Ten years of experience in the field

The project “I Felini di Puglia” was launched in 2016 and is inspired by the cat colony management procedures that I personally tested with ULSS officials in Treviso, both in drafting them and in putting them into practice, having registered 60 cat colonies in my role as an ENPA Treviso board member.
The project started simultaneously in the provinces of Brindisi and BAT, whose respective local health authorities (ASL) were failing to meet their obligations for different reasons.

In BAT, the then director of Siav A restricted access to neutering for free-roaming cats exclusively to animal welfare associations registered on the regional list, denying private citizens the right to register and neuter the cats they were caring for.

In the 20 municipalities of the province of Brindisi, on the other hand, cat colonies had never been registered, because the local health authority (ASL) claimed it could only neuter cats if the municipality had a municipal veterinary shelter (canile sanitario), which most municipalities did not have, and that recognition by the mayor was a necessary condition for neutering.

And so, thanks to the valuable advice received from the Ministry of Health, the walls of non-compliance built by the local health authorities (ASL) of BAT and Brindisi were “torn down”. The project’s forms allowed citizens and association volunteers to report cat colonies in their area, while for municipalities without a municipal veterinary shelter, I reminded ASL officials that cats could be neutered at clinics under their own jurisdiction (in the province of Brindisi there were as many as 3, now used for weekly cat neutering sessions).

This is how the groups “I Felini di Barletta” and “I Felini di Brindisi e provincia” were born, each with its own logo linked to the project, and other local groups later joined in, making it possible to open Facebook pages and create email addresses to interact independently with their local authorities. As people registered the colonies in their area, they were added to the respective WhatsApp groups, and this is how, for the first time in Puglia, municipal, provincial and regional “Reti Feline” (Cat Networks) were born, made up of the people who, every day, for free and with great care, look after free-roaming cats.