AUBURN — When Community Cat Advocates trapped Chowder at Mid-Maine Waste Action Corp.’s transfer station, he was scared, skittish and completely blind.

How he’d survived three years at the local dump was a mystery.

There were other cats there, too: a fluffy black kitten whose mass of tangled fur disguised how life threateningly skinny she was until a volunteer picked her up and felt only bones; a dirty black-and-white cat who wouldn’t let anyone near him at the dump but who seemed friendly once trapped; a teenage cat who took such good care of two young kittens that everyone assumed they were mother and babies right up until volunteers trapped the older cat and realized he was a boy.

Welcomed by MMWAC, Community Cat Advocates has spent the past month rescuing about a dozen stray cats from the transfer station, some of whom have lived there for well over a decade. Volunteers are still trying to trap those who remain — they estimate there’s a few left, but the cats can be hard to count.

“They’re extremely intelligent,” said Rachel Bray, co-founder of Community Cat Advocates. “In order to be the cat that survived out there, you had to be the smartest, most wary, toughest cat.”

The group is now working to find permanent homes for the cats they have caught, whether that’s a barn for the ferals or a family for the cats who would be happy living the life of a pet.

Cats started showing up at MMWAC over 20 years ago. Back then, some were strays from the area, while others were inadvertently brought to the Auburn dump when the residential garbage bins they were digging through were emptied into MMWAC’s trucks.

Over the years, some of those cats had kittens, which added to the population. And, judging by how friendly some of the cats were and how comfortable they were being handled, it appeared at least a few had been part of a family at one time and discarded there.

Bray had been hearing about the Auburn MMWAC cats for a while, but she thought they’d been fixed years ago by another rescue group that that was managing the colony. However, if another group was ever involved with the cats, it wasn’t now.

Although MMWAC employees and members of the public fed the cats, they could provide little medical care. Even if they were able to trap the cats and bring them to a shelter, some employees worried that any feral cats in the group would be euthanized.

Bray and her volunteers decided to take a closer look at the situation in December, when a community member told them a couple of sick kittens had been spotted there.

When volunteer Kaili Stalling pulled up to the transfer station, she didn’t have any trouble finding cats.

“When you drive in, there’s a stop sign. There were, like, four or five cats just laying on the side of the fence. They’re used to people, but you couldn’t get very close to them,” Stalling said.

Within the transfer station, she spotted not only the sick kittens but also thin cats, dirty cats, cats with obvious frostbite. With MMWAC’s blessing, the group immediately began setting out live traps.

It turned out that no ordinary bait would work.

“For dump cats, they’re very fancy,” Stalling said. “It’s like you can’t give them sardines, you can’t give them wet food. They’re like, ‘Hmm, thanks, but, you know, I get chicken.’ So I had to buy chicken or tuna.”

The cats also quickly learned to outsmart the traps by sliding a paw between the bars and scooping out the food from the outside.

But with a few alternations — how they placed the food, where they placed the traps, the kind of food they used — Community Cat Advocates started catching them.

To ensure that no cats got trapped and left in the cold, volunteers stayed in the area for hours to monitor the traps. When they couldn’t be nearby, MMWAC recycling attendant Tom Casey watched over them and moved any captured cats into his heated shed.

Chowder was one of the worst cases. His eyelashes had turned inward and grown into his eyes, blinding him. It’s believed he’d been living at the dump for three years. No one knows how he found food, let alone how he safely navigated the transfer station, with its piles of debris, heavy machinery and constant traffic.

“Cats amaze me,” said Bray, who is now fostering Chowder. “He’s just a tough cat.”

This isn’t the first colony of cats that Community Cat Advocates has cared for, and some of the other colonies have been larger. But the MMWAC situation is unique because, unlike a wooded area behind someone’s house, the dump is unsafe with its heavy equipment and traffic. And it’s very public. Too public.

“When people see that cats are being fed in that location, or even just that there are cats hanging around, they assume it will be safe to leave their unwanted house cat there. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the sad reality is the high risk of living among all of that chaos is most likely why the colony stayed small,” Bray said.

The Kennebec Valley Humane Society in Augusta is helping Community Cat Advocates spay and neuter the dozen cats that its volunteers have caught so far. Taylor Brook Animal Hospital in Auburn is helping with other medical care.

Because some cats — like Chowder — require more than neutering and a few shots, the tiny Auburn nonprofit set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for additional medical care. It raised almost $1,600 in a week, just over half its $3,000 goal.

When money doesn’t come in, Bray pays the vet bills out of her own paycheck as a an assistant manager for a Portland parking garage.

She’s adamant that no cats will ever be euthanized because they need expensive vet care or because they’re feral.

“We are completely no kill. No cat is too angry,” Bray said.

Five of the MMWAC cats will go to a Waterville-area farm, where they can safely live as barn cats and stay together “with friends they already knew,” Bray said. It’s unclear whether a couple of the oldest feral cats will be released back to MMWAC, where they’re beloved by staff and have made a home for the past 14 years.

“It’s just tricky. Obviously if they’ve been there for 14 years, they’re doing OK,” Bray said. “I don’t want people to be like, ‘Hey, they’re feeding cats.’ I want people to stop leaving cats there.”

She’d also like the public to stop feeding the cats so the bait in the live traps will become more attractive and they’ll have a better chance of capturing the five or so who remain on the lam.

One large gray and white cat has been particularly elusive. Sometimes he watches volunteers from afar.

“He taunts us,” Stalling said.

Bray is looking for adoptive homes for the cats that aren’t feral or that seem like they could eventually be comfortable in a family.

All, that is, except for her own foster, Chowder.

“Chowder may already be home,” she said.

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