A kitten nursery saves tiny lives
This city is aiming to become ‘no-kill’
Sophia Lim, a volunteer at Mission Hills’ Best Friends Animal Society in California, knows the routine. Hands clad in blue surgical gloves on a spring afternoon, she gingerly weighs a 4-week-old beige kitten named Osbourne on a small tabletop scale, then places him belly-down on her chest and holds a travel shampoo-sized bottle to his lips. A few minutes later, she moves on to one of the other 81 unweaned kittens who needed to eat.
“Sometimes I can’t believe how many kittens come in here,” said Sophia Lim, a nurse who regularly drives 33 miles from her home to help keep baby cats alive.
The shelter in the Mission Hills area houses one of this city’s half-dozen neonatal kitten nurseries, all of which have sprung up in recent years as part of an ambitious bid to lower euthanasia rates at six municipal facilities.
Now the “live save rate,” is in the mid-80s. And the goal is to reach 90 percent by year’s end, which would make this the nation’s largest “no-kill” city — where only very ill or dangerous animals are put down.
Yet while cats can be harder to place, one demographic is a clear exception — those between 8 weeks and about 5 months of age. So despite the incredible manpower kitten nurseries require, the idea is gaining traction among shelter experts, and operations are now found in cities including Austin and New York.
“It was clear that one of the best ways to raise our live save rate was to save these bottle babies,” said Brenda Barnette, the general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services.
→ Although shelter euthanasia rates are falling nationwide, felines, many of them young, still make up nearly 60 percent of animals killed, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
→ In 2011, Los Angeles city shelters killed nearly 7,300 kittens, or about 8 of every 10 admitted.
→ Before the kitten nursery effort began, in 2012, about 57 percent of animals left the shelters alive.
→ The number of kittens euthanized was down to 2,642 last year, in part because of the nursery where Lim volunteers. It is in a public facility managed by the Utah-based Best Friends Animal Society, which partnered with the city to lead the no-kill campaign, and it pulls unweaned kittens from shelters across Los Angeles.
“If you invest in this population, you will see a return, because people want kittens,” said Matt Bershadker, the president and chief executive of the ASPCA, which runs the New York City nursery. “There’s an outlook for these animals.”
The outlook is less clear for some of the center’s other creatures: ferals. Stray-cat management is a hugely controversial topic that pits wildlife and environment groups against companion-animal organizations.
The debate has led to an eight-year state of limbo in Los Angeles. A 2010 court injunction, sparked by a lawsuit filed by wildlife groups that said such trap-neuter-return programs violated California environmental law, has prevented officials from leading or funding them. The city now has an $800,000 study in the works on the environmental impact of sterilizing this population, which Barnette hopes will lead to a reversal of the injunction.
The staff took in 23 kittens in January but 646 in May. By December, the annual count is expected to surpass a record 3,000. Some 2,600 kittens came through in 2016.
Helping keep them fed is a volunteer corps of about 80, who work two-hour shifts weighing kittens, taking notes on their eating habits and mixing gruel for those more than a month or so old. The organization spends about $6 million a year on the nursery and other programs to lower the city’s euthanasia rates.
Several hundred “fosters” also care for unweaned kittens at home. Lim, who was in the midst of a week off from work last month, said she had two of those kittens at her house. She’d fed them at 1 a.m. and again four hours later.
“So this is how I spend my vacation,” she laughed.
Original story by The Washington Post’s Karen Brulliard.
