Colony work is long, quiet, and exact. The record should be too.
Trap-neuter-return is straightforward in principle: trap the cat, sterilize and vaccinate, return to the colony, keep watching. In practice it is months of trap nights, vet appointments, recoveries and monitoring checks, held together by whoever remembers what happened last. WhiskerMatch keeps that history on the colony and the cat, stage by stage.
Eleven stages, one cat.
Every cat in a colony carries a stage, from first sighting through monitoring. The pipeline mirrors the real sequence of colony work, including the parts that take the longest: recovery and the years of watching after return.
- Sighted
- Identified
- Trap needed
- Trap planned
- Trapped
- Vet appointment
- Sterilized
- Vaccinated
- Recovery
- Returned
- Monitoring
Along the way the record keeps trap attempts, vet visits, sterilizations, vaccinations, medical notes, returns and monitoring checks as dated events, plus reminders and milestones for the colony. A cat's history is a timeline, not a status field.
Real cats skip steps. The rules allow it.
Skipping ahead is allowed, moving back needs a reason
Skipping ahead is allowed, moving back needs a reason
The normal path runs forward, but an ear-tipped cat seen at a feeding station goes straight to monitoring, and the system does not fight that. Moving a cat backward, a failed trap attempt, a cancelled appointment, requires a written reason. The record remembers what was claimed and why it changed.
Exceptional outcomes end the path until someone clears it
Exceptional outcomes end the path until someone clears it
Four outcomes close a cat's colony path: placed indoors, transferred to a shelter or rescue, deceased, or not seen for a long time. Each one is a real event with a real meaning, and none of them quietly reopens. Someone has to clear it deliberately.
The ear tip is the settled part
The ear tip is the settled part
The tipped ear marking a sterilized community cat is one of the few genuinely settled conventions in this field: recognizable at a distance, permanent, and understood across organizations. The system treats an identified ear-tipped cat as already past the work the tip stands for.
The four exceptional outcomes
Placed indoors
Adoption, foster, or a barn home. The colony path ends because the cat's life changed.
Transferred to shelter
The cat leaves colony care for a shelter or rescue's intake.
Deceased
Recorded honestly. Colony work includes loss, and the record does not hide it.
Not seen
The cat has not been seen for a long time. The path ends until someone clears it.
Precise colony locations are never public.
A map of where outdoor cats live is a map of where they can be harmed, harassed, or taken. Colony locations are visible only to staff with the colony-management role, and community-cat sightings from the public go privately to one organization that opted in for that postal area. The reporter keeps a receipt and a browser-held field journal. There is no public map of cats, ever.
What a public sighting report does
- A neighbor reports a cat they have seen, with an approximate area, never an address.
- The report goes privately to one TNR organization that chose to receive reports for that postal area.
- The reporter keeps a receipt and a field journal in their own browser. Nothing is published, and shelters are not notified automatically.
- If the organization takes the cat on, colony and stage tracking begin inside the workspace, visible only to the team.
What this part of the system does not claim.
The system tracks the work; it does not evaluate colony outcomes.
Stages, trap attempts and monitoring checks describe what happened. They do not measure whether a colony is shrinking, stable, or well. We do not publish population claims, and the tooling is not built to produce them. Anyone using this data for research should talk to us first about what it can and cannot support.
Colony management practice varies, and the system does not pick a school.
Feeding schedules, relocation ethics, return-to-field versus placement decisions: practitioners disagree, and the disagreements are substantive. The record holds what a team did and why they said they did it. It does not tell them which practice is right.
If you run TNR work and the pipeline gets something wrong about how colonies actually move, tell us. Practitioners shape this part of the system more than anyone else can.
Run colony work? Bring one colony's workflow.
Colonies, trap nights, monitoring: bring the part that lives in texts and memory, and we will map it against the stage pipeline.