Professor Volunteers Her Skills and “Cattitude,” One Feral Colony at a Time

In her spare time, Dr. Becky Morrow will do more than 50 surgeries a day. An assistant professor of biological sciences, Morrow is rare among academicians: a licensed veterinarian and a scholar who gets her hands dirty helping communities from Clarion to the West Virginia border control feral cat colonies. She drives her pickup and special surgical unit, a retrofitted trailer once used to haul Harleys, into communities that put out a call for help.

Morrow makes clear that feral cat colonies exist because food supplies and shelter are available; if these cats were exterminated, as others advocate, different cats likely would move into the same territory—or animal pest populations might soar. If residents capture the cats, Morrow is willing neuter and release them, leaving behind a stable and healthier cat colony.

“You do a whole group at once. That’s how you get ahead of the reproduction cycle,” explained Morrow, who established the nonprofit Frankie’s Friends Cat Rescue in New Kensington in memory of her rescued silver tabby.

Morrow finds recruits across campus, engaging students to organize clinics, draw blood and assist with surgeries. Duquesne students who aspire to veterinary practice gain an edge by working with Morrow, observed Dr. Alan W. Seadler, associate provost for research and technology.

“Becky has been absolutely outstanding and has had excellent success in helping students to get into vet schools—which I’m told are harder to get into than medical school because there are fewer than 50 in the U.S.,” Seadler said. “She makes sure students are academically prepared as well as prepared for admittance. Because Duquesne has no veterinary school, no agriculture school and no medical school, this is a major achievement.”

Yet these biology, pre-medical and post-baccalaureate students are not the only beneficiaries. Forensic science students of Dr. Lisa Ludvico gain skills obtaining DNA through tissue samples remaining from Morrow’s efforts. An international practice is to clip a cat’s left ear tip so it’s immediately visible that it has been neutered. Ludvico, a cat lover now on the nonprofit’s board, asked Morrow about obtaining this typically-discarded tissue for a more rich—and rare—opportunity to extract DNA than saliva and blood samples.

“Some students were put off at first,” Ludvico said. “Then they started realizing the marker systems used to identify individuals in animal populations is the same as what is used in humans, even though they are species-specific.”

Ludvico and her students are determining the inter-relatedness of cat colonies to answer whether cats band together in families or if groupings are happenstance. “This is the first year that I have a formal requirement of quantification, genotyping and putting the information in a big database, like we would have for humans,” Ludvico said.

The cumulative efforts mean students win, communities win—and the cats themselves win. “The population Becky sees would never seek veterinary help—these people could not afford it,” Ludvico noted.

“Students can see the community problem,” Morrow added. “Working with underserved populations is tied to our academic work.”