New York – Strawberry, Blueberry, Jojo and Mazzy were approximately 6 weeks old when animal rescuers took them out of long metal pipes in the parking lot of a company of storage units. The meatball was a single kitten that lived in a cold garage with a group of semi-feet adult cats.
Meanwhile, the spaghetti, macarrones with Rigatoni and Rigatoni were only 2 weeks old when the good people of the Wild Feders of LIC, a rescue of cats in Queens, took them and fed them with the bottle until they were strong enough to survive.
Consider these packages the face of the 2025 kitten season.
The kitten season, usually landing during the warmer months, is the time of the year when most cats give birth. That produces a wave of kittens, often fragile neonates. The shelters feel overwhelmed, especially when it comes to 24 -hour care and the food of extremely young kittens.
That, as a result, triggers the need for more reception houses because many of the approximately 4,000 shelters in the US. They do not have the time or resources for care throughout the day, said Hannah Shaw, an animal welfare defender known as the Gatita lady with more than one million followers on Instagram.
“We see about 1.5 million kittens entering shelters every year. And most of them will enter shelters during May and June,” he said. “Shelters need all hands on the deck to help foster.”
Familiarity with the promotion of animals is high, Shaw said. The act of doing so is a different story. There is a false perception, he said, that the expense of promoting animals falls on the people who take a step forward to do so. These days, many shelters and rescue cover food, supplies and medical promotion costs.
“Many people do not encourage because they think this will be this great cost, but fostering actually only costs time and love,” he said.
Lisa Restine, petrition veterinarian for a hill, said people looking to adopt kittens should take couples, since cats often join early in life. And how many cats are too many cats per home?
“This is nothing serious or medical, but my general rule is the number of adults in the house, as a proportion of 2 to 1, because you can take a cat in each hand, so if there are two adults, you can have four cats and still be healthy,” he said.
Square feet to avoid territory disputes are a good general rule when planning cats, Restine said. Two cats for 800 square feet, then 200 more square feet for each addition should help, he said.
Garbage companions, such as macaroni with Rigatoni, are much more likely to join, said Restine. The kittens are not biologically related, but that are often raised, such as the meatballs and spaghetti. But adopters who hope to unite an adult cat with a new trigger arrival can be disappointed.
“Once they exceed that 3 or 4 months brand, it is difficult to obtain that real bond,” Restine said.
In general, kittens remain in their homes from a few weeks to a few months. While statistics are not maintained in the number of kittens matches that “fail”, when parenting families decided to keep their positions, some shelter report rates up to 90%. That is a victory, despite the use of the word “failures”, he says they defense them.
Shaw sees another barrier that prevents people from encouraging: the notion that requires training or special skills. That is why he has dedicated his life to educating the public, offering videos, books and research on how Kittenlady.org works in place.
Companies are also arriving on board. Hill’s, a pet food company, directs Hill’s food, shelter and love program. It has provided more than $ 300 million in food support for more than 1,000 animal shelters that support promotion in North America.
“About a quarter of a million kittens, unfortunately, they do not survive in our shelters every year,” Shaw said. “The shelter will be there to guide and support you. So I think that much about the fear that people have about promoting, they could find that it is really something you can do. It’s scary because you haven’t done it yet.”
