Her mission: helping cats

“I want so much to save cats from the misery of fighting and breeding on the streets, I want to save families (like my own) from the despair of ever-growing colonies that they cannot afford to feed and take to the vet,” said Karst. “And I want to save kittens from freezing, starving, dying of preventable diseases, to save our vulnerable wildlife from the hungry cats that are only doing what nature demands, and I want to save neighbors from discord caused by streets full of feral cats.”

This past summer, Karst’s mother passed away, leaving Karst with 29 feral cats, their home in Oregon and funds to care for them, plus additional resources that Karst is using to further her mother’s life’s work, which has now become her daughter’s work.

When asked how she had become involved in all this so quickly and passionately, Karst replied that she grew up with cats.

“My mother had a cat she got when I was just a newborn. I grew up with him and he didn’t pass until 20 years old, when I had gone off to college,” she said. 

At that point, her mother started caring for all the neighborhood cats. Once she started feeding them, she found out just how many there really are.

“Realizing what was happening with breeding, my mother started taking feral cats to the vet for surgery. That was before the term TNR was known in the U.S., in the mid-’80s,” said Karst. “By the time I graduated college, she had 15 cats living on her porch, all of them properly vetted. Five years later, my mother had moved to a larger property and built a cat-proof fence and had 34 cats. Five years after that, again she moved to a bigger property and a bigger fenced yard,” she said. “She began taking in all the feral cats that the local animal impound would have been euthanizing, and quickly had 97 cats. She never once had unfixed cats at her place. A trip to the vet was always the first order of business. This was around the millennium.

 “My mother was heartbroken by people’s inability to learn and change their behaviors. Places she had trapped out, fixed all the ferals, were now repopulating because people had taken unfixed cats from friends and neighbors and let them escape.”

Karst used a sizable chunk from her inheritance to purchase the building in Monte Vista and began to buy equipment and supplies for her dream of having a spay-and-neuter clinic for the Valley. She knew it would be hard and without medical training, she would always be dependent on outside help.

Recently, Lisa Petri of CAWL suggested to Karst that they form the SLV Spay Neuter Alliance. Now they are four non-profits, working together.

“Colorado Animal Welfare League provides essential connections, training, advice, and a well-developed model. Bergen Spay & Neuter is getting us an excellent jump start with hundreds of surgeries in an upcoming single event, as well as facilitating purchase of surgery equipment,” said Karst.

 “Animal Rescue of Southern Colorado, headed by Jen Thomas, will manage the clinic and staff, while I, as head of Cats Alive! SLV will care for the building, supplies, and paperwork. Our surgeon, a long-time local, Dr. Linda Behrns, owns Crestone Mobile Veterinary Service and has also served as the DFL vet in the valley for the last two years. She’s excited to have a new venue for her dedication to spay and neuter.”

Karst said the ambition of the four non-profits is to perform surgeries three days a week, as many as 30 animals per session. If they can work 11 months a year, they will accomplish as many as 4,000 surgeries in a year.

“That’s a shockingly high number, but in order to succeed by fixing faster than the pets breed, we have to go full-court press. The cost is roughly $75 per surgery, meaning we will have to raise $200,000 to work at the pace we would like to, even with the small co-pay we will ask of pet owners,” said Karst. “And of course, the feral cats will not be paying, as they do not have owners and each of our towns has several hundred feral cats, and more being born all the time.”

 Karst said the population ecology aspect of this creates urgency. Scattered or low-volume efforts will not be effective, even if run for decades. Hard concentrated effort by the alliance can succeed in a few years, provided that ongoing back-filling efforts are sufficient to keep up with new breeding animals brought into the system.

“SLV Spay Neuter Alliance (SLV SNA) will be doing surgery in Monte Vista from now on, as long as the money holds out,” said Karst. “If anyone knows of business owners or corporations that do business in the Valley, please search them out and ask if they ever do grants for community support. We need this so much. We’ll need grants to keep us going forward for the 10 years I plan to keep this clinic going.”

Karst said she currently has a list of 425 cats to trap. The goal is to deal with all the feral cats.

“We will be trapping around the Valley and contacting people we know who have colonies, and they will tell us about someone else who has a colony,” said Karst. “So we are just working on the feral cats and will hold spaces open for owned cats and dogs, but the mission of Cats Alive is to help out the community cats through spay and neuter. That’s really my personal focus.”

Karst said she and the other coalition partners are incredibly excited to be doing this. It will be a real effective change for the Valley to have a permanent clinic.