The Population Problem

They dart across roads at dusk like four-legged shadows. They slink around our parks, creeks and sewers. Their paws leave prints on our cars in the night. They are the countless undomesticated cats of Los Angeles—and they’re a big problem.

Experts say there are 1-3 million undomesticated cats in LA County and the only cost-effective solution that we’ve found to deal with them is troublingly final: We kill them.

Kiana Lasko, a resident of the University Park neighborhood, speaks of a gray and white feline named Maceio, whom she often sees in her parking lot. “Some woman comes by every day to feed him,” she says.

Shelters euthanize stray cats like Maceio every day because of the size of the stray population and the lack of resources at public shelters. In 2019, shelters in the city of L.A. euthanized 74 percent more kittens than a year earlier. So for every hundred kittens, they killed in 2018, they killed 174 the following year.

The cost isn’t just moral. One shelter’s yearly cost for euthanasia supplies is about $6,000, and that’s just one of shelters in the county. In its 2019-2020 budget Los Angeles County put a price tag on the capture and removal of stray and unwanted cats at nearly $16 million.

In cities like Los Angeles, such a feline toll has to do with the weather, according to Dr. Julie Levy, a professor of Shelter Medicine at the University of Florida. She says that areas with warm climates facilitate cat reproduction, especially among those living on the streets. The “kitten season” lasts up to nine months each year—from February until November with peaks in June and July—when many thousands of kittens are born, resulting in packed public animal shelters.

A network of shelters, activist organizations and small businesses have been working to change this equation, in some cases, for years. How much can they do to flatten the cat-killing curve?

The Final Solution

In Los Angeles, neither city nor county shelters can legally refuse to take in an animal. So they do, and then they euthanize many of them—often to make room for their next ones. County shelters alone kill nearly 13,000 cats annually, according to L.A. County Animal Service Records.

Euthanasia is more graphic than many people realize. Typically, a shelter veterinarian injects a barbiturate-based anesthetic into a cat with a high enough concentration to make the creature overdose. The dying animal often emits a short vocalization before losing consciousness. Some cats then exhibit involuntary muscle contractions, defecate, urinate, or continue to gasp before finally dying a minute or two after the injection.

Why kill such cats? While strays have only a fleeting presence in most of our lives, they urinate or defecate in yards and on porches, and sometimes attack domesticated cats. Sometimes strays carry diseases that transfer to humans.

In an attempt to combat the problem, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced that the 2020 budget will include a $50 million one-time fund allocation to the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program to develop a grant program for animal shelters. The program intends to help local communities achieve a state goal: “No adoptable or treatable dog or cat should be euthanized.”

The Race for Adoption

Shelters try to facilitate a speedy adoption process to create space for incoming cats, but their limited resources often make it difficult to keep up, especially during kitten season. In the summer of 2019, L.A. County Animal Care and Control struggled to keep up with intakes averaging 22 percent higher for kittens and 14 percent higher for cats than previous summers.

Aside from limited resources, a speedy adoption process can provide cats with a healthier environment before they become too sickly for adoption. The dark, congested cages can cause cats to develop depression or contract diseases such as ringworm, upper respiratory infections like Feline Immunodeficiency Virus or Feline Leukemia Virus. 

Although the L.A. County takes in many strays—nearly 24,000 per year, according to its annual shelter report—many workers at shelters say more people abandon their pets than is documented. Some cat owners simply leave their cats behind when they move, or lock them out one day, while others bring their cat—and sometimes her offspring—to the shelter.

“You have people turn in cats that are allegedly stray that people don’t want to abandon [to the streets],” says Alvin Rodriguez, an officer at the Agoura Animal Care Center. “They don’t want to deal with the guilt of, you know, giving up their cat.”

Often times, visitors adopt after seeing rows of cages with scared, sick animals in them. This, coupled with two-for-one adoption deals or the waving of adoption fees encourages people who aren’t ready to adopt cats. Crumbs and Whiskers Cat Cafe manager Carly Oros says shelters urge many people to adopt for the wrong reasons. 

“Maybe you don’t fall in love, but then you immediately feel bad when you leave because you’re like, ‘These cats are going to get euthanized,’” she says. “And [you] immediately feel guilty because you didn’t pick one.”

While animal activists and some journalists hold shelters responsible for high euthanasia numbers, volunteers insist that shelters are scapegoats. The county requires them to maintain an open-door policy for anyone who needs to relinquish their pets, but if people don’t adopt, they ultimately only have one possible solution. 

And the situation may get worse. With pet owners afraid of COVID-19 and limitations on going outside, some shelter employees anticipate the upcoming kitten season will be more challenging than usual because they won’t have enough staff.

“Other years we have a pretty good volunteer system to take care of [the kittens] and get them bottle-fed before they can be adopted,” says officer Rodriguez with a sigh. “But after the Coronavirus, we’re not sure.”

Rescue Centers and Trap-Neuter-Release

Instead of promoting adoption, most private humane organizations seek to prevent cats from reproducing, and they move cats to foster care and rescue centers where they are safer. These locations do not practice euthanasia.

Rescue centers such as Stray Cat Alliance or spcaLA usually visit shelters and pay to adopt the cutest and healthiest cats. Most often, the shelters receive calls requesting Ragdolls and Siamese. Oros, who works closely with Stray Cat Alliance, says they often groom the cats before putting them up for adoption at the rescue center.

Even Lasko was moved to adopt a kitten after seeing the stray cat in her neighborhood. “We adopted [our cat, Minos] from the Annenberg Petspace,” she says. “They take cats and dogs from animal shelters in the area… and they train them and make them look a little bit more presentable so they will be adopted easier.”

Humane organizations and rescue centers often rely on foster parents to care for cats that might not fit at the organization’s adoption center. City Terrace resident Gabrielle Green grew up in a household that sometimes housed 30 cats or more at a time, although it was a gradual process. Growing up with her twin sister, Green remembers playing at her neighbor’s house when she and her sister discovered two cats—one male and the other female. “They had babies... and I think my mom at the time didn’t really know what to do about it.” Eventually, Green says, her family started rescuing cats.

Soon, Green remembers, people began to ring the family’s doorbell and leave cats on the porch. In return for creating a safe indoor and outdoor space for the tabbies, FixNation began to give the Green family supplies to care for the cats, which eventually numbered in the dozens.

But relocation has its limits. The Animal Humane Society reports that about 70,000 kittens and puppies are born in the US each day—that’s 10 times the number of humans born every 24 hours. With such birth rates, there will never be enough households for such four-legged creatures unless every family in the country becomes as cat-centric as the Greens. That’s why so many organizations have put in place trap-neuter-release programs. The goal is to prevent more of those stray cats from reproducing after they mate.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals discourage “trap-neuter-re-abandon” programs, arguing that they do nothing to “protect cats from the horrors that befall them when left outdoors to battle harsh surroundings, sickness, and sadistic people.”

The no-holds-barred animal rights group produced an extremely graphic video depicting the horrors some stray cats endure—including severe injuries and infections—to discourage further trapping, neutering and releasing. “While you’re sitting at home watching this with your cat purring on your lap,” the video announcer says, “homeless cats are out there on the streets, fighting a daily battle for survival that they will ultimately lose.”

The euthanasia-versus-trap/neuter/release debate can to some extent be boiled down to whether or not we should peacefully euthanize cats, or have a longer but troubled life.

But perhaps there is another way.

How Cats Are Helping to Save Themselves

Crumbs & Whiskers Cat Cafe in West Hollywood is a boutique that temporarily houses about 25 cats, and its staff invites locals to come in and relax among them their potential four-legged friends.

Between the allure of the aesthetic study spaces and celebritiy visits by the likes of Drew Barrymore and Bella Thorne who are drawn to the potential adoptees, the place shows signs of success. During its grand opening, the Los Angeles location earned $22,000 in revenue from donations and merchandise sales.

Oros says the cafe lets visitors hang out with cats for a fee ranging from $15 to $40, rather than taking a salesperson-oriented approach common to shelters. Visitors have traveled across the country to pay to play with their Instagram-famous cats for periods of 15 minutes to an hour or more.

 “It's more like get to know this cat because there might be something about this cat that you really gravitate towards,” Oros says. “We do what we call ‘cat-roductions,’ which means we bring cats around and we'd tell people a little bit about their back-stories so that hopefully they happen to fall in love that way.”

The cafe doesn’t profit off adoption fees—the money is passed on to Stray Cat Alliance so they can continue to afford adopting and rescuing shelter cats from euthanasia. Crumbs & Whiskers does profit from customers who pay to play with the cats.

While Crumbs & Whiskers is the first “cat café" in Los Angeles, the CatCafe Lounge is the county’s first and only nonprofit cat cafe. They too work directly with Stray Cat Alliance to pull cats from shelters.

There are more traditional variations on the model. Best Friends Animal Society’s Working Cats Program provides a useful role for even feral, or unsocialized, cats from shelters. The program, which operates in the Flower District of Downtown Los Angeles, allows business-owners to adopt cats to provide rodent control.

As with the county shelters, Crumbs & Whiskers is not immune to the strain on small businesses caused by COVID-19. The cafe closed its doors to the public in early March, and it has been relying on merchandise sales and donations to try to survive. And then there is the challenge of signing up volunteers in the middle of a pandemic for the coming kitten season.

In the big picture, Oros suggests, such efforts need to be scaled up greatly. “I know that the cats won't stop what they're doing, that's for sure,” she says. “There's not going to be as many hands on deck, but I do know... rescue doesn't stop. Rescue doesn't stop.”