Your local SPCA should be able to refer you to whatever vet they have under contract this year, and you can call ahead to confirm they'll take a feral cat and handle it as above. If they KNOW it's feral, they know how to handle it safely.

What follows is not suitable reading for the faint of heart:

I had another vet in another situation come out to a farm I managed for awhile, to humanely dispose of the sick and infectious feral poulation there. Those kitties were lured to a room in a place with food and then brought from the room one at a time for a shot straight to the heart, laid out on a kitchen table. It was grim. So grim. Stacking warm dead cats in garbage bags. I was the assistant-- the holder of these beautiful but deadly cats while he put them down fast. The last tomcat cursed me with his dying yellow gaze. He was tough. But they were all hungry enough to catch.

It was an awful time on that farm.... the manager had been gone a long time and left the annual winter culling to me, but I didn't come upon all this till early spring. Untrimmed hooves curling under, hens without feathers....

How I found the helpful vet was, I brought him a sick rabbit that had been allowed to live with one leg chewed to a scarred stump by a rat, in its rabbity infancy. Could hardly hop to the food in the wire-floored cage. Heartbreaking. Person before me would feed critters but didn't LOOK at them. Vet fixed me up; soon, when he knew what-all I was having to deal with, he was very, VERY kind to me as I worked my way through just about every small group of farm animal you can imagine.

One goat was wasting away and I never knew why-- until I found the frozen bucket stuffed with the frozen corpse of a large, perfectly formed kid. There was no placenta with the stillborn kid. Duh-- she'd retained it and had been sick ever since as it decomposed.... helpful Mr. Vet gave me antibiotics. She picked up, finally.

Awful time. A cow that had to go moo'ed at me all the way out of the barnyard from the trailer I lured her into.... I had become the only person she'd ever allowed to touch her, and she jumped right in that trailer for me, and off she went. A few days later I claimed the hide for an ed project. When I laid it out, to dry the hide, her face was still attached, still looking up at me with that LOOK. Damn slaughterhouse hadn't removed it for me-- joke on the city girl. YOu had to ASK to have head or no head.

Culling life in early spring when it's supposed to be starting, not ending. BAD time.


Well, back to feral cats. We had one in the house that had been a pet somewhere, had failed litterbox 101 there, and had been dumped at the farm where we rent the house. She was always very sweet, and liked to be petted, but held-- NO. It took me an hour to get her re-caught in the van when I took her in for spay. They gave her back to me IN a carrier and reported that they'd just handled her with feral protocol after I'd shared how hard it was to nab her. She became an honored outdoor cat policing the farm rats.

~Susan