Interview! Brianna Grant, Communications Associate at Alley Cat Rescue

"We believe in protecting all cats, no matter what area they are in."

Brianna was always involved with cats and found a particular sweet stray when she was younger that broke her heart with how bad of shape it was in. She spent the next few months taking care of this little stray and in the process, learned a lot about TNR and community cats. Because of this, her passion for animal advocacy was born!

When she went to school at Tutfts for her degree, she worked a lot with FIV+ cats and now she works with them at Alley Cat Rescue, as well. They focus on protecting domestic and free-roaming cats and are involved in animal advocacy at a local, national and international level.

A new hot topic that Alley Cat Rescue is working on in an advocacy campaign is the feral cat bounty program that has been implemented in Australia. Hunters can go out and kill cats and bring in their scars to the government for money! Clearly, there are many who are very opposed to this and find it counterproductive towards actually reducing the population. Right now, no hunters have claimed the bounty and Brianna is hoping that with the large scale media attention that is being targeted around this, it will bring the bounty to an end. Despite studies that have shown how effective TNR can be in Australia, the government still does not support it and instead is focused on funding other, more cruel ways to eradicate the cat population.

Currently, 137,000 signatures have been collected in an online petition about reversing this bounty and 16,000 of these have come from local Australians. Locals are worried about their domestic cats who may wander out and innocently get scalped for money by mistake.

For more information, head over to saveacat.org.