BALL BUSTER Yvette Piña’s work—sterilizing feral cats—is never done.

Pussy patrol
Call her an activist. Call her the city’s feline guardian angel. Call her the biggest enemy to cat testicles since the invention of neutering. Just don’t call her a crazy cat lady (although, at first glance, she certainly qualifies). Leading a dynamic double life, Pilsen resident Yvette Piña spends her days working for the Environmental Protection Agency—and her off time on a vigilante crusade, ridding the city of as many feline reproductive organs as she can get her paws on.

A volunteer with Alley Cat Allies (alleycat.org), a Maryland-based nonprofit agency that specializes in the protection of feral cats, Piña is part of the group’s trap-neuter-release project, TNR for short. Determined to limit the area’s homeless-cat population (as well as the fighting and noxious urine smell that goes with them), TNR volunteers like Piña and her husband, Francisco, spend their nights lurking in the back alleys and abandoned houses of Chicago’s worst neighborhoods in an effort to sterilize vagrant cats before they can have freaky, unprotected cat sex.

“Feral cats really can’t be domesticated, so Alley Cat Allies advocates volunteers to not spend resources on that,” Piña explains, adding that Chicago alone has more than half a million feral cats. “We can prevent homeless-cat colonies from growing, though, so we’re trying to protect as many as we can.”

For Piña, that means dragging up to six cat-friendly cages out to neighborhoods like Pilsen, Little Village and Austin that are overrun with the city’s largest feline gangs. Once traps are baited with food, Piña and Francisco wait for a kitty to sniff out the grub. If a caught cat doesn’t have the signature earmark vets leave on neutered animals, it’s off to the Lurie Family Clinic, a Little Village–based facility that offers $20 spay and neuter surgery for feral animals. After a day or two of rehab in the Piñas’ home, the cats are fed, photographed for Piña’s TNR blog (blootails.blogspot.com), taken back to where they were found and set free. In terms of controlling the cat population, Piña stresses that neutering ferals is more effective than removing them from the street. “Cats choose their home for a reason, usually because there’s a steady food supply,” she notes. “If you trap and remove them, more cats are going to come and fill that spot because there’s food.”

Not only does Piña devote much of her free time to removing cats’ bits, she shells out a lot of cash, too. The cost of food, transportation, surgery, towels and microchipping—a procedure that prevents Animal Control from euthanizing the cat if it’s caught—runs about $40 per animal, most of which comes from her pocket. Multiplied by the 80 animals she neutered last year, as well as the 40 additional cats she rescued and “rehomed,” the Piñas’ annual cat tab runs well over $3,500, partly subsidized by donations through her blog.

Despite the cost, time expenditure, urine stench and occasional injury, Francisco says the hardest part of his wife’s mission is dealing with people who don’t care about animals enough to make a call for help when they see a suffering stray. “Cat poo, cat pee, cat vomit, all of that washes away,” he notes, “but you can’t wash away when an animal suffers and it could have been prevented.”

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