNR in May. Rada was put into contact with Jim Cunningham, the executive director at Capital Area.

Cunningham helped start a new program called the trap, test, vaccinate, alter and release program that he and Rada participate in together.

After locating two wild cat colonies around the city a week, members trap the cats and take them back to the center for tests. If the cats have life-threatening, contagious diseases or are injured in a way that they can’t survive, they are euthanized. The remaining healthy cats are spayed and neutered and put back where they were caught so they can maintain their territory.

“We are taking a percentage of them off the street, which is lowering the cat population, and then we’re spaying and neutering them to prevent them from continuing to breed,” Cunningham said.

The five workshops presented to humane society staff, veterinarians, animal control officers and anyone else who wanted to learn more about getting involved offered training sessions regarding non-lethal cat management, TNR demonstrations and consultations.

“We had a really good response with training sessions, and we just need to get people to know more about (trapping) and let them know that it actually does work,” Rada said.

Cunningham said the main causes of wild cats are the lack of neutering and spaying, lack of registration requiring licensing similar to that of dogs and many cat owners feeling that it is safe to simply let their cats run loose not thinking of the consequences.

“Two uncontrolled and unaltered adult cats over 10 years can produce over 80 million offspring,” Cunningham said. “So when you think there’s 250,000 roaming cats in Columbus and the rate that they can breed, obviously that’s one of our biggest problems.”

“We’re not naive enough to think that what we’re doing is going to solve the problem,” Cunningham said. “It’s the first step. Thirty years ago there was a similar dog problem and through legislation and spaying and neutering and control programs like this one, that will eliminate it.”