by NEW YORK (AP) – Strawberry, Blueberry, Jojo and Mazzy were about 6 weeks old when rescuers from Long metal pipes in the parking lot of a storage unit company. Meatball was a single kitten who lived in a cold garage with a group of semi-ferale adult cats.
Spaghetti, Macaroni and Rigatoni were now only 2 weeks old when the good people of Lic Feral Federers, a cat rescue in Queens, they took them and they fed them on Bottel until they were strong enough to survive.
Consider these sweets as the face of the Kitten season 2025.
Kitten season, usually lands during warmer months, is the time of year in which most cats give birth. This produces a wave of kittens, often vulnerable neonates. Shelters are overwhelmed, especially when it comes to the 24-hour care and the feeding of extremely young kittens.
As a result, this causes a need for more foster families because many of the 4,000 hiding places in the US do not have time or resources for the entire clock care, said Hannah Shaw, a lawyer for animal welfare that is known as the kitten lady with more than a million followers on Instagram.
“Every year we see around 1.5 million kittens who enter hiding places. And most of them will come in hiding places in May and June,” she said. “Shelters need all the hands on deck to help through promoting.”
Familiarity with promoting animals is high, Shaw said. Doing it is a different story. There is a false perception, she said, that the costs of promoting animals fall on the people who perform to do it. Nowadays, many hiding places and rescues cover the food, the supplies and the medical costs of promoting.
“Many people do not promote because they think it will be these enormous costs, but promoting actually costs you time and love,” she said.
Lisa Restine, the vet of a Hill’s Pet Nutrition, said that people who want to adopt kittens have to take couples, because cats often bind early in life. And how many cats are too many cats per household?
“This is nothing serious or medical, but my general rule of thumb is the number of adults in the house, such as a 2-on-1 ratio, because you can wear one cat in each hand, so if there are two adults, you can have four cats and still be healthy,” she said.
Square meters to prevent territory disputes is a good rule of thumb when planning cats, said Restine. Two cats per 800 square base than 200 square foot more should help for each addition, she said.
Nestmates, such as Macaroni and Rigatoni, are much more likely to bind, said Restine. Kittens not organically related but merged, also often connected – such as meatball and spaghetti. But adopters hope to bind an adult cat with a new arrival of kitten can be disappointed.
“As soon as they mark that 3 or 4 months, it is difficult to get that real bond,” said Restine.
Usually kittens remain in their foster families from a few weeks to a few months. Although the statistics are not stored on the number of kitten fosters that “fail” – when foster families decided to retain their costs – some shelters report the rates up to 90%. That is a victory, despite the use of the word ‘failed’, it makes the supporter of.
Shaw sees another barrier that stops people from promoting: the idea that it requires special training or skills. That is why she has devoted her life to the training of the public, offering videos, books and research into how it works on her site Kittenlady.org.
Companies are also on board. Hill’s, a pet food company, runs Hill’s Food, Shelter & Love program. It has provided more than $ 300 million in food support to more than 1,000 animal shelters that support promoting in North America.
“About a quarter of a million kittens, unfortunately, unfortunately do not survive every year in our hiding places,” said Shaw. “The asylum will be there to guide and support you. So I think that much of the fear that people have about promoting, they can think it is actually something that you can do completely. It’s just scary because you haven’t done it yet.”
