Feline Friends Network

In 1989, Stanford University had a problem with roaming cats all over the campus. Too many students think kittens are cute and adopt, but realize at the end of the year, mom won't let them bring them home, so they let them go (there is a no pets policy in campus housing). The university decided to exterminate these feral cats. But a group of people who had been trying to care for some of these cats got together to take care of this issue by trapping them all, getting the metered, taking many in that were tame enough to be pets, and attracting others to special feeding stations on the campus that are watched and fed and watered daily by volunteers. Through adoptions and attrition over the years, the number of regular ferals we have on the campus now is at about 15. We continue to find new cats as people dump them, but we also have a policy of adopters returning the cats to us if they must surrender them instead of taking them to a shelter where they would most likely be killed. We also find many lost cats and reunite them with their owners. We always need volunteers to do the feeding, fostering, and some administration work like making flyers for our adoptable cats and posting them and putting them on various websites. We do a once a year holiday letter with information about what is happening along with a donation appeal. We need donations to purchase good food for our ferals, get our cats neutered and make sure they are healthy. Vets are quite expensive, even with our shelter discount. We have no real administrative overhead except for stamps and paper.

We take responsibility for all free roaming cats on the Stanford University campus and lands. We try to help with community cats, as well (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, San Jose, Cupertino, Sunnyvale) when we have enough volunteer fosters or by posting them for adoption as community cats on our website and the websites with which we affiliate.