Palm Beach Man Is The Cat’s Meow!

A California man has become a community hero to 250,000 starving feral cats – and their grateful neighbours.

Jim Strout spends every night patrolling the streets of Boynton Beach in Palm Beach County, California, in a car packed with cat food, feeding hundreds of hungry felines.

The area is overrun with feral cats. Mr Strout uses his nightly outings to both ensure that cats left to go wild by negligent owners don’t suffer, and to capture ‘unfixed’ cats and take them to the vet.

Mr Strout told WPTV’s Channel 5 News that he spends around $60,000 of his own money every year on his nightly missions of mercy.

According to the Channel 5 New report:

The Strouts are part of an underground network of volunteers who say they are keeping these animals from starving, all while keeping the Palm Beach County feral cat population down.

Heidi Nielsen, the Assistant Director of the Peggy Adams Animal Rescue League in West Palm Beach, said that the explosive population of feral cats is a concern but she welcomes the help of volunteers like the Strouts.

Nine feral cats were among the felines that were spayed or neutered on Wednesday. Those nine procedures alone can help reduce the local feral cat population by tens of thousands.

“If you get them sterilized, the cat colony stabilizes. New cats do not move in and the colony reduces in sides through attrition,” said Nielsen.

Feral cats are brought to Peggy Adams Animal Rescue League by people like Strout and his wife, who alone captured, neutered and later released about 1,000 cats this last year. Most of these volunteers pay out-of-pocket for the procedures.