Long Beach residents are likely to hear soft mews coming from under cars or homes and almost guaranteed to spot a couple of felines darting across streets searching for food—it’s kitten season.
On the surface, it may seem like an unwelcome nuisance for people from March through October, but it is proving to be an unprecedented problem for local cat rescues and organizations.
As the Long Beach Animal Care Services continues to operate at full capacity—only taking in animals that are sick and injured—healthy kittens with no place to go are being funneled to nonprofit and volunteer organizations at an alarming rate.
“It’s made the numbers unprecedented this year,” said Brandy Gaunt, founder of Jellicle Cats, a nonprofit cat and kitten rescue in Long Beach. “I mean, every day on Facebook, I got 100 emails a day, 25 Facebook messages to my rescue page. And then there’s just hundreds of posts.”
Gaunt has been rescuing cats for 28 years through a process called trap and release, or TNR. After years of luring cats into cages and taking them to a shelter to get vaccinated, microchipped and spayed or neutered out of her own pocket, Gaunt decided to create a nonprofit from her passion for felines.
She operates the foundation in addition to her day job as an aerospace engineer, and teaches people how to safely deal with stray cats or kittens they may find. The numbers of strays found as well as pet surrenders have increased since the pandemic, she said, a problem that she and her community of volunteers are struggling to keep up with—and she’s not the only one.
“I’m inundated by shelter emails, from Long Beach and others of just kitten after kitten after kitten and especially some of the county shelters,” said Deborah Felin, a member with the Helen Sanders Cat Paw Foundation.
She said the problem began when shelters had to close their doors due to COVID, “turning cats away for months” and allowing them to breed with no interference over the winter.
“And what we’re facing now is the inevitable consequence of that,” Felin said.
Gaunt blames this year’s problems on a mixture of events, mostly uncontrollable, that have resulted in “this overwhelming tsunami” for the rescues in the city.
“There’s a lot of networking in the rescue community, you know, but right now networking isn’t really doing any of us much good right now, because we’re all drowning,” Gaunt said.
City resources for stray cats strained during pandemic
The pandemic forced many animal clinics and rescues into either permanent closures or limited capacity—treating sick and injured animals, but offering no spay-neuter services for healthy cats. This was one of the main factors that are now causing the overwhelming stray population.
“During this time, you know, we’re not able to take in healthy stray cats,” said Staycee Dains, director of Long Beach Animal Care Services. “So we have to really reserve our handling resources to animals who need it the most, so animals that are sick or injured or in need of urgent medical attention.”
Due to staffing shortages, the shelter has been operating at full capacity for a couple of months now, according to Dains. As of June 16, she said the facility had “at least” 111 dogs in their care, with only 99 kennels.
“There’s a confluence of factors really, […] I think one of the biggest is the lack of accessible and affordable spay-neuter resources for people. I mean, that’s where it all starts. That’s the beginning and the end of it. We can’t adopt our way out of what we’re facing right now.”
—Deborah Felin, a member with the Helen Sanders Cat Paw Foundation.
“When we say at capacity, it’s not just about having an animal in every cage. It’s also about having enough people at the shelter to care for those animals,” Dains said. “So we do have a couple of empty cages here and there, but even if they did have animals in them, the staff levels that we would need to care for every animal in a cage is—we’re not there. We’re definitely not there.”
Neighboring cities in Orange County are experiencing similar space and resource issues, as Spectrum News reported that Orange County Animal Care Services was operating at full capacity earlier this month.
Dains said the community can help by not bringing animals into the shelter, but instead working to find the animal’s owner. She said the shelter does not “have the ability to care for” healthy stray animals people find.
“It is very common that people sort of expect animal control to take in cats but there is no legal requirement in the state of California to do that,” Dains said.
The shelter currently has five full-time animal care attendants, two experts from independent organizations—one of which is leaving at the end of June—and a rotating group of volunteers who mainly socialize the animals, clean out their kennels and feed them twice a day.
The shelter has closed down the volunteer program until they can hire a coordinator to train new people, Dains said. They are currently reviewing applications for the job.
As people come across newborn kittens or helpless strays in their neighborhood, they often take to social media to offer the animals up for adoption. When that doesn’t yield results quick enough, many people go to Animal Care Services looking for help.
Dains says the shelter just hired a new Foster Coordinator at the beginning of March, which she hopes will help move animals out of the facility quicker “so that we can expand those other programs, but these things take time,” Dains said.
“There’s a confluence of factors really, […] I think one of the biggest is the lack of accessible and affordable spay-neuter resources for people,” Felin said. “I mean, that’s where it all starts. That’s the beginning and the end of it. We can’t adopt our way out of what we’re facing right now.”
Last year, the city tried to remedy the problem by offering $100 vouchers to residents hoping to spay or neuter animals they find. According to Dains, the program was able to issue vouchers successfully for three months before falling behind on applications. The program’s “lag time has increased exponentially,” taking months for a person applying to receive their voucher, she said.
“I wouldn’t call it a waitlist necessarily, but yes, there’s definitely a large gap of time between the requests that they make [and getting a voucher],” Dains said. “And again, that relates back to staffing at the shelter.”
She explained there is one person in charge of processing vouchers for the city, the same person who is also answering all calls for the shelter.
Foundations urge the city to step in with affordable resources
According to Gaunt, there are currently about 40 mainly donation-funded foundations in the city that provide Long Beach residents with a variety of services from free spay-neuter, microchipping, adoption and fostering services, TNR, flea treatment and more. These services are either offered for free or paid for through donations.
Animal Care Services sometimes reserves surgery spaces for cats brought in from a handful of local groups they work with, “because they come in and they leave really quickly,” Dains explained. She said they are able to provide these services to “about six to 10 cats a week.” The rest are referred to local organizations, she said.
Some organizations, like the Little Lion Foundation in Long Beach, have begun focusing their services on other counties due to their “frustration” with the lack of city aid.
Claudia Otis, executive director of the foundation, said they began focusing their efforts on Orange County due to “the lack of partnership” from city-run Animal Care Services for the past three years.
The foundation began in 2019 and currently has 50-75 volunteers with 203 cats in rescue as of June 20, according to Otis.
“They’ve been saying for almost three years now that it’s because of a lack of staff and because of COVID and because of this and because of that, but you know, we’re still having to operate,” Otis said.
She said even if the voucher program was successful, $100 toward a $300 to $400 surgery for each animal “helps, yes, it helps but it doesn’t.” The lack of affordable spay-neuter, she said, is just one reason animals end up back on the street.
“That’s just one small part of it. I think the TNR is very important. Having a robust adoption and foster program at our shelter. So there’s a lot of components to this,” Otis said. “And we’re never going to fully fix the problem but with all of that you can drastically reduce it. We’re going backwards. I don’t know how we’re going to create the change other than to start going to city council.”
Animal Care Services is funded by the City of Long Beach.
A 2018 audit of Animal Care Services found that “a lack of resources, including limited staffing levels, has resulted in ACS operating beyond its capacity,” and stated that once a vision and strategy were implemented, “appropriate resources should be aligned with service goals and objectives.”
In 2018, the department had a budget of $5 million. This fiscal year, the department has a budget of $4.3 million—a 16.3% decrease.
“I know how hard our staff work. I know how hard our volunteers work. I know how hard all of us work and how much we sacrifice personally and professionally to do this work in an animal shelter,” Dains said. “If there’s a problem in society, we are absolutely on the solution side of the equation. We are not on the problem side of the equation, because all that does is serve to hurt these animals further.”
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