WHERE TO ADOPT
Where: Montgomery County Animal Resource Center
Address: 6790 Webster St., Dayton
Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday-Friday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday; 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sunday
Phone: (937) 898-4457
There’s a passel of kittens at the Montgomery County Animal Resource Center. A plethora. An abundance.
Just plain too many.
“Kitten season came late this year,” said director Mark Kumpf. “Spring sprung late and the kitten sea arrived. It’s like a big wave.”
For the first time in at least a decade the number of cats at the animal shelter could surpass the number of dogs, Kumpf said. He said dogs typically have outnumbered cats 2-to-1. But as of Friday afternoon there were 79 dogs and 50 cats, with the number of cats up by about 25 percent over the shelter’s usual August amount.
“We are well over our comfortable capacity,” Kumpf said, adding that he’s heard that other area shelters, including the Humane Society of Greater Dayton and the Society for the Improvement of Conditions for Stray Animals (SICSA) are experiencing the same problem.
To move the cats more quickly to adoptive homes the resource center has cut the price of adopting a cat to $10, which pays for surgery to spay or neuter the cat, vaccinations and a microchip.
Animal Friends Humane Society in Hamilton has done the same thing, said Nancy Patton, receptionist.
“We are pretty full right now,” she said.
Normally, Montgomery County would charge $60 to $80 per cat. Dog adoption prices, which are on a sliding scale ranging from $20 to $500 for highly sought-after dogs, have not changed. The resource center’s $2.4 million budget is covered by dog license fees, contracts with jurisdictions for cats, fees and fines.
Even though the number of cats is unusually high, Kumpf said the center’s overall numbers have dropped dramatically in the past 10 years. He said prior to 2006 the shelter had 10,000-to-12,000 dogs and cats annually — and another 8,000-to-10,000 were in the care of the local SICSA and Humane Society.
Since then the center’s annual number has dropped to 7,000, and another 3,000 are housed by the other two local groups, which with the center formed the Dayton Alliance for Companion Animals several years ago.
Most of the credit for the decrease in overall numbers goes to a mandatory policy of spay and neutering any animal before it leaves the shelter, Kumpf said. Before that change people would get a voucher to have the adopted animal spayed or neutered but many neglected to do it.
That policy helped the alliance reach its 2015 goal of not euthanizing any animal due to lack of space to house it, Kumpf said. He said no cat has been euthanized due to lack of space at the center since 2014, and no dog since 2008.
“We cannot adopt our way out of the situation. There are only so many homes and so many people to adopt,” he said. “Until you start reducing the ability for all those animals to reproduce you don’t really have an impact on the community.”
The cats at the shelter are a combination of strays, lost animals, those whose owners give them up and those confiscated in animal cruelty cases. Some are what he called “the feral fed cat” that lives in a person’s yard, gets fed and keeps having litters until neighbors complain.
“Folks don’t perceive them as owned. (They say) ‘It’s not my cat. I just feed it,’ ” said Kumpf. “Most importantly, it doesn’t get fixed.”
On Friday one cage housed a pile of at least seven kittens curled up together, watched over by a very wary feral mother. Kumpf said staff work hard to socialize the wild kittens and cats so someone will want to adopt them.
“I have some employees who enjoy carrying around little balls of unhappy and before long they become friendly kittens,” Kumpf said. “If the goal is to get adopted, leaving them in a cage with no socialization doesn’t get them there.”
Lisa Blanton of Trotwood was visiting on Friday and spent some time in a cat room where several adult cats lounged about.
“We’re looking right now,” said Blanton, cuddling a big gray tabby. “We have a houseful already. But you never know.”
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