Trapping

Advantages

The main advantages of trapping all the cats at once include:

Quickly resolve a problem situation - a group of unaltered cats can attract complaints from neighbors due to yowling, fighting and foul odors. This nuisance behavior can be practically eliminated overnight by having all the cats spayed and neutered at the same time.

Less time and effort overall - During the project, mass trapping can be a lot of work, but in the end it's going to be less than trapping one or a few cats at a time. Only once do you have to secure traps, find a holding space, arrange transportation and make spay/neuter appointments instead of going through the process repeatedly over a period of weeks or months.

It's easier to catch the last cats - In a large colony, trapping one cat or a couple of cats at a time is simple in the beginning when all or most of the cats still need to be caught. But when you get down to the last few, they're surrounded by cats you already caught and released, and now you have to pick the holdouts out of a crowd. With mass trapping, the last cats are the only ones in the territory, so you can continue to withhold food and get them hungrier, put out more traps than cats, and try a trick or two.

Can you do it?

Whether it's possible to mass trap depends on how many cats you're dealing with and whether there are enough local resources available to handle that number. You'll need to schedule enough spay/neuter appointments, secure as many traps as cats plus a couple more, arrange for a large enough space to hold and care for them, and have the time (and help) needed over a period of several days.

If it's not possible to TNR all the cats at once, take the next best approach and trap as many as you can manage. If you catch three or four cats together, there will still be advantages over going one or two cats at a time. Check out our tips on hard-to-catch cats when you're down to the last few. In the end, what's most important is getting them all fixed at a pace that works for you.