Midcoast animal shelters are overwhelmed with unwanted cats

Animal control officials in the midcoast are urging residents to sterilize their cats and consider adoption after an uptick in the number of free-roaming or unwanted felines that have been taken to overflowing shelters this summer.

The situation has gotten urgent enough that Heidi Anderson Blood, an animal control officer for seven towns in Waldo and Knox counties, issued a warning on Aug. 21 to a Belfast-area Facebook page.

“Notice to all: Please do not trap any cats and call me,” Blood wrote. “Both shelters that I work with are overfull! SPAY/NEUTER! ADOPT! GOT A BARN? ADOPT A WORKING CAT! We seriously cannot save anymore without adoptions!”

In an interview, Blood said that she has resorted to letting homeless animals stay in her own home for up to two days at a time when shelters have had to turn calls away. During a recent 10-day span, she received some 17 calls about cats, she said.

Although the problem is widespread across Blood’s coverage area, one hotspot has been the town of Union, where she has rescued roughly 11 kittens and five pregnant mothers from a dairy farm. Neighbors became aware of the problem when they noticed a growing number of cats on the property.

Those kittens are now being housed at Pope Memorial Humane Society in Thomaston. They are not old enough to be spayed or neutered, but will be given proper vaccines and surgeries before any adoption.

“People who want to get rid of their cats will find a cow farm and think, ‘Oh, cow’s milk! They’ll get well-taken care of, they’ll be well-fed, and we’ll dump them off here!’ They do it every day,” Blood said.

Among the challenges, Blood said, are that stray cats may move into some neighborhoods where they find residents willing to feed but not adopt them. If those stray cats are pregnant and give birth, people may then try to give away the kittens to friends who don’t spay or neuter them either, perpetuating the cycle.

Another issue that’s challenging shelters is the trend of people who adopted animals during the COVID-19 pandemic deciding to surrender them in recent years, due to the increasing costs of taking care of them.

Besides the uptick in reports of stray or surrendered cats, there has also been a decrease in the number of people willing to adopt them, according to Meghan O’Connor, director of PAWS Animal Adoption Center in Camden.

The organization has taken in around 250 cats so far this year, but just 206 have been adopted out. Every cage at PAWS was occupied on Friday, in some cases by more than one cat.

“Instead of going up, adoptions are going down,” O’Connor said.

When people do adopt, they also tend to prefer kittens to older cats: two of three adoptions completed Friday afternoon were of kittens.

Besides straining the resources of shelters, Blood also worries that the proliferation of stray and unvaccinated cats can increase the spread of diseases such as rabies.

She noted that there are some free or low-cost resources available to help people take proper care of their cats on the midcoast.

For example, PAWS offers a “last litter” program, through which pregnant cats can birth their kittens, receive a spaying surgery for free and go home without the babies. Strays can also be trapped, sterilized and released back into the wild.

The Belfast Pet Food Pantry distributes vouchers to cut the costs of surgeries. It and the Waldo County Humane Society also offer free and discounted rabies vaccination clinics throughout the year.

Under Maine law, all cats over three months and dogs over six months of age must be vaccinated against rabies. However, Blood said there aren’t laws that require domesticated animals to be spayed or neutered.