They say herding cats is impossible. Liam Montgomery begs to differ.

Picture this: It’s 4:30 a.m. in the Bay Area, and someone is waiting beside a cat trap. They have food, a blanket, and the patience of a person who knows the cat behind the nearby bushes is going to do this on the cat’s schedule.

Eventually, the cat takes the bait. The trap closes, and the person who's been waiting approaches, speaking softly as they drape a blanket over it.

The cat, meanwhile, has questions.

“Who is this Churu-smelling stranger? Wait, how did I get into this box?  Why is this human talking to me like we're old pals?” I imagine them thinking.

It takes a particular kind of person to get up before dawn and do this work. The independent trappers, rescue volunteers, and neighbors who show up for community cats give their time, lose sleep, and rearrange their lives for animals who they may never see again.

But getting the cat into the trap is only the beginning. That cat still needs veterinary care, including spay or neuter surgery and vaccinations, before returning to the place they call home.

That’s where Liam Montgomery and Nine Lives come in.

Liam is the executive director of Nine Lives in Redwood City, California. His team provides affordable spay/neuter surgeries, vaccinations, and other veterinary care for cats brought in by community members and partner organizations. After surgery and recovery, the cats are returned to their outdoor homes, now sporting a fashionable tipped ear (to show they’ve already been spayed or neutered).

That process is called trap-neuter-vaccinate-return, or TNVR, with everyone doing their part to complete the lifesaving circle.

Nearly half of Nine Lives’ spay/neuter surgeries are for community cats. Last year, through the efforts of about 45 employees and 200 volunteers, Nine Lives performed 6,518 spay/neuter surgeries. This year, the team is on track to perform 10,000. Can you imagine caring for that many cats with 45 employees in just one year? Nine Lives also maintains a 97% save rate through its adoption program year after year.

Along with their community work, the organization also works with more than 50 rescue partners, including shelters that don’t have a veterinarian on staff.

Liam knows what it feels like to want to help and not know how.

Growing up in rural Wales, U.K., Liam and his sister often rescued animals. One day, they found two neonatal kittens all alone. Even though young Liam and his sister had the best intentions, without proper access to resources, they had no idea how intensive neonatal kitten care can be. Despite their best efforts, after a few weeks, the kittens passed away.

That’s when Liam knew he had a mission — a calling. He knew what it felt like to want so badly to help an animal and not have the information or support to do it. Today, he’s making sure more people have somewhere to turn.

Liam works diligently and creatively to get his community connected with everything they could need. In 2023, Nine Lives applied for and received a grant from Best Friends to support their partner Los Baños Animal Shelter.

They started working hand in hand with the Los Baños team that consisted of only a couple of animal services officers and one dedicated volunteer named Suzanne.

They were overwhelmed, and roughly half of the animals in the shelter were losing their lives. After the grant, Nine Lives took in over 200 at-risk cats from Los Baños in the first year. Combined with their TNVR efforts, they were able to help Los Baños reach the 90% benchmark of no-kill for their cats — for the first time ever.

And the real game changer for them came this year when Nine Lives opened a new veterinary clinic in Redwood City that doubles the capacity of their previous two buildings combined.

The new clinic was four years in the making, and Liam turned to the people who would use it every day to help design it. His team weighed in on everything from the height of the prep stations to where the anesthesia monitors should go. With the new facility’s increased capacity, Nine Lives can offer affordable veterinary care to even more families, spay and neuter even more community cats, and help even more shelters and rescue groups that don’t have a veterinarian on staff.

In one beautifully poetic moment of redemption for his first neonatal kittens, Liam took in two kittens named Trill and Lady Gaga. The two were semi-paralyzed, incontinent, and had neurological conditions. Liam couldn’t find a foster home with the capacity to care for their needs, so he and his team set up a room (of their very limited space prior to the new facility) with pee pads and blankets that had to be changed constantly. They reached out to over 100 rescue groups all across the country, but no one had the capacity to take them in.

Finally, they found Copper’s Cat Commune, a Texas rescue group for cats who are incontinent. In talking with the group, Liam learned that they had cats with FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus) who they were struggling to find adopters for because of stigma around the disease. Nine Lives could welcome some of those cats near San Francisco, while Copper’s Cat Commune could take Trill and Lady Gaga. A search for help became a new partnership.

I love that kind of thinking. When the obvious solution isn’t there, you find another way. You pick up the phone, build relationships, and keep going until you find something that works.

You see, the “R” in TNVR is often the crux of it. Not every cat living outdoors needs to come into a shelter in order to be saved. For cats who aren’t outgoing or comfortable around people, adoption becomes much more difficult. Many community cats are already home in their neighborhoods. They know the area and have established routines.

What they need is access to spay/neuter surgery, vaccinations, and people nearby who care for them. Providing those resources is at the heart of Liam’s work.

Liam will be the first to admit that it’s not glamorous work. Often, the best possible outcome is watching a cat disappear into the bushes without so much as a backward glance.

But someone got up before dawn for that cat. They drove to the clinic. A veterinary team made room and provided care. And then someone made sure the cat got home. Liam and his team are helping that circle keep going for thousands of cats and the people determined to help them.

Liam and his team are helping to make TNVR the norm in Northern California. I want to thank them for work that too often goes unrecognized. They are among animal welfare’s unsung heroes.

If you want to support Nine Lives and the work Liam is doing, please check out their website.

-Julie

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