This raised issue with Dennis. Community cats that had already gone through the TNR process with the City had gone missing.
“I was crushed to my core when 15 of my cats — my personal colony, the ones that I had fed for 10 years — when they came up missing. I was gutted,” Dennis says.
She began organizing to bring attention to this practice, with protests at Good Space and throughout North Oak Cliff. However, in recent months, Dennis decided it was time for a truce.
“But to hold on to a grudge or to try to change the past, it’s not going to happen,” she says. “So what do you do? You move forward.”
Dennis says she originally reached out to Spence requesting that he stop the trapping and make two sizable donations to animal welfare organizations, not including her own, to finally resolve this tension within the community.
Three weeks later, he sent her an email in return, and the two agreed to meet.
“When David and I were emailing, he knows my strong stance for Israel and for the Jewish community, and so he said it would be really, in so many words this is paraphrasing, but it would be really cool if we could do this on Yom Kippur because of what Yom Kippur stands for,” Dennis says. “And I was like wow … when you talk about Israel and you talk about the High Holidays and things, you’re touching my heart.”
They joined in conversation at Kessler Park United Methodist Church. Lead Pastor Eric Folkerth served as host and one of the mediators.
“We at Kessler Park, we seek to be a safe space for all of our neighbors, and we want to serve the whole community,” Folkerth says. “And any time that we can help to be a part of this kind of resolution, that’s something that we are interested in.”
Joe and Connie Stout of the nonprofit Mid-Cities Community Cats also served as mediators to help the pair come to a solution for their quarrel.
“When Lisa asked us to come and told us a reverend would be involved, I thought, ‘Hey, this is good,’” Stout says. “This had a good chance of being successful.”
Folkerth echoes that statement, saying he felt it was very helpful for them to be in the room together.
“To me, they both seemed very sincere and very motivated to put this behind them,” Folkerth says.
The Stouts were able to provide their educational expertise on TNR, or what they prefer as trap-neuter-vaccinate-return (TNVR), to the table as supporters of feral cats in Hurst, Euless, Bedford and several adjoining cities.
During the discussion, the couple explained the importance of TNVR versus simply removing or relocating feral cats.
“If you trap and remove the animal, especially if it’s already been fixed under the TNVR protocol … you’re going to have a vacuum,” says Connie. “No matter what the animal, even if it’s a squirrel or a ’possum or raccoon, but also with cats. If you remove a cat that’s already been fixed and vaccinated for rabies, you don’t really get rid of them. You will just get the ones that are not vaccinated.”
Following their two-hour discussion, Dennis says Spence stepped up beyond her suggestion to not only remove traps, but donate to four separate animal welfare nonprofits.
“I just feel like the pounding has stopped, like David said,” Dennis says. “And I’m grateful for that, too.”