The Manx Lottery Trust has given a grant to the ManxSPCA which will go towards extending its feral cat care programme.

The grant will fund a project that involves taking feral cats into care, ensuring they receive any necessary veterinary treatment and, once they are ready, releasing them back into the wild.

The population of feral cats in the island has multiplied in recent years. This has led to increasing issues with feral cats, which can carry dangerous diseases, behave aggressively toward domestic cats, soil the land and kill smaller mammals and birds.

As well as bringing the cats in for treatment against dangerous diseases the scheme aims to reduce problems developing in the future by neutering or spaying the cats to limit the population expansion.

Juana Warburton, general manager of the ManxSPCA, said: ’The Manx Lottery Trust have been immensely helpful and we are very grateful for the grant. We can now expand the programme which will give us the opportunity to build good ground work for the scheme. Eventually we should see the number of issues caused by feral cats reduce and then we can maintain the programme on a smaller scale.’

Lulu Gillow, Chair of the Manx Lottery Trust, added: ’The Trustees, being very aware of the feral cat issues, recognised the lasting benefits of the ManxSPCA being able to expand their treatment and neutering programme.’