The cats came to Weiser in 2023. The town, in southwestern Idaho across the Snake River from Oregon, had always been a bit of a pet place. People had barn cats. Maybe there had been a single stray. And then, out of nowhere, several hundred cats arrived.
Natasha McDaniel wasn’t worried at first. Sure, the “entire town had turned into a litterbox.” But, on the plus side: no rats!
Almost as quickly as the cats did, the complaints started to trickle in. McDaniel, who serves as both Weiser City Clerk and as President to the Chamber of Commerce, heard constituents talking about rounding up all the cats to kill them en masse. “I would probably, safely, definitely say there were some vigilante killings,” she said.
McDaniel wouldn’t have it. She’s an animal lover—her dog recently completed a six-month treatment of acupuncture and essential oil therapy. “It’s not the cat’s fault,” McDaniel told me she remembered thinking, when I visited Weiser in May. She started to look for funding to start a trap and release—or TNR—program. In TNR programs, cats are caught, fixed, and released where they came from. Unable to regenerate, colonies eventually disappear.
All it takes for a cat colony to establish is one or two strays, plus one or two unspayed pets. A mother cat can have 3-5 litters in a season, and averages 3-8 cats per pregnancy. (Unabated, an average cat could birth 100 kittens in its lifetime, easily.) Two cats turn into two dozen in one summer; each male kitten breaks off to begin its own colony. Now, McDaniels estimates, there are “at least 15 or 20 colonies. And each one has 15 or 20 cats.”
But even the most well-managed TNR program is insufficient on its own; people’s pets have to get fixed, too.
“I think pet owners have a cute [female] kitten who grows up and gets pregnant,” said Jenn Huff, the Weiser Community Officer for the Lor Foundation, which gave the TNR program its seed funding. “They say, ‘I’m just gonna take him, and I’m gonna put him down to the river.’ Because there are a ton of cats there, oddly. You don’t think you’ll go down to the river and see a bunch of cats, but you will.”
On Huff’s lead, I went down to the river. There were hidey-holes everywhere, and the ambient air temperature felt fifteen degrees cooler—prime conditions for a cat-nap. But there were no cats, nor any signs of them—no scat, no piled-up skeletons from whatever portion of the 2.4 billion birds killed by cats per year. Instead, I counted two dozen red-winged blackbirds. A magpie swooped low over the water, where a pair of ducks bobbed for bugs. The air was thick with crickets, dovesong ringing in the air, the breeze ripe with the treacly scent of Russian Olive trees—it was the one week a year they were in bloom.
If ever there had been cats there, the habitat seemed totally undisturbed. The river corridor was city-owned, at least above the high-water mark, but the town doesn’t have programs to monitor the population levels of any animals other than cats.
Cat Hunting
I’d asked the concierge at my motel if she had any leads. “I have 20 cats,” she shrugged, gesturing back towards her on-site apartment. If the river had been a bust, maybe the town would prove better hunting. The night before I met McDaniel, I walked down Weiser’s main drag, prowling for cats, but the streets were empty all over town.
The only kitty anywhere was in the window of a bookstore, pawing at the scuffed-up pane. As soon as I walked in, the tabby wound itself around my ankles. In the back of the store, another cat caught my hand as I walked by the chair it was perched in and, in a single maneuver, pulled me into its armchair and plopped into my lap. Later, another cat piled on top.
Cat colonies can be found in the alleyways of Weiser, Idaho. (Photo courtesy of Astra Lincoln)
It turned out the store had six cats. On my way out of the shop, I mentioned to the store’s owner that I was in town to write about the alleged colony. From what Jenn had told me, I’d been picturing five hundred cats, or a thousand, in a seething heap along a birdless riverbank, the entire local ecology rendered unrecognizable and weird.
“Feral cats,” the shop’s owner repeated as she rang up my stack of paperbacks. “You mean the ones in the alleyway behind the shop?”
Books in hand, I tentatively walked down the narrow dirt lane behind the building, past dumpsters and a mess of industrial trash. I hadn’t made it far when the first cat, a raggedy, orange, darted out. It startled when it saw me, and stared at me cockeyed, its bright tongue lolling out of its mouth. In no time, a half-moon of strays had surrounded me. I counted twelve cats, but was told by a barkeep who’d spotted me in the alley as she made a dump-run that three newborns were hiding somewhere. Plus, the long-haired cat was “super pregnant.” There was another litter on its way. I’d found one of the cat colonies.
What’s Next for Weiser’s Cats?
McDaniels’ TNR pilot was a success, at least initially. They bought trap-door kennels, disinfectant, and a laundry machine with the grant money. The local veterinary office offered to pilot a program for the local high school students in the trade program. Under advisement, the student apprentices could administer anesthesia on the trapped animals, something they normally didn’t get to do. It was too risky for students to learn on neighbors’ beloved pets.
The sheriff’s animal control officer rounded up as many cats as he could. By the end of 2025, 102 cats had been trapped and released. When the LOR grant money ran out, McDaniels applied for Idaho’s “Pet Friendly License Plate” program, which allocates money from specialized license plates to TNR programs in six-month funding cycles.
A stray cat hides behind a car tire in Weiser, Idaho. (Photo courtesy of Astra Lincoln.)
McDaniels guessed they could get 40 cats in that window. “If we can’t get 40, we open up the funds to the community, for people who need help spaying or neutering their pet,” she said.
There’s no way to know whether any of this will amount to much in the long-term without waiting out a cat’s expected four-to-sixteen years. TNR “is not a right now solution,” McDaniel said. “But it’s a humane solution.”
I told McDaniels about the growing kitten population I’d seen in the alleyway. It was time for another call to animal control, we agreed. The alleyway was among the most consistent colony locales (in no small part due to the Literary Paws’ bookshop owner’s help—McDaniels thinks she feeds them). It helped that the site was abandoned—it had been a brothel once, and then a grain processing facility. “And now it’s a cat house again,” McDaniels said with a wink.
We exited the coffee shop, where we’d been chatting. McDaniels had to return to her office, but she left me with a list of three other promising colony-sighting spots. On our way out, she pointed to a bright sign on the door that had two male lions roaring in the center of the frame. “I’m bringing the circus to town next weekend,” she told me. The lions were real, and they’d be right here in Weiser. McDaniels was thrilled to have these cats in town.
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