As kitten season arrives, ‘Bottle Baby Brigade,’ scores of fosters are keeping baby felines fed

As the weather around Southern California starts to dry out and warm up, animal-care agencies and rescues from across Southern California are bracing for an onslaught of newborn kittens to come through their doors.

Kitten season, as its known by those who work in animal care, is a months-long timetable that usually kicks off in the spring when endless new litters of infant felines are born and, inevitably, brought to local shelters.

And though most animal lovers may rejoice at the thought of thousands of newborn kittens frolicking around their yards — the reality of kitten season is often more bleak.

“Kittens can actually start producing (more) kittens at six months old — biologically at four, but often we see it start around six, and they can have three litters a year,” said Long Beach Animal Care Services bureau manager Melanie Wagner. “Exponentially, kittens are made very very quickly.”

“With the nice weather, wildlife breeds. It’s the same thing for cats,” said Santa Ana-based rescue Cali’s Misfits CEO and co-founder Carla Etzold. “Cats who are unfixed on the streets or unfixed and owned, but on the streets, they just breed prolifically. t’s just the massive influx of underage kittens.”

Though most kittens are likely to survive when they’re in the constant care of their mother, it’s a different story for the thousands that end up orphans each year.

Newborn kittens need feedings every two to four hours to survive — round-the-clock care that most shelters don’t have the capacity to offer.

“We end up with a lot of motherless neonates in our care,” Wagner said. “Why that is so hard on shelters, in general, is they need feeding every two to four hours. We cannot leave them alone at night or they will starve to death.”

Complicating the scenario: The deepening need for bottle-feeding “foster pet parents.”

Kevin McManus, spokesperson for Pasadena Humane, said kitten season is always “all hands on deck.” In addition to staff efforts, the Pasadena agency has about 70 kittens currently out at foster homes.

Ana Bustilloz, spokesperson for the spcaLA, said the spcaLA South Bay Pet Adoption Center in Hawthorne has placed 25 kittens with foster volunteers, even though Kitten season isn’t in full swing yet, in addition to kittens on site.

Fosters can be tough to find “because people do like to sleep,” McManus said.

It’s not as tough as it sounds, he added. The overnight stint isn’t as grueling, he said, as, say caring for a newborn human. After all, three-week old kittens  “don’t do much besides eat and sleep and poop,” he said.

Still, foster homes can be hard to find. The alternative, sadly, can be grim. In Long Beach, for example, around 400 newborn kittens are euthanized each kitten season, LBACS’ Wagner said, simply because there aren’t enough resources available to care for them — and letting them starve to death overnight is a far less humane option.

Often, timing can be the biggest challenge — such as when a litter of newborns is brought into the shelter towards the end of the day, when it is ultimately more difficult to find fosters who can provide round-the-clock care for the kittens, or if they’re brought in just before a weekend.

“Where we run into those issues is that gap — that one- to three-day gap,” Wagner said, “where we just need to buy kittens some time.”

And though the Long Beach shelter currently partners with various rescues — including the Little Lion Foundation — to temporarily foster and care for hundreds of their newborn kittens, there still aren’t enough resources available to care for every single kitten.

“(Little Lion Foundation) takes 500 kittens from us and put take them into their into their rescue — that means they’re responsible for adopting out those kittens, too,” Wagner said. “So they just can’t take that gap of kittens that we have during kitten season — it’s too much pressure on a rescue.”

But Wagner and LBACS have launched a new program — a first of its kind for the city — aimed at bridging that gap completely and preventing any kittens from being euthanized for lack of resources.

Dubbed the Bottle Baby Brigade, the program is a new partnership between LBACS and the Little Lion Foundation that will employ a team of emergency fosters to take temporary care for the kittens that can’t be taken in elsewhere.

“The idea is that late in the day or after hours, our officers will be calling Little Lion directly, (who will) reach out to their emergency foster team,” Wagner said, “who will hold on to those kittens for us for one to three days.”

That new system, Wagner said, will free up time for LBACS’ foster coordinator to find those kittens a more long-term foster until they’re old enough to be adopted out to a permanent home.

“I like to call our Bottle Baby Brigade a ‘kitten cushion,’” Wagner said, “Like a pillow that they get to rest on for a minute before they go somewhere else.”

The program is grant funded with donations from two other animal rescue organizations, Best Friend Animal Society and Kitten Lady, according to Wagner.

For now, the emergency foster teams will only be available through Little Lion as the Baby Bottle Brigade program gets off its feet, Wagner said.

“I think if it works and we see a positive impact,” Wagner said, “in future years, we can look at expanding this into a bigger, broader program with other rescues.”

And though the term “kitten season” denoted a finite period of time that rescues see and influx of newborns — Wagner said that the season is essentially year-round in California, and they could always use extra help from the community.

“Pretty much we’re gonna break at Christmas,” Wagner said. “In the past we used to see it slow down in September or October — now, we’re seeing it slow down much later in the year.” All told, LBACS typically takes in about 1,200 to 1,400 kittens each season.

The Bottle Baby Brigade, meanwhile, is a short-term fostering opportunity that typically won’t last more than three days. Animal rescue agencies, Wagner said, would also benefit from more long-term fosters.

“Fostering in general is incredibly impactful for us,” Wagner said, “especially during these busy months — it makes kennel space available to be able to help more kittens coming in.”

Another key piece of the kitten season issue — one that many people tend to overlook — is ensuring that pets and street cats alike are fixed.

“The more cats we have fixed, the less cats are mating — and that that is how we solve this problem.”

Many shelters offer aid programs to help pay for spaying and neutering. LBACS, for example, offers up to five $100 vouchers.

“The community can help us, because we can’t go out and fix every cat,” Wagner said. “To me, that is that is the biggest thing that we can work on as a community — is fixing every community cat.”

Also, many shelters are constantly in need of various supplies — especially for newborn cats who need bottle-feeding — ranging from milk replacement and heading pads to blankets and food.

“If somebody really wants to make an impact for bottle babies,” Wagner said, “they can donate those supplies to us, so they can go to the fosters that help us.”

For now, the most compelling for shelters as spring arrives: Get the babies fed.

Pasadena Humane’s McManus has taken in three fur babies himself for round-the-clock feedings. He set an alarm for every three hours, fed each one, plopped them in the litter box and that was it. Back to bed.

“For me it’s just super rewarding to see them gain weight and get a little bit more active,” McManus said.

By the end of the foster stint, McManus said, the kittens bonded to him and started chasing him around.

“Their little personality starts to come out,” he said. “But, of course, once they’re adopted, you breathe a sigh of relief.”

More information about LBACS’ fostering, spay and neuter vouchers, and needed donation items is available on their website, longbeach.gov/acs. To volunteer to be a foster in the Pasadena area, visit pasadenahumane.org/volunteer. In the Hawthorne area, folks who are interested in fostering can start the process to become a volunteer at spcaLA.com/foster.

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Staff writers Destiny Torres, Tyler Evains and Lisa Jacobs contributed to this report. 

Source: Orange County Register