When volunteers do what the city won’t to help feral cats, their personal safety shouldn’t be at risk.

But every time Irene Borecky arrives at a social housing co-op on Garnet Janes Rd. to feed 14 feral cats living under the back deck of a home, she endures a hail of abuse and threats.

Some residents hate the cats. They spray them with a garden hose, menace them with a snarling dog and think that if the cats aren’t fed, they’ll just go away, like pigeons when the bird seed is gone.

Borecky, who is part of the network of feral cat caretakers on the front lines of the problem, has been feeding them until they can be trapped, neutered and relocated.

She wants what they want — to get them out of there — and knows how to do it. But try explaining it to people who would rather starve and savage them.

“These people are hostile towards the cats and anyone who helps them,” said Borecky, who called police during an earlier confrontation, when a guy turned the hose on her and threatened to beat her with a baseball bat.

“We’re trying to help the community deal with a problem that will only get bigger. Trap and neuter is the only way to do it, but we need support from the city. We’re not getting anything.”

“Trap, neuter and return” is now the city’s official feral cat policy, but it is left entirely to volunteers, with no help, financial support or legal standing.

If hostilities arise, the volunteers are on the pointy end of the stick, as we learned recently when we tagged along with Borecky while she tried to sneak into the co-op to feed the cats.

We had barely entered a walkway between the units when a woman started screaming at us to “get the f--- out,” while a heavily tattooed man who lives with her threatened to take our camera.

The woman kept screaming and pushing us backwards, while the man went into his yard and returned with the garden hose, saying he’d hose us down unless we left.

The commotion attracted several other residents who obviously aren’t cat lovers; they joined in the shouting, gathered in a group and tried to stare us down, after we retreated to the street.

A member of the co-op board of directors named Roger soon arrived and joined the group. He was reluctant to talk but we managed to persuade him to tell us his side.

The cats do their business in people’s yards, he said, adding he has a young daughter. The residents met recently and decided to trap the cats themselves and take them to city animal services for disposal, he said.

We explained to him that Borecky and other volunteers would trap them, get them fixed and relocate them, but not until veterinary arrangements could be made for neutering.

By the time we were done talking, Roger was acting as a conciliator of sorts between Borecky, two other volunteers and the unhappy residents. When we left, they were all talking, a small sign of progress.

Borecky told us Sunday that she’d trapped eight of the 14 cats over the weekend and has arranged for them to be neutered Monday. The rest will be trapped and fixed soon, but not returned to the co-op.

“Normally they’d go back, until we can find somewhere to re-locate them, but there’s just too much hostility there,” she said.

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She added that the tattooed man and shouting woman were verbally abusive to her throughout the trapping process, even though she was ridding them of the cats.

It’s time for the city to do the right thing, before a volunteer is attacked.