Rescue Math, or why we probably can't take in the cat you emailed us about

Like all no-kill rescues, Cat Angels gets many requests to take in animals. It is important for people requesting us, or any other rescue group, to take in animals to understand some basics about how no-kill rescues work and what the limits are.

All no-kill rescues have a maximum capacity. This maximum capacity is determined by many things including financial resources to care for animals, foster space for foster groups, or space in the facility for a group with a shelter facility. Shelter facilities, like Cat Angels, are licensed by the NC Department of Agriculture. This license sets limits on how many cats we can have in our facility. Like all other rescues, we operate full all the time because we don't want to turn any away if we can help.

This means we do not have open space available waiting for someone to email us to take one or more cats. We have to adopt out a cat to make room for a new cat. In other words, in a given year, intakes cannot exceed adoptions.

What do those limits look like in the real world? On average Cat Angels adopts out approximately 175 cats per year. This averages out to roughly one adoption every other day. It's important to note that this is an average over a year and that adoptions fluctuate. In some months, especially summer months, adoptions are extremely slow and there may be only 5-10 adoptions in some months.

By contrast we get 2-5 requests to take in animals every single day. Many of those requests are for more than one cat as well.

So over an average week we will adopt out 3-4 cats and people will request that we take in 15 or more. You can see that these numbers don't work and we can't take in the vast majority of cats that people ask us to help with.

What about a waiting list? You can see from the above numbers that if we put everyone that we couldn't help onto a waiting list, it would grow by over 10 cats a week or over 500 cats after a year. This is unmanagable and there would be no realistic prospect of animals on the list getting in any time soon. Other groups may have waiting lists, but most of them close their lists when they reach a maximum size.

All the no-kill rescues are in the same situation. Some may have more capacity than others and some may have foster networks and therefore might be able to help if you are willing to foster the animal until it is adopted (note that Cat Angels is not a foster organization and so we can't offer that). However the simple truth is that there is no spare no-kill capacity out there to take in cats that people want to get rid of quickly.

This is why it is critically important for people with "problem" cats to work to solve those problems instead of get rid of them. And people who find strays need to work to find their homes or rehome them themselves.