Managing Kitten Season: Challenges for Animal Shelters

TFD – Explore the challenges faced by animal shelters during kitten season and the impact of climate change on feline birth rates.

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Humane Society of America compares this supposedly wonderful time of year to a “natural disaster.” The kitten season.

“The level of emotions for months on end is so draining,” said Ann Dunn, director of Oakland Animal Services, a city-run shelter in the San Francisco Bay Area. “And every year we just know it’s going to get harder.”

Summer is “kitten season” in the United States, which is generally understood to be the warm-weather months from spring to fall when a cat reaches her maximum fertility. Animal shelters around the nation have been observing that the kitten season begins earlier and lasts longer for more than ten years. According to some scientists, the increase in feline birth rates could be caused by the consequences of climate change, which include milder winters and an earlier start to spring.

Dunn’s shelter conducted a clinic for spaying and neutering outdoor cats in February of last year. Despite the fact that Northern California’s kitten season doesn’t normally begin until May, the organizers discovered that more than half of the female cats were already expecting. It’s frightful, Dunn remarked. “It simply keeps happening earlier and later.”

Cats procreate when females enter estrus, also referred to as “going into heat,” when changes in hormones and behavior indicate that the cat is ready for a partner. Cats can go through up to two weeks of heat cycles multiple times a year. However, there is usually an increase in births between April and October. While it’s well established that lengthening daylight triggers a cat’s estrus, the effect of rising temperatures on kitten season isn’t yet understood.

According to one notion, cats may have the means to start mating earlier if winters are milder. According to Christopher Lepczyk, a well-known researcher on free-ranging cats and an ecologist at Auburn University, “no animal is going to breed unless they can survive.” The food supply for outdoor cats might also be growing because warmer weather tends to boost the populations of particular animals, such tiny rodents. As winters get milder, kittens might also have a higher chance of surviving. He argued, “I would argue that temperature really matters.”

Some, like senior strategist Peter J. Wolf of the Best Friends Animal Society, believe that visibility has more to do with the surge than biology. According to Wolf, people might be going outside more and spotting kittens earlier in the year as the weather warms. After that, they put them in shelters, giving rescue organizations the impression that kitten season has arrived sooner than usual.

Whatever the precise cause, an abundance of feral cats is problematic for more than simply animal shelters. Apex predators like cats can seriously damage the biodiversity of the area. According to research, 33 species are thought to have already gone extinct as a result of outdoor cats on islands. Since birds account approximately half of wild cats’ diet, they represent a disproportionate threat. Cats are the most destructive predators of animals in Hawaii, which is dubbed the bird extinction capital of the globe. “We know that cats are an invasive, environmental threat,” said Lepczyk, who has published papers proposing management policies for outdoor cats.

Though they disagree greatly on how to address the issue, scientists, conservationists, and proponents of cats all agree that uncontrolled outdoor cat populations are a concern. Cat populations have been shown to recover swiftly, despite some conservationists advocating for the deliberate killing of individual cats—a practice known as culling—and a single female cat and her progeny can generate hundreds or even thousands of offspring in as little as seven years.

Although sterilization protocols such as “trap, neuter, and release” are favored by many cat rescue organizations, Lepczyk said it’s almost impossible to do it effectively, in part because of how freely the animals roam and how quickly they procreate. After sterilization, cats may have a bad quality of life, spread disease, and continue to harm wildlife if they are left outside without homes or sanctuaries. Lepczyk stated, “It won’t matter what strategy you employ if you can’t stop the flow of new cats into the landscape.”

Rescue shelters are struggling to adjust to their new situation as a result of a lack of resources and veterinarians. Some distribute resources that assist the public in determining when outside kittens require assistance, while others concentrate on finding foster volunteers for programs that become vital to the care of kittens who require round-the-clock attention.

“How do we handle all these tiny lives that need our help as the population keeps growing?” Dunn declared. “Everything we have is going into this.”