On This Faculty Senate’s Agenda: Cats 

Prairie View A&M University, home of the Panthers, is now home to another member of the Felidae: campus cats.

The community of at least a dozen cats on the rural Texas campus is drawing affection and controversy as faculty members and administrators wrestle with how to manage the growing feline population.

At the heart of the debate is Daisy, a scrawny black and white cat, who has become a beloved companion to professors on campus. Daisy is the “feline equivalent of a teen mom,” said Ian Abbey, a history professor who has made her a cause.

A few months ago, Abbey saw Daisy’s bones poking through her thin fur. He started quietly feeding the cat and her two kittens. Now, Daisy brushes her tail around his leg when he arrives and rolls on the ground, pointing her round belly up to him — a cat’s sign of earned trust.

Weeks into feeding the trio, Abbey received an announcement from Cynthia Carter-Horn, the university’s senior vice president for business affairs and chief financial officer.

“We know of several individuals who are feeding the cats throughout parts of the campus. While well-intentioned, it is creating significant issues,” Carter-Horn wrote. “All feeding must stop for the safety and well-being of all who use our buildings. We are in a rural area and the cats will fend for themselves.”

It wasn’t long before Abbey discovered poison bait in the same areas where he’d been feeding the cats. Days later, one of Daisy’s kittens was found dead.

“I realized this couldn’t go on,” Abbey said. “These cats needed help. … They needed a program where they could be protected.”

To Abbey, the mission is personal. His initiative, the Catness Project, was named after his own cat, whom he adopted from a friend who could no longer keep her. A first-time cat owner, Abbey soon realized he would never sleep with a bedroom door closed again.

“I also realized that I couldn’t take a shower without her trying to break down the bathroom door,” he said, laughing. “My home was hers, and I just lived in it. She was a special cat.”

When Catness got sick last spring, Abbey fed her through a tube. She died on the Monday after graduation. “Since then, I’ve just been a sucker for cats, especially cats who need help,” he said.

To help provide a better life for the cats on campus, Abbey is now working to mobilize an uncommon source of animal allyship: the Faculty Senate.

“We were at our beginning-of-the-year meeting, and I figured this might be the best opportunity to bring the issue forward,” said Abbey, who has been on the Faculty Senate for three years. “There are people there who work with agriculture and have a unique insight on that. And I also knew that some of them were cat lovers, and so this would be a sympathetic group.”

At a subsequent meeting on September 18, the body that typically meets to discuss hiring practices, curriculum review, and campus safety considered a proposal to establish the Catness Project.

The project would ensure that tame cats like Daisy are adopted and the feral population is fed, neutered, and vaccinated through an effort known as Trap, Neuter, and Release, or TNR. Faculty and student volunteers would feed the cats, stand back at a comfortable distance, then return to collect the feeding dish and any food scraps.

Abbey said by making the project a Leave No Trace program — following a set of ethics promoting outdoor conservation — he hoped the administration would be amenable to it. Under his proposal, the cost — $5,695 for the first year — would be covered by the Faculty Senate.

“Costs will be higher for the first year of the program because most of the cat population on campus needs to be fixed,” Abbey wrote in his proposal. “After this year, most if not all of the cats will have been fixed. As the population shrinks through adoption and fostering, there will be fewer cats to care for.”

Gerard D’Souza, dean of Prairie View A&M’s College of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources, was an early advocate. He sees the project as a way for students in his department to support a vulnerable animal population that has been affected by urban development in the area.

“As a college, our role is to educate,” he said. “We’re also a land-grant university, which means that we have to be responsive to the needs, not only of students, but the communities around us.”

Models on Other Campuses

Abbey looked to TNR programs at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Texas A&M University as examples. The cat population at both colleges had reached into the hundreds before faculty members put campus-cat programs in place. Rather than starve or euthanize the animals, the colleges fostered collaboration among faculty members, students, and animal-advocacy groups to care for the cats, drastically reducing the number of feral ones.

“Our university administration has been very supportive of our work because they wanted to help control the cat population in a humane way,” said Kim Hachiya, a retired volunteer with Husker Cats, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s TNR program. A spokesperson said the university provides some support for food on occasion and also accepts cat-food donations.

Meanwhile, the Faculty Senate at Prairie View A&M was largely receptive to the Catness Project, according to two people who were present, but had to confirm that the request was within its funding guidelines. One week later, Carter-Horn dismissed the plan.

In an email to the speaker of the senate obtained by The Chronicle, Carter-Horn wrote that, “based on how the Faculty Senate is funded, it would not be appropriate to use senate funds.”

Carter-Horn, who oversees the university’s budget, wrote that while the project was a worthy initiative, financial support would have to be sought through sponsorships from outside organizations.

“I encourage them to seek sponsorships, partner with other entities, but to use institutional funds would not be the way to go,” Carter-Horn told The Chronicle.

Even with funding for the first year of the program, sustained support would be paramount, according to one cat advocate.

“Just one session of TNR can go a very long way,” said Coryn Julien, an officer of program communications at Alley Cat Allies, an international cat-advocacy organization. “But of course, for a cats-on-campus program, the goal should be for it to be continuous and to make sure that students who are running it now are passing it down to students who are coming in.”

Otherwise, existing cats would not leave and might attract new cats from surrounding areas.

None of that has deterred Abbey. “We also might just do some old-fashioned fund raising,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “We’re still committed to helping the cats.”