Cat lovers looking for a fur-ever friend in Dunedin are in luck, with a special kitten adoption day taking place tomorrow.
The charity group Cat Rescue Dunedin has received hundreds of rescued and surrendered cats over the year, and is hoping to find some of the felines a family to love them through the new year — and forever.
Cat Rescue Dunedin board of trustees chairwoman Debby Foster said almost 600 kittens were surrendered in 2022 alone.
"During Covid the vets weren’t doing the fixing and I think we’re paying now for that," she said.
A special adoption day would be held tomorrow, from 1pm at the Animal Attraction store in Crawford St, where 15 kittens would be up for adoption, she said.
"This adoption day is because at some point we’re going to reach saturation, and I just don’t know what we’re going to do."
Cat Rescue’s intake centre in Caversham was originally set up to hold 15 cats before they went out to foster carers, but this was difficult if the animals came in sick.
Ms Foster said she was seeing more dumped domestic cats in the Taieri area, where farmers were often finding the abandoned felines on their property and reporting their finds to Cat Rescue.
"A little sweetie was found out in Taieri by a farmer. He thought she was feral until she just trotted up to him, but she was really, really sick,
"She was all skin and bone, completely emaciated. People just dump them out there and think they'll manage but they don’t," Ms Foster said.
Cat Rescue Dunedin has a dedicated team of fosterers across the city, including students, helping to provide shelter and socialisation for cats and kittens.
However many of the volunteers returned home over the busy summer season during the university break.
"We’ve had one of our students here every day this week, and she would normally do one day a week. It’s not easy," she said.
The rescue had applied for more funding and hoped to have a spay and neuter day in the new year to ensure more cats were not producing more kittens, she said.
There were some large colonies in the Dunedin area which were getting bigger and bigger, but the shelter was already overwhelmed and could not take more in.
"We just don’t have the resources to get stuck in there — it’s a pretty dire situation at this point."
The cost of food and cat litter had risen over the year and the organisation was struggling to keep up with demand, something Ms Foster said affected all rescue groups after Covid-19 and with the cost-of-living crisis.
"Everything’s gone up, and funding has dropped, people are broke — they can’t afford to help out as much as they have."
