Animal Welfare Professionals

Which do you do for healthy, weaned, adoptable kittens?

Since I don't actually work in a shelter I didn't want to skew the poll; however I did want to chime in on the topic. Keeping kittens out of the shelter should always be the number one goal to avoid exposure to infectious disease.  Adopting kittens out of their foster home is great, but if you have a lot of people coming to the shelter looking for kittens you could always have fosters drop off for the day and if they aren't adopted have them picked back up. Offsite partnerships are great too such as Petco, Petsmart, PetSupermarket, PetSense since there are fewer pets housed there and usually a lot of people visiting the store who may never step foot in your shelter.  Another thing to keep in mind is that adoption fees should be kept low so that they are adopted quickly and that the process is streamlined to make it easy for adopters to bring home their new pet. The longer you hold onto these kittens, the more likely they will get sick so removing barriers is key.

I will also answer the poll - but the answer is “it depends.”

The way the poll is written, it looks like this is asking about kittens that arrive to the shelter at healthy adoptable weight. Our adoption turn around on those in the shelter is currently 5 days or less (if we have to hold stray time, then to be altered, etc). Our fosters are needed for things that come in underweight/underage or sick. Right now, 99% of our kittens that come in underage/weight are getting adopted out of the foster homes and only enter the shelter clinic for vx and sx, never have to stay at the shelter.

it’s not worth it to send our “ready to go” kittens to foster, market them back out of foster, reschedule surgery, etc when we can move them in/out of the system faster if they stay with us.  

I chose Other because before COVID we did both. If they came in at-weight they would stay at the shelter and would go home within a few days. If they were in foster care because they were too small then they could return to foster care after their surgery for adoption. Now everyone is in foster care since our shelter is still closed to the public.