Marisol Ramos, who founded Boyle Heights Gatos, works to trap, neuter, return cats at a home in Boyle Heights on April 30, 2025.
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Jaqueline Ramirez
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Boyle Heights Beat
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Topline:
An estimated 300 community cats near Sonia Villegas' home have all been “fixed,” thanks to her and Boyle Heights Gatos, a volunteer-run group working toward humanely controlling the cat population through a practice known as trap-neuter-return, or TNR.
How it works: Cats are trapped in a box, taken to a veterinarian to get neutered or spayed, and returned to their outdoor homes. Villegas has played a key role by establishing a regular feeding schedule that makes it easier to trap cats at predictable times.
Why it matters: For years, Angelenos have tried to contain cat colonies to help curb the city’s pet overpopulation crisis. But in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and East L.A., where public services often fall short, residents are taking matters into their own hands. Their grassroots efforts go beyond helping animals, they’re filling service gaps shaped by housing inequalities, rising costs and immigration-related displacement.
Read on... for more about these volunteers' efforts to control the cat population in Boyle Heights.
This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on May 15, 2025
Free-roaming cats emerge from alleys and driveways in this Boyle Heights neighborhood as soon as they sense Sonia Villegas is nearby.
They purr and meow, awaiting their feed, as Villegas fills cardboard bowls with cat food that she carries in a stroller during her evening walk. As they eat, she points to their clipped ears — a sign they’ve been spayed or neutered.
An estimated 300 community cats near her home have all been “fixed,” thanks to Villegas and Boyle Heights Gatos, a volunteer-run group working toward humanely controlling the cat population through a practice known as trap-neuter-return, or TNR. Cats are trapped in a box, taken to a veterinarian to get neutered or spayed, and returned to their outdoor homes. Villegas has played a key role by establishing a regular feeding schedule that makes it easier to trap cats at predictable times.
“It’s not just about feeding. It’s about spaying and neutering, and vaccinating at the same time,” Villegas, 70, says in Spanish. “We don’t want the cats to have so many kittens, leaving the poor kittens abandoned.”
For years, Angelenos have tried to contain cat colonies to help curb the city’s pet overpopulation crisis. But in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and East L.A., where public services often fall short, residents are taking matters into their own hands. Their grassroots efforts go beyond helping animals, they’re filling service gaps shaped by housing inequalities, rising costs and immigration-related displacement.
“It’s all interconnected,” said Marisol Ramos, who founded Boyle Heights Gatos during the pandemic. “Fear of immigration crackdowns has forced some people to leave, and leave their community pets behind. It’s only going to get worse.”
Cats are lured into box traps with a trail of wet cat food.
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Susanica Tam
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Boyle Heights Beat
)
A grassroots effort amid overwhelming need
Ramos finds time to do TNR after her day job as an administrator at UCLA. She begins trapping midweek, usually after 6 p.m., to fill 15 weekly scheduled spay and neuter appointments at FixNation clinic in Sun Valley. She reaches that weekly goal by working with other volunteer trappers in Boyle Heights and East L.A.
Lately, Ramos says she encounters people asking, “What do I need for my cat or dog so I can take them to Mexico?” Or, “This person is [self-deporting]. Can you take the cat to get fixed?”
Then there are the cats she has captured within mobile homes near Olympic Boulevard, placing traps inside the vans where unhoused people live. “They [the unhoused] care about their animals, and a lot of the shelters don’t allow you to bring your pet so people choose to live inside a car just to be with their pets. They need services,” she said.
Ramos estimates she helped sterilize 600 cats last year and is tracking another 600 free-roaming cats that need spay and neuter care just in East L.A. and Boyle Heights. She collects tips from neighbors and Instagram DMs, then logs the information on Google Maps to determine which locations to strategically target.
“There’s a lot of need, and it’s up to us regular people to figure out what to do,” said Ramos, who lives in Boyle Heights.
Marisol Ramoss sets up a cat trap in Boyle Heights on April 30, 2025.
(
Susanica Tam
/
Boyle Heights Beat
)
Trapping cats can take an hour, days, weeks or even months.
(
Susanica Tam
/
Boyle Heights Beat
)
Ramos also helps residents navigate the shame and judgment that comes from unmanaged cat colonies near their homes. Many residents doing TNR in Boyle Heights and East L.A. are Spanish-speaking and Ramos is there to explain the process and understand how the situation got out of hand.
“There are people who are irresponsible, but there are also a lot more people who are like, ‘I just don’t have money to pay.’ Because if you go to a vet, they [can] charge you like $400 for a spay and neuter.”
Ramos, herself, spent more than $30,000 last year on sterilization, including about $10,000 from her own pocket. She secured grants and took up consulting jobs to help pay for those services, and also used vouchers from the Citywide Cat Program to cover costs.
Now, as the city navigates a budget shortfall, advocates like Ramos are urging the city to prioritize increasing reimbursement rates covering sterilization costs. To Ramos, TNR offers a band-aid to the issue. The real solution, she said, is making spay and neuter easier to access.
“If the city pushed for affordable spay neuter options [and] made that accessible, I don’t think we would be in the situation that we’re in,” Ramos said.
A distrust of outside rescuers
In Boyle Heights and East L.A., Ramos was intent on setting clear boundaries for TNR, especially after witnessing outsiders strolling in to trap and “rescue” cats without making contact with neighbors.
Across social media, Ramos has encountered trappers who share about cats they’ve found in “terrible living situations” or in a “poor neighborhood with lots of violence.” She’s seen people who come in and take kittens, leaving the adult cats “to continue breeding,” and neighbors wondering about the whereabouts of the community cats they’ve been feeding.
“They’re painting a picture of the neighborhood as this is bad Boyle Heights, [a] bad part of East L.A., gang-infested, garbage ridden, just to make a story about saving a cat appealing to that savior mentality,” Ramos said.
On a recent Wednesday evening, Ramos trapped six cats with the help of Katelyn Vargas, a Boyle Heights resident who reached out to her after noticing a surge of community cats around her home. Three of them were pregnant.
She trapped the first three on the grounds of Vargas’ home and the other half within the property of the next-door neighbor, who had amassed more than a dozen community cats in her yard.
The cats were lured into box traps with a trail of wet cat food as bait on sheets of paper. Once inside, a trigger plate shut the door. Ramos put the cats at ease, covering the cages with blankets or towels.
Trapping that evening took about an hour, a success story considering that sometimes it takes days, weeks or even months to trap certain cats.
But Ramos couldn’t shake a feeling of helplessness, realizing they had not yet reached containment in that specific neighborhood. “I thought we had it under control when I last came here,” she said.
To Ramos, TNR is a “community responsibility.”
“I’m not a person coming in to rescue, or be a savior to anybody. I help people by bringing the traps and transporting them, but I encourage everybody to learn how to trap,” she said.
