Challenge’s goal: Save cats from euthanasia
From behind the stainless steel bars at an Orlando animal shelter, Phoenix the cat has spent the past month watching a string of humans pass, waiting for one who will stop to scratch his head or stroke his long, white fur.
Handsome, sweet-natured but geriatric, the 14-year-old was surrendered by people who said he didn’t like their other pets. A few years ago, he would have faced a probable death sentence. Today, in some respects, Phoenix is lucky.
First, this shelter — the Pet Alliance of Greater Orlando — won’t euthanize animals simply because
they’re not easily adopted. More importantly, the organization has joined a growing national movement to stop hundreds of thousands of cats from being euthanized in shelters each year — in part by keeping them from being dumped there in the first place.
“It’s a really exciting time in feline welfare,” said Dr. Julie Levy, director of shelter medicine at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine.
“As 2017 begins, 69 of Florida’s 130 animal shelters have enrolled in the Million Cat Challenge, which has an audacious goal: Come together to save 1 million more cats in five years.”
Levy is a co-founder of the challenge, a joint project between UF and the University of California, Davis, launched in 2014. It asks shelters to commit to saving lives, report their numbers and share what works best on key goals: Keep cats with their owners, limit the intake of cats to a manageable number, increase adoptions and promote sterilizations of both owned cats and strays.
“Throughout our region, we do pretty great with [homeless] dogs,” said Fraily Rodriguez, vice president of operations for the Pet Alliance, which signed on for the challenge. “But as a community, we really needed to look at what else we could do for cats.”
These days, from 70 percent to 90 percent of dogs brought to local shelters are either reclaimed by their owners or adopted, officials say. But for a range of reasons, cat rates are much lower.
They reproduce faster than dogs, so there are more of them. And owners often fail to search for their cats when they wander off, supposing they’ll return or fend for themselves.
“We take in way more cats and kittens than we do dogs and puppies,” said Diane Summers, program manager for Or- ange County Animal Services. “Unfortunately, I think some people view cats as something they leave behind when they move to a new apartment — instead of a lifelong pet.”
On the flip side, some well-intentioned animal saviors can cause problems, too. Last summer the Pet Alliance, as part of the Million Cat Campaign, launched efforts to teach people not to round up stray kittens and bring them to shelters. Instead, the advocates said, it’s best to wait for the mother cat to return to her babies, or — if she doesn’t show up within 24 hours — people should try to take care of the kittens themselves.
“If you bring us a 3-week-old kitten, we’re going to ask you if you can keep the kitten if we give you all the tools you need,” Rodriguez said. “And what we’re finding out is that people tend to say yes.”
Some of those kittens, who require frequent bottle feeding and have fragile immune systems, may eventually be adopted by their caretakers, Rodriguez said. Others can at least be brought in for sterilization before being released again, so they don’t create even more kittens.
Though Orange County has not officially joined the cat challenge, it does embrace many of the practices, including rounding up strays, sterilizing and vaccinating them, and then returning them back to where they came from.
Dubbed TNR — for trap, neuter, release — the practice is not new. CARE Feline TNR, an all-volunteer nonprofit organization, has been doing the work for 20 years, providing spay and neutering surgery to over 35,000 Central Florida cats in that time.
But Bill Gaskin, CARE’s vice president, said he is encouraged that more groups are following suit. In late 2015, for instance, Orange County began its own TNR program, and private groups do the work in Seminole, Lake and Osceola.
This month, in fact, Osceola County Animal Services has decided it will stop picking up trapped and “nuisance” stray cats only to euthanize them, instead focusing its limited manpower on mandated dog bite investigations and animal cruelty complaints.
“It’s really hard to continue to pick up animals knowing that no one is going to claim them or adopt them — so they’re going to be put down 99 percent of the time,” said Kim Staton, director of Osceola County Animal Services.
In Seminole — where county law requires animal control officers to round up strays when a property owner complains, and the law forbids TNR — officials say their work has focused on offering low-cost adoptions and partnering with groups that help with low-cost spay-neuter programs, such as the nonprofit Spay ’N’ Save.
In Lake County, though, animal welfare volunteers have gotten creative, opening the region’s first “cat café” — a place where people can sip a latte or order a chai while orphaned cats roam among them, ideally cuddling up to someone who will adopt them.
“It’s going great,” said Jessica Whitehouse, director of development for The Animal League, which partnered with Axum Coffee to open the Orlando Cat Café in Clermont. “We were booked solid for the first two and a half weeks, and we’re still going really strong.” Since opening, 45 cats have been adopted.
That effort isn’t officially part of the Million Cat Challenge, which at last count had saved an additional 676,909 cats, according to reports from participating shelters. Levy said the initiative is on track to meet its goal by the end of 2017, a year ahead of schedule, though she knows there are millions of stray cats still out there that no one can count.
“We think the future looks bright,” she said. “Next, we’re very interested in seeing if we can ask shelters to stretch even further and save a million more cats in a single year.”