Animal Welfare Professionals

Our Catty Litter program has been very successful, but I believe it will be a seasonal offering.  Early this year, some of us were brainstorming ideas to save the second wave of kittens in Arkansas.  We experience full kitten season starting in March.  Since most of our low cost spay/neuter organizations require kittens to be 3 months old, kittens (and mom/baby sets) usually take up foster homes for 2 to 3 months minimum. When our second wave of kittens hit, the foster homes are full.  Many of these kittens (or even mom/baby sets) are euthanized in our shelters or rejected due to closed intake at rescues.

CART has several destination partners within a 6–10-hour drive; these partners have in-house (or ready-access) spay/neuter operations.  They have plenty of kitten foster homes available, but their kitten season starts later than in Arkansas.  We created this program and signed up 5 partners within this distance.  The attached diagram shows how we determine eligible cats.

In the last month, we've limited the program to those kittens and mom/baby sets that only need another 2 weeks in the partner's foster home before they can be spayed/neutered and adopted.  Several of our partners market these kittens while in foster care, so they are pre-adopted prior to their surgery!

In three months (April through June) we transported over 60 cats/kittens under the program.  However, most of our partners are now focusing on their own kitten season, so they don't have capacity at this point.