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.”]]>