Why cats?
The most overlooked animals in the shelter
Dogs get the commercials. Cats get the waiting list. They enter shelters in greater numbers, wait longer for a home, and are far less likely to be reunited with the family that lost them.
The numbers
This isn’t an annual report. It’s the reason we exist
The gap
Cats are treated like they can figure it out on their own
A lost dog gets a neighborhood search party. A lost cat gets assumed to be fine. That single assumption drives an enormous share of the problem: fewer than one in twenty stray cats that enter a shelter are ever returned to their owner, compared with roughly one in three dogs.
Add to that the cost of spay and neuter access in under-resourced communities, the shortage of foster homes for neonatal kittens, and the everyday obstacles that lead families to surrender a cat they love, and you get a system where cats are always last in line.
None of this is a mystery. It’s a resourcing problem, an education problem, and a visibility problem. Those are all fixable.
The opportunity
The need is real. So is the opportunity to change it
Every one of these gaps has a proven intervention behind it. We fund the work that already works, and give it the attention it has never gotten.