About fifty cats, including 23 kittens, have been found at the northeast Georgia home of a couple in their mid-80s, officials said.
LifeLine Animal Project spokeswoman Karen Hirsch said the couple’s daughter reached out to local organizations for help on Monday. The woman’s parents started feeding stray cats about a year ago. Over the next year, those female cats had dozens of kittens, Hirsch said.
Authorities were able to rescue all but seven of the approximately 50 cats. They are trying to recover the ones that remain on the property.
Credit: LifeLine Animal Project
Credit: LifeLine Animal Project
Juliet Clark of Cats and Dogs of Georgia is fixing and releasing the adult cats, but LifeLine took the 16 kittens. All need veterinary care.
“We desperately need foster homes for them, because we are almost out of space in our isolation ward at the clinic and the kittens need to be separated from other cats,” Hirsch said.
People interested in opening up their homes to a kitten via fostering should visit LifeLineAnimal.org/fostercats and select the Community Animal Center as the location.
Authorities do not anticipate filing charges against the couple.
Anyone who has feral cats on their property that would like to keep the cats from reproducing should consider LifeLine’s TNR (trap, neuter, release) program. “Feral cats are never good candidates for adoption because they usually cannot be tamed if they are over 3 months old. At most shelters, particularly rural ones, feral cats are killed upon arrival,” LifeLine program Director Gin Taylor said.
“Since LifeLine manages Fulton’s and Dekalb’s county shelters, TNR rather than euthanisia is the standard response to feral and stray cats in those counties,” Taylor said. LifeLine loans traps to people interested in the TNR program along with easy trapping instructions. For more information or to get started with the TNR process, contact CommunityCats@LifeLineAnimal.org.
In other news:
Credit: Georgia Tech Athletics
About the Author
