Welcome to kitten season, when animal shelters need all the help they can get

NBC News

06-06-2025

NEW YORK — Strawberry, Blueberry, JoJo and Mazzy were about 6 weeks old when animal rescuers coaxed them out of long metal pipes in the parking lot of a storage unit company. Meatball was a single kitten living in a cold garage with a group of semi-feral adult cats.
Spaghetti, Macaroni and Rigatoni, meanwhile, were just 2 weeks old when the good folks of LIC Feral Feeders, a cat rescue in Queens, took them in and bottle-fed them until they were strong enough to survive.
Consider these cuties the face of kitten season 2025.
Kitten season, typically landing during warmer months, is the time of year when most cats give birth. That produces a surge of kittens, often fragile neonates. Shelters get overwhelmed, especially when it comes to the 24-hour care and feeding of extremely young kittens.
That, as a result, triggers a need for more foster homes because many of the 4,000 or so shelters in the U.S. don't have the time or resources for around-the-clock care, said Hannah Shaw, an animal welfare advocate known as the Kitten Lady with more than a million followers on Instagram.
"We see about 1.5 million kittens entering shelters every year. And most of them will come into shelters during May and June," she said. "Shelters need all hands on deck to help out through fostering."
Familiarity with fostering animals is high, Shaw said. The act of doing it is a different story. There's a false perception, she said, that the expense of fostering animals falls on the people who step up to do it. These days, many shelters and rescues cover the food, supplies and medical costs of fostering.
"A lot of people don't foster because they think it's going to be this huge cost, but fostering actually only costs you time and love," she said.
Lisa Restine, a Hill's Pet Nutrition veterinarian, said people looking to adopt kittens should take pairs since cats often bond early in life. And how many cats is too many cats per household?
"This is nothing serious or medical but my general rule of thumb is the number of adults in the house, like a 2-to-1 ratio, because you can carry one cat in each hand, so if there are two adults you can have four cats and still be sane," she said.
Square footage to avoid territory disputes is a good rule of thumb when planning for cats, Restine said. Two cats per 800 square feet then 200 square feet more for each addition should help, she said.
Littermates, like Macaroni and Rigatoni, are much more likely to bond, Restine said. Kittens not biologically related but raised together often bond as well — like Meatball and Spaghetti. But adopters hoping to bond an adult cat with a new kitten arrival may be disappointed.
"Once they're over that 3- or 4-month mark, it's hard to get that true bonding," Restine said.
Typically, kittens stay in their foster homes from a few weeks to a few months. While statistics are not kept on the number of kitten fosters that "fail" — when foster families decided to keep their charges — some shelters report rates as high as 90%. That's a win, despite use of the word "fail," advocates note.
Shaw sees another barrier holding people back from fostering: the notion that it requires special training or skills. That's why she has dedicated her life to educating the public, offering videos, books and research on how it works at her site kittenlady.org.
Companies are coming on board, too. Hill's, a pet food company, runs the Hill's Food, Shelter & Love program. It has provided more than $300 million in food support to over 1,000 animal shelters that support fostering in North America.
"About a quarter of a million kittens, unfortunately, don't survive in our shelters every year," Shaw said. "The shelter's going to be there to mentor and support you. So I think a lot of the fear that people have about fostering, they might find that actually it is something you totally can do. It's just scary because you haven't done it yet."