‘Not all cats go to shelters’: Visalia Texas Roadhouse offering 10% of your next meal to help feral cats

VISALIA, Calif. ( KSEE/KGPE ) – The Texas Roadhouse in Visalia is partnering with the Visalia Feral Cat Coalition (VFCC) to donate 10% of everything customers spend on Wednesday, July 31 to the VFCC to trap and release feral cats in the community.

“I would love to pack the Texas Roadhouse,” VFCC Board Member Marc Egge said. “I want to see every seat, every booth in that building just full all night long.”

According to Egge, the VFCC has been helping the people of Visalia coexist with feral cats for the last 10 years through the work of volunteers.

Egge says the VFCC works primarily with cats that don’t care for human interaction and want to live independently.

“They’re the ones you’re going to see in parking lots, apartment buildings, hospitals, you know, just anywhere where they can thrive,” Egge said.

Egge says the VFCC works with their public partners and veterinarians to host mass clinics once a month aimed at spaying or neutering, vaccinating, and releasing cats back into the community so they can freely roam without bothering anyone.

“Being a rural area, Tulare County, we have orchards, we have a lot of farmland, a lot of space for these cats to exist. What we do with the TNR (Trap and Release) program is to help reduce the reproduction on that.”

According to Egge, the mass clinics can help ensure 80 cats don’t reproduce in Tulare County each and every month, making it possible to control feral cat populations without using county resources.

“Not all cats can go into a shelter. Not all cats can be adopted out. Not everyone has room to take on all of these cats and they don’t need it either,” Egge said. “The numbers of how fast cats can reproduce are insane. I can’t even keep up with them.”

Egge says that feral cats actually tend to help the communities they inhabit by:

• Keeping other cats outside their colonies away.
• Killing pests.
• Generally keep to themselves when interacting with humans.

However, Egge says feral cats can become a problem if they’re not spayed, neutered, or vaccinated, and the VFCC can’t provide those services without help from the community.

“We are 100% grant-based, volunteer-based, donation-based and fundraising is what makes sure we have enough room to host these clinics.”

Egge says $30 is all it costs to take care of one cat. Everything else is subsidized by the VFCC, which makes fundraising all the more important.

“If we were to make $300 and fundraising, that’s really only 10 cats at $30 a cat,” Egge said. “So if you are seeing more than ten cats in your neighborhood, then we need more than $300.”

The fundraiser will start at 3 p.m. and end at 9 p.m. that evening, at the Texas Roadhouse at 4425 South Mooney Boulevard in Visalia.

Egge says you can get a pair of cat ears and ensure 10% of what you paid for your meal gets donated to keep the feral cats in your neighborhood under control.

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