This is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT due to the sheer volume of Lost, Found, Roaming and Deceased cat forms that we receive each and every day, 365 days per year. We have (on a few days), received 28-30 forms! This does not include the numerous texts, private messages, phone calls and trappings that we do all over the city and surrounding areas.

We simply cannot keep up, while providing the same level of attention to detail, phone-call support to owners, and then the actual posting of these cats… in a timely manner. Cats are NOT getting posted immediately, as they were when our page was not so ‘big’. It is simply impossible now. We have owners sending angry texts, or calling us wondering why their ‘Indoor/Outdoor’ Cat, that has been missing for 24 hours, is not posted yet. The reality of that situation is that the VAST majority of Indoor/Outdoor Cats who leave their residence, DO come home within 72 hours. There are some that take a week or two, especially during the warmer weather, regardless of whether they are ‘fixed’ or not; but ESPECIALLY if they are not. (Please spay/neuter and chip your cats!) There are days where members of our Admin Team spend upwards of 8 hours just posting and/or dealing with the Cat Page. It’s a pace that our Team of 7 (one away for family needs right now), simply cannot keep up with. ‘Roaming Cats’ in particular, take up hours and hours of our time, and they are ‘almost’ always just outdoor cats who live in the very neighbourhood that they are seen roaming. Well-meaning people then feed them and/or let them into their homes, and it only serves to confuse the cat as to where their ‘own’ home is. It is actually considered to be ‘Luring’ to do this according the CRD and VACS. Unless you have good reason to believe that the cat is definitely in need of help or assistance, please do not feed or let in someone else’s cat. Roaming Cats make up a minimum of 30-35% of our Cat Forms.

We will be re-vamping the Cat Forms to include only ‘Critical Cases’ and cases that we will look at as a Team, to determine whether we can provide the necessary assistance to the owners of those cats. These may include such cases as;

-Indoor cats jumping from apartment/condo decks.

-Sick cats.

-Injured cats.

-Pregnant cats.

-100% Indoor-ONLY cats

-Very young cats

-Or Elderly cats

We will continue to trap cats, as we do almost weekly, when the situation dictates. We will always be available to talk to owners who seek extra help (verbally), on different techniques to try to get their cats home. We will provide, ‘Tips for getting your Lost Cat Home’ that will cater to the many variables which come with lost cats. These tips will be available on our ROAM Cats Page and our ROAM Website. These tips are invaluable, and have helped so many cat owners get their cats to come home on their own, when owners follow the instructions provided to them.

We absolutely did not come to this decision ‘on a whim’. This decision has been coming for well over a year now. We have done everything in our power to avoid having to do this, but as it stands, we have all been ‘Living and Breathing ROAM’ every single day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and it has finally caught up with us. We are all exhausted. We are feeling as if we don’t ‘Run ROAM’…ROAM runs us!’

We will continue to do our very best to help with the most critical cases, and strongly urge owners to utilize their Community Pages, or one of the many other Lost/Found Pet Platforms on the Island, such as ‘Finding Felines’ :https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554899851424… if your ‘healthy, indoor/outdoor cat has been missing for more than 48-72 hours.

Our ROAM Dog Page will continue to operate as usual. Dogs keep our team EXTREMELY busy on a daily basis, and due to the Cat Page being so overwhelmingly busy, dealing with the bulk of the Lost/Found/Running/Injured Dog Postings, has fallen almost solely on Admins Lesli Steeves and Rachel Stouwer.

We in NO WAY ‘favour’ or ‘prefer’ dogs over cats, however Lost, Found, Running or Injured Dogs are, in almost every case, exclusively ‘Urgent’ in nature, and need to be posted promptly. The necessary steps that follow, need to happen immediately. It has not been fair to Rachel and Lesli to carry the majority of this for several years now and the rest of us simply can’t keep up with both.

Since we Founded and began ROAM in 2016, we have helped to reunite several thousand Lost and Found Pets. We always strive to do so in a kind, respectful, empathetic and inclusive way. For that, we are very proud. We do our best to ‘keep the blinders on’ and remain focussed and on task, even when it has been so unbelievably difficult to not defend ourselves against baseless ‘attacks’. We have only chosen to retort in a handful of cases that absolutely warranted it. Our followers know what ROAM is all about, and know who it is that is out there looking for, or trapping their lost dogs, or helping them to trap their lost Indoor cats, or trap pregnant feral cats and find homes for, and financial support for, those Rescues that so graciously take in these (exclusively cats) for us.

This weekend marked the 5th weekend in a row, where the Cat posting was solely left to two Admins; Elsie Hanson and Julie Martin, because Lesli ‘mans’ R1 (first ROAM phone) 24/7, and the rest of the Team was out on Dog Searches. Two recent searches (including one that lasted 18 days) ended tragically, both of which absolutely gutted our entire Team. It has been a positively exhausting few months. At the risk of sounding dramatic, we feel that it is hard for people to comprehend how many hours and hours and often days on end, go into these searches and in just the day to day operation of ROAM. Because we are TRULY a ‘Boots on the Ground’ Team, weekends are particularly busy, as people take their dogs for hikes, or they may go away and leave their dogs with an unfamiliar sitter, or a contractor or child leaves a door/gate open etc. So for 5 straight weekends (with maybe one day here or there ‘off’), we are out, sometimes from 6:00 am… throughout the day, until 1:00 or 2:00 am, while searching. This entire weekend was spent searching for a Lost dog again. While we LOVE what we do, and each and every search is near and dear to our hearts, they do take a tole on us mentally, and also on our family lives.

There are too many family dinners and events missed, to mention. Birthday Parties either not attended, or left early. Aging parents not visited. Yard work or household chores left undone or unfinished. We may have multiple traps set up for Lost dogs or cats, and the constant ‘pings’ from the minimum of 2-4 live-cameras we have set up, mean that on those nights, two of us Admins are woken up anywhere from 10-40x in a single night (to check the footage for the pings), often for many nights in a row. We have 4 devices that ‘ping’ us, so that we can get ourselves, or the owner, or a Volunteer to the trap site within a 10-15 minute time frame if an animal is trapped and we are not right there. Our 8, ‘LIVE’, ‘in the moment’, Arlo Cameras, have enabled us to safely set traps and not be right there, especially for the hundreds of cats we have successfully trapped over the years.

In closing, we ask that our followers have some compassion and understanding of why we made this decision, and that we did so after contemplating so many other options. It was either this, or close the page entirely, which we simply could not in good conscience, do. We would rather give 100% to the animals that we DO post, than to have 30+ cats waiting in the queue, with their owners not understanding why we haven’t posted their cat. The current system certainly is not allowing us to give owners 100%. That has been a hard pill to swallow.

We will endeavour to do our very best to help as many animals as possible and always in the kind, ‘ROAM-fashion’.

*Please note that our ‘Catchment Area’ for posting cats has changed slightly, and again, this is so that we can effectively help the cats that are directly in our area, while sadly leaving the other cats for owners to post in their own areas (which is absolutely more beneficial anyway.)*

Thank you,

~ROAM Team