In a small, indistinct house in Jakarta's southern districts, a woman in full scrubs is silently and efficiently desexing an anaesthetised cat.
Next to the table, another four cats wearing nappies lie in a row, their bellies shaved and exposed with a freshly stitched wound, sleeping off their anaesthesia.
This is the world of Indonesia's underground vets, working to desex as many cats as possible, to help stall the explosive growth of felines on the streets of big cities.
"Regularly trapping and neutering cats will help maintain the population number for about two years, but if we don't do it, the cat number will explode," said Vivi Sebayang from Rumah Steril, an organisation that catches street cats to be spayed and then released again.
With a group of volunteers, she runs monthly cat-catching sessions in Jakarta, usually around university campuses or train stations where people tend to feed strays.
"Every day it costs me quite a lot of money to buy enough food to feed 15 cats, but I don't own one myself, so it's okay," said Koh Aliong, a local store owner who helps maintain the stray population at a university campus in the southern district of Depok.
"People have dumped tiny kittens around here, so what can I do but look after them and feed them?" he said, as he helped the cat catchers trap felines for spaying.
Jakarta's feral cat problem
The Jakarta Provincial Food, Marine and Agriculture Agency estimates there are 860,000 cats in the Jakarta municipal area alone.
But that only covers about half of the greater Jakarta metropolis, meaning there are likely well over 1.5 million cats roaming the streets and yards of Indonesia's capital.
"Indonesian people tend to move a problem around rather than solving it," said Sebayang.
"So if someone doesn't like having a stray cat around their house, they will often take the cat and dump it in a wet market where there's some food," she said.
She says cats often have litters of three of more kittens, and she's determined to stem that.
Her organisation is able to spay a female cat for about $30, or about $25 for a male cat.
But not everyone is happy about it.
On the day the ABC visited, the vet performing the operations declined to be named or identified, and Sebayang says her top priority is protecting the identities of the vets who perform the cut-price procedures.
"[Some] veterinarians are afraid these procedures are performed by people who aren't qualified," she said.
"Most of the veterinarians who are willing to join this activity are also concerned about the overpopulation problem.
"They make it clear to me they don't want to get bullied by other colleagues who disagree with this program, so I always protect them."
She says vet clinics also have a commercial imperative to oppose her cheaper operations, as they usually price desexing procedures at about $50 to $150 — beyond what many people are willing to pay to desex a stray.
'It feels like a grey area'
The extent to which local governments cooperate with such programs varies.
In Jakarta, the local district governments often works with organisations like Sebayang's to conduct cat desexing drives.
For example, the South Jakarta Maritime Food Security and Fishery Sub-agency recently said they would launch another sterilisation drive in February aiming to desex 2,300 cats.
Veterinarian associations are sometimes cooperative with such efforts.
But in the outlying districts of the capital region, the vet associations and local governments tend to be less supportive of organisations that take matters into their own hands.
"It feels like a grey area but I think it's the only way to solve the problem," says Sebayang.
She estimates over a decade her organisation has spayed 10,000 cats.
But it's a drop in the ocean.
"I think it might take another 10 or 20 years before this problem finally gets better," she said.
