You know Chicago is the country’s rattiest city – at least according to Orkin, who just gave us that distinction for the ninth straight year – but did you also know it’s one of the feral-cattiest? Chicago has thousands of outdoor cats, as well as thousands of humans who care for them.

“Probably over 3,000 caretakers in the city taking care of I don’t even know how many cats, cats we don’t even know about,” said Cecilia Ocampo-Solis, community programs manager at Tree House Humane Society in the Rogers Park neighborhood.

In this episode, we talk with one of these feral cat colony-minders about what it’s like to host a couple of wild fuzzballs.

“I call them more like barn cats,” said Rob Crowder, who hosts two cats, Washington and Drake, in his backyard in Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood. “Because they’re – they don’t live in a barn but they’re always just around, they’re easy to maintain, and they give back to us as well.”

By “give back” Crowder means “deter rats.” But Ocampo-Solis also myth-busts a common misconception about Chicago’s feral cats and her organization’s “Cats at Work” program.

“This program was built to offer quote unquote, a ‘second chance’ to unsocialized cats in high-volume shelters. They don’t have many options. Sometimes their options are humane euthanasia,” Ocampo-Solis said. “So it’s a harm reduction program.”