A group of Brewton residents concerned about the city’s growing population of stray and feral cats brought a formal proposal to city hall this week, asking Mayor Frank Nalty and other city representatives to support a humane, long-term solution to a problem many say has been building for years. The volunteers, organizing under the name Brewton Community Cats Program, outlined a plan centered on trap-neuter-return practices, kitten rescue, and community education during a presentation to city leaders on Monday.
A new volunteer effort takes shape
The Brewton Community Cats Program was formed by a small but determined group of local animal advocates, led by volunteer Marianna Grillo Amacker. According to Amacker, the group’s next step is to secure formal 501(c)3 nonprofit status, which would allow it to apply for grants, accept tax-deductible donations, and build the kind of sustained funding base that long-term spay and neuter programs typically require.
“We will be moving ahead to get 501(c)3 status,” Amacker told city leaders. “Then we can push to move forward with the program.”
Amacker said the scope of Brewton’s stray cat situation became clear after the group posted a call for information on social media. In just two days, residents responded with reports of numerous cat colonies scattered throughout the city.
“That post revealed so many colonies in just two days,” she said. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
The two-day response illustrated the dynamic that tends to drive unmanaged cat populations in towns like Brewton: free-roaming cats cluster wherever food and shelter are reliable, and most colonies form around quiet pockets — warehouse rows, restaurant back lots, wooded edges near residential streets — that most residents pass without noticing. When a group finally asks the public where the cats are, the map it gets back is usually larger and more dispersed than anyone expected.
What is trap-neuter-return and why it matters
Trap-Neuter-Return, commonly known as TNR, is a widely used approach to managing community cat populations without resorting to euthanasia. Volunteers humanely trap free-roaming cats, have them spayed or neutered and vaccinated by a veterinarian, and then return them to their original outdoor location, where caregivers can continue to monitor their health. Over time, sterilizing enough cats in a colony stabilizes and gradually reduces the population, since the animals can no longer reproduce.
Animal welfare organizations across the country have pointed to TNR as a more effective and sustainable alternative to trap-and-remove methods, which tend to create a vacuum effect that new cats quickly fill.
The Brewton Community Cats Program’s stated goals go beyond trapping and sterilizing. The group says it wants to build a network of trained volunteers, rescue and place kittens that can be safely socialized, support the residents who already feed and care for community cat colonies, and educate the public on responsible pet ownership, including the importance of spaying and neutering owned pets to prevent further litters from entering the stray population.
City leaders weigh in
Mayor Nalty said the proposal addresses a concern he has heard about directly from residents.
“They will be working to solve the overpopulation of cats in the community,” Nalty said following the presentation. “It will be very helpful to the community to cut down on the amount of new cats born into the city. We’ve had a number of calls about certain areas being inundated with feral cats.”
City officials did not commit funding at Monday’s meeting, but the mayor’s comments signaled openness to working with the group as it develops its program further.
Firsthand accounts of a growing problem
Volunteers who spoke during the presentation described what they have witnessed while working informally to help Brewton’s stray cats. Amy Dolohite told city leaders she has seen people abandon cats and kittens near a bridge close to a local Popeye’s restaurant, a dumping pattern that has contributed to at least one known colony in that area.
Fellow volunteer Edith Kelley said she has regularly encountered stray animals while helping transport cats to early-morning spay and neuter appointments, underscoring how widespread the issue has become across different parts of the city.
The accounts match a pattern animal advocates describe across Alabama’s small cities, where there is typically no municipal animal shelter and no full-time animal control operation. In communities like Brewton — the Escambia County seat, home to a few thousand residents along U.S. 29 and the Conecuh River — abandoned animals often become the responsibility of whoever notices them first, and volunteer transport networks are frequently the only way a stray reaches a veterinary clinic at all.
How residents can get involved
The Brewton Community Cats Program has set up a Facebook page, “Brewton Community Cats Program TNR,” where residents can report colony sightings, volunteer their time, or learn more about upcoming efforts. Organizers say they hope to grow their volunteer base as the group works toward nonprofit status and a more structured, citywide TNR campaign.
For a community that has fielded a steady stream of complaints about feral cats in recent months, the group’s organizers say patience and volunteer support will be key to seeing real, lasting results. As the Brewton Community Cats Program continues building its infrastructure, city leaders and residents alike appear to agree that a humane, coordinated approach offers the best path toward bringing the community’s stray cat population under control.
Advocates of TNR emphasize that the method is a long-term commitment rather than a quick fix. A single unspayed female cat and her offspring can, under favorable conditions, account for dozens of cats within a few years, which is why colonies left unchecked can expand noticeably from season to season. Sterilization also reduces the behaviors that generate the most complaints — yowling, fighting and the strong odors associated with unneutered males — and vaccination brought in with the surgery lowers disease risk within the colony and for nearby pets.
The economics matter for city leaders weighing the request. Municipalities that have supported TNR generally find that volunteer-run sterilization costs a fraction of repeated trap-and-euthanize cycles, since the animals are handled once by a clinic and then maintained at negligible public expense by neighborhood caregivers. Grant funding that becomes available with 501(c)3 status is typically the financial backbone of such programs, covering clinic fees, traps and transportation while the city’s role stays limited to cooperation and, in some cases, a meeting space or modest in-kind support.
For now, Brewton’s program remains in its organizing phase: volunteers assembling, nonprofit paperwork ahead, and a public already responding. The measure of its success will arrive over the coming seasons, one sterilized colony at a time.
The presentation also gave city leaders a clearer picture of the labor involved. A functioning TNR program in a town the size of Brewton depends on a rotating set of volunteer roles: trappers willing to set and monitor humane traps overnight, drivers for the early-morning clinic runs Kelley described, foster homes for kittens young enough to socialize, and neighborhood caregivers who keep feeding stations and watch a colony for new arrivals or injured animals. Organizers said the Facebook page is intended to sort willing residents into those roles as the program formalizes.
Kittens rescued from colonies present their own decisions. Those caught young enough — generally before they are two or three months old — can often be socialized and adopted into indoor homes, which is why the group lists kitten rescue as a core function rather than an afterthought. Older adults, by contrast, are typically returned outdoors after surgery, since they rarely adapt to domestic life and removing them would only reopen the colony to new, unsterilized cats through the vacuum effect advocates warn about.
The dumping pattern Dolohite described near the bridge by the Popeye’s restaurant is a familiar target for education campaigns. Humane organizations stress that abandonment is both a welfare crisis for the animal and the fastest way to seed a new colony, since domestic cats turned out loose reproduce with the same speed as their feral counterparts even if they were never strays themselves. The group’s plan to teach spay-and-neuter responsibility for owned pets is aimed directly at that source, upstream of the colonies themselves.
What Brewton’s proposal would join, if adopted, is a growing set of Alabama communities that have moved from complaint-driven animal control to organized colony management in recent years. The practical benefits city leaders have cited elsewhere include fewer nuisance calls over time, reduced intake pressure on the county facilities that do accept animals, and a self-funding structure in which the city’s contribution stays small while donors and grants carry the clinic costs. Brewton’s volunteers are, in effect, proposing to give the city those same results at the cost of cooperation rather than cash.
Amacker’s group expects the nonprofit status to unlock that structure within the coming months. Until then, the volunteers say they will keep doing what they have been doing — trapping on their own time, transporting to early-morning appointments, and answering the social media calls that, in just two days, revealed the true size of the problem. The tip of the iceberg, as Amacker put it, is now at least on the map.