We have some 5-week-old kittens through a feral mother cat who gave birth to them on our back porch. We will be able to keep a couple of the kittens but will have to find homes for the others. What is the best way to do this? We live in a fairly large city and haven’t lived here that long so don’t have a lot of friends. I work at home so don’t have any local coworkers to ask and don’t get out much. We have some family in the area but they are already full up on pets of their own.
Taking the kittens to a city shelter would really be the final, most repulsive option. If we use Craigslist…well, my mother is convinced we’ll be murdered. :rolleyes: Also, we do want to find someone who really wants a kitten, not someone who’ll think it’s cute when it’s little and then get bored of it later and forget about it.
I know this is long and I sound very picky and impossible to please. It’s just that we’ve gotten attached to the little dumplings and the time is coming to part with some of them yet we don’t really know where they’re going to be going and it’s a stressful time. Has anyone here done this before? Maybe have some tips or wisdom to impart?
Rather than a city shelter look into finding a private rescue cat shelter that can take them. They’re usually always no-kill and the people who run them do it out of love for animals. They will still request a donation for taking them. Some may require it, but this is hardly unreasonable.
Can you foster them? If you can foster them and hang on to them, the private rescue that Hail Ants recommends would be grateful - they’ll do all the work of advertising and screening. Private rescue is the bomb.
Second this. The local one we’ve used has arrangements with a local vet for shots and spay/neuter plus a free exam and gift card good at the vet’s practice.
The City Shelter is not necessarily a repulsive option, unless of course you happen to know that to be true for *your *city shelter…our local shelter does a great job of placing animals, and works very closely with a number of rescue organizations to foster pets from the shelter when needed. It’s a long, long way from “the Pound” that a lot of us remember from our youth
If it’s really not a reasonable option for you, then that’s that, but don’t simply rule it out if you haven’t looked into it.
You might try taking out an ad in the newspaper, but give the ad a twist. I remember years ago, hearing about an ad in which a person advertised: “Free to a good home, four adorable kittens, and one ugly one.”
They meant it as a joke, but it got people’s attention. People called wanting to see them, and they showed up, all of them asking, “Which one is the ugly one?”
So they pointed to one,* any *one; it’s the runt, its markings aren’t symmetrical… whatever. Without fail, the people chose the ugly one. New people showed up, asking which was the ugly one, so they chose another.
They gave away all five “ugly” kittens!!
Which makes sense… they gave the people a story to tell about their new kitten. They made the people think they were doing a good deed, taking the ugly one. Gave them a little sense of superiority, seeing the beauty that someone else had missed. And each person knew that their new kitten was special!!
We are in the San Antonio, TX area. If there were a private rescue group around here that could find homes while we foster, that would be fantastic. It would be difficult for us but I think we could do it if we knew there would be an end in sight. Of course fostering means more time for us to get attached to the little boogers and a harder time saying goodbye to the ones we give away, but it sounds like a good option. I haven’t found much so far - everything I’ve found seems to take cats/kittens from shelters, not from private homes.
We’re supposed to be a no-kill city but I’m not quite clear on everything. My mother was told that adult cats are still euthanized, so we were afraid that if the kittens were unlucky enough not to be adopted as kittens, they could still end up killed.
The idea with fostering is that the management of the adoption would still be done through the shelter, but you provide space and training for the kittens until an adoption is made.
My local shelter has a section for “special adoptions” most of which seem to be cats which are currently being fostered due to their special needs. Some of the cats from the regular section are fostered kittens.
A diner in Virginia has a sign informing customers that unattended toddlers will be given espresso and a free kitten. I don’t know if they got any serious inquiries along with the requests for a copy of the sign to take back home, but it might be worth a try.
Are you on FB? Try putting their pics on FB, and asking for others to “share” it. Also you might search for a local pets page on FB. We have a few local pets pages around here where people post missing/found/for adoption pets.
You might also want to post their pics on here. Dopers are softies when it comes to kittens.
From what I’ve been told, you’re better off requiring a “rehoming fee”, to make sure the person is serious about adopting one. “Free Kittens” usually end up in the situations you’re dreading – or worse.
Thank you so much for taking those kittens in. I know how easy it is to get attached to them. I am not near you, but have heard that the San Antonio Human Society has a great no-kill rate.
I know nothing about them, but as soon as PHS notified me about your post, I looked them up and made some phone calls.
I’d really suggest that you call them first. From what I understand, they have all of their critters fixed and vetted before being put up for adoption. Early spay/neuter is easier on them than waiting until they are old enough to get the bad habits that come with sexual maturity. When cats start spraying or yowling is when people get tired of them and dump them.
If its possible for you to trap the mama and have her fixed, there are low cost options for ferals in your city, that would stop her from leaving more kittens on your porch.
The SAHS will probably lend you a trap and give you wonderful tips about trapping her. I’d be happy to do the same, I’ve trapped a few cats over the years. (Actually, if you can get a trap now, the kittens are about the best bait ever. Put the kittens in a carrier at the closed end of the trap, cover the trap while being careful to not interfere with the mechanism and she will probably remember them and go straight in.) Our rescue group always wants the mama and kittens to stop mama from making more kittens.
Oh, flatlined, any tips you have about trapping the mama cat for a trip to get spayed would be priceless to us. That’s been a big concern. It’s our understanding that once she stops nursing, she can become pregnant again almost instantly, and that’s definitely something we want to prevent. The kittens will be 6 weeks on Tuesday and we’re not sure when we can do the spaying without cutting the kittens off from nursing too early. We have already been feeding them some formula mixed with soft kitten food starting at 5 weeks but they do also still nurse.
The mama cat is very skittish. We can feed her and she actually does let us pick up her kittens, but we cannot pet her, pick her up or anything like that. We were going to take her to SNAP to get her spayed but she can’t eat anything overnight so she will be stuck in the trap all night and it’s going to be a big ordeal for her.
We still have not found any takers for the kittens, either so far.