I used to hate cats.

Used to be dogs all the way till a cat came along.

Changed my tune.

Now I say I prefer cats to people, and cats seem to prefer me too.

Hello there cat people.

Dan the Cat Man here along with Stephen Quant, our cat behavior expert from catbehaviorhelp.com and our producer extraordinaire.

Hi, Steven.

Welcome.

Hey, Dan.

Welcome to episode 68 of the Shelter Cats podcast podcast created by shelter cats.

And this is another in our little brief cat treat series between seasons and Michelle sends her best.

She's currently dealing with chemo and she's hanging tough.

I'll have a link to her TikTok if you want to go follow her journey and very, very quickly.

The Shelter Cats podcast is part of the Chewy Rescue and affiliate program.

But Chewy does wonderful things for local rescues and local shelters.

So if you click the link that we'll have in the podcast description and make your purchase by on Chewy by clicking the link in the description, you will not only help Chewy further their mission of helping rescues and shelters, you also help support the podcast.

I'd love a company car at some point.

I'm totally kidding.

You'll help support the podcast and Chewy's efforts with local and affiliates.

I mean, a small Hyundai, That's not asking much, is it Steven?

But that being said, we are recording this.

I'm putting you on the spot, Steven.

Today is one year since your first appearance on the podcast, October 26th, 2024.

So happy one year since your first guest appearance while on the show.

You totally blindsided me with that I had no idea on.

Purpose on purpose.

Happy one year.

I am so honored and privileged to have you working with us and we've become friends and colleagues and all the above.

And I'm very, very grateful to Gemma Smith for linking us up because you are an invaluable producer to be have your expert friend at all around great human beings.

So I'm so grateful.

Thank you.

You know the pleasure.

The pleasure is all mine.

I love putting you on the spot too.

That's always a lot of fun.

So that being said, this cat tree is about overcrowding and cat hoarding.

And one of the main things that shelters and rescues all over the countries face, probably hand in hand or paw and paw with trying to raise money and trying to rescue cats is having too many cats and having overcrowding situations and having to adjust their trajectories and their plans accordingly.

So I know Steven, you wanted to cover that today in terms of overcrowding.

So I leave the floor to you.

So yeah, before I do a quick plug, you know, the last cat treat we did, we talked about my participating in the Ultimate Cat Conference 2025, which I did and had a great time.

And I met Jackson Galaxy and spent a good deal of time talking to him as well as other luminaries in the cat behavior and cat welfare world.

And it was a great time.

Shout out to True Rescue, the rescue and shelter organization outside of Nashville that sponsored that conference.

But yeah, I want to talk about overcrowding because as I also work part time in feline behavior for the Animal Care Centers of New York City, and while I'm not speaking on behalf of the organization, I can't do that, I can still speak about it.

And we've had some very serious crowding issues.

And I would love to just briefly address them because everyone who's listening, if you're in the New York City area and sometimes even people who aren't, we've had people come adopt from us as far away as Texas, as far as I know, and that's pretty far away.

This summer, we closed down to routine admissions.

We had over 1000 animals in our care citywide, a number that had never, I believe had never been hit before since we received a contract with the city, be the animal welfare organization for the city.

And that was it got a lot of press and the numbers, this is the first interesting part is the numbers came way down like kind of offseason numbers, like depth of winter numbers on a Goodyear, you know, and and that not sure what the ultimate change was, but we certainly, I would guess we went down maybe half.

But again, I don't, I don't know exactly, but I remember in Manhattan, the numbers, I saw the numbers and they were way down.

We had no dogs in pop up crates for a while at that point, which is something that's been an ongoing issue.

And then we reopened and guess what happened?

Shot right back up.

Shot right back up right to where it was or worse.

And right now we have the cat population is is very high.

We literally, I think can count the number of empty kennels in single digits, maybe sometimes in double digits, but low, low double digits, like really small and it's really tough.

We're also getting hoarding cases, which is contributing to the problem.

These are people who have large cat populations in their New York City apartments or homes and are surrendering.

They're kind of it's a rolling, rolling process.

They'll surrender 10 or 20 at a time to keep from totally overwhelming us.

And yet every chunk of time another 20 show up from this one home, not to mention all the others that are just coming in individually from individual cat parents.

And so we are hit really hard and cat adoptions remain strong.

We do a lot of adoptions.

Some of our cats are adopted within a day or two of arriving.

We have the new free roaming room in Manhattan, 2 free roaming rooms in Queens where cats cohabitate.

These are really popular rooms and help cats get adopted really well.

But it's still, the numbers coming in still tend to outpace those leaving the building.

And and then there's dogs.

And the dog situation seems to be that we just aren't adopting out enough dogs.

The adoption numbers, I think are not as good as they could be or should be.

And people continue to surrender.

So we need help.

We we're doing staycations where a dog can go out to a home for a few days, get a break from the shelter, which is great.

Sometimes those folks who take a dog first, sorry, straycation, not a staycation, it's a straycation.

Sometimes those people decide to keep the dog either as a long term foster or as an adoption.

We do Burrow breaks for our dogs where they get to at least go to Central Park for the afternoon, which is, you know, fantastic.

They're so happy to do that.

And our cats don't get to go out on, they don't get to go to Central Park, but they do get to go to foster homes.

And that's really important.

So that's kind of my, my pitch.

I'm happy to address or answer any questions that I can without anything you might be curious about.

By the way, we I would just mention as you think about that we did recently get a sphinx, a beautiful sphinx cat who appears to be almost hairless.

They just have really, really short hair and she is so sweet.

He is.

When you touch Sphinx, it's like you're putting your hand on a hot pad because there's no fur to kind of insulate their body temperature feel really, really warm.

And they tend to be as a breed really sweet and gentle.

And he is.

And we gave him a big igloo bed, which as soon as I gave it to him and I put a heating pad in it because we wanted to, you know, you have to keep regulate the temperature of Sphinx as they can get too cold, they can get too hot.

And so he immediately dove into this igloo bed and spent the rest of the afternoon when I was there, just in there, head out, looking out, I'm happy, came out, wants to have some water, then went back inside and curled up.

How did he get to ACC do you know?

I do know are.

You allowed to.

I don't want to go into a lot of details, but it was a surrender situation that's under something called special cases.

And we're, I think hoping to reunite the family again, but he may be going into a short term foster in the meantime.

He's he's not definitely not available for adoption at this point.

If he was, I would mention more specifics and people would flock to the shelter to to try and adopt.

Them so it sounds like the big problem.

It sounds like the crisis might be more for dogs in terms of adoptions.

People aren't adopting as many dogs.

I think we're not the shelter dog podcast, but is there any?

Can you?

I know you can't speak, but can you personally speculate why people aren't adopting dogs?

It's not that they aren't adopting.

I think they're just not adopting fast enough to meet the inflow, which is too high at this time.

And, you know, there's a lot of competition.

There are other rescue groups who pull dogs from outside of New York City and don't necessarily always pull from us.

And that makes it harder and ever, you know, everyone's trying to figure it out.

But, you know, small dogs are really popular.

Big dogs take longer typically, and cats we just have, again, we do great lots of cat adoptions.

They're just still a lot of cats coming.

In I would encourage anyone to please follow ACC social media, particularly their Instagram.

They do great reels and they're fans of us.

So thank you it shout out to ACC for being fans of our Instagram.

But they do great reels where they feature all the cats and dogs that they have for adoption.

I'm personally friends on social media with Evelyn, one of the great volunteers there.

She does her own personal videos and posts all the great cats for adoption and she goes into a lot of detail about their how they got there, their age, their temperament, their health are.

You talking about?

Are you talking about Evelyn?

Evelyn, yeah, she does really great.

She goes into a lot of detail about all the cats that she interacts with personally at ACC.

So do follow ACC on their social media.

And again, for cats, it sounds like you're doing, you know, the adoptions are going OK.

Are there more hoarding cases than ever?

Well, there, there are more hoarding cases right now than we should have.

I mean, I don't know how to say that in a way that makes sense.

There's more hoarding cases perhaps than usual and we just seem to be getting a lot in from and that's just a burden on us.

And that and these cases are in the New York City, like 5 borough of New York City.

Area, yeah, our jurisdiction for taking animals in is, is the five boroughs.

Outside of the five boroughs, we don't we don't take animals.

And again, we don't, you know, maybe we'll do an episode on people who hoard at, at at a later date.

That's certainly a topic worth exploring.

But but briefly, just people who just take in too many cats, get out of control, can't care for them properly.

Yeah.

I mean, there can be sometimes maybe mental illness issues or, or things can just snowball where what started as something that was good got out of that person's control.

Hoarding, you know, there are different ways of defining it, but I think the most common way is to look not at the number of animals in a home, but their, their care and condition.

So you might not have 100 cats, but if you can't properly care for 20, then that's, you know, goes into a different area than than if you are properly caring for them.

And if you can properly care for 100 cats, and not easy to do in New York City or anywhere for that matter, but I've heard of it being done, then more power to you.

But that's takes a lot of money, a lot of work.

Yeah, someone with multiple cats in a 2 bedroom apartment, I can attest to the fact that it just keeping them happy, keeping them fed, you know keeping after just keeping after any potential health issues cuz mine range from from 5:00 to you know, tailor AACC vet could be as old as 17 or 18, you know, only he knows, you know he so just keeping an eye on any potential signs of anything.

It's a lot.

Of work, so there are people.

That could do it.

More power to you because it's a lot of work.

It takes a lot of paying attention, first and foremost, just paying attention on top of everything else.

So please adopt.

We're recording this just five days before Halloween on October 26th.

Holidays are a great time of year.

Holidays are my favorite time of year, but also a great time of year to adopt, to adopt A cat, adopt A dog.

I prefer cats to dogs.

Cats and dogs can get along.

I'm sure Steven, you've dealt you in your practice at Cat Behavior Help.

I'm sure you've had cases of cat, cat, dog behavior cases.

It is possible they can get along sometimes.

Really well.

My dearly departed Sophie intimidated a Pitbull, but she liked dogs.

She just had to make sure that they knew that she was boss.

But it is possible they can get along.

Please go to ACC.

We'll have a link in the podcast description, so please consider going to to adopt.

They have they do wonderful work.

Steven does wonderful work on the days that he's there.

He can help you choose the right animal for your personal situation, which I think is a wonderful thing.

I can and I've just mentioned the website nycacc.org and the adoption page is NYCACC dot app APP.

We'll, we'll have those links in the description.

So, you know, every, every, every rescue, every shelter deals with overcrowding.

But when it's New York City's only municipal shelter, correct?

Am I phrasing?

That correct?

No, that is correct.

It's the only municipal shelter.

When it's the only municipal shelter in New York City proper, and that's the five boroughs of New York City, when they are in a crisis situation, you know, we have to, we have to discuss.

So I'm glad you brought this up.

I'm glad we had this discussion.

Again, please adopt.

Please adopt not just the holiday season, but any time of year go down there, go spend time with them.

One last thought of a good reason to support ACC is we do not euthanize dogs for space or time, and that is also true for cats who also as a rule are also not euthanized for behaviors there.

You know, some shelters in the country routinely euthanize all the time.

And that, you know, is a a sad solution to the overcrowding problem.

And that's not a solution that we use.

So that means that adoptions are even more important.

And probably probably one of the biggest misconceptions that people may have about ACC is what you just said is that you don't do that as opposed to I'm sure people have I, I may have had that misconception a while back, but you know, in my in the dark days before I got involved with rescue and podcasting.

So please, we'll have that.

We'll have the ACC.

He sees links in our description.

And again, we're recording this right before Halloween.

So please have a safe, happy Halloween.

Black hats are not, I repeat, not bad luck if they cross your path.

I love Black Cats.

I've had two tuxedos.

Michelle, our beloved cohost, has two tuxedos.

They're Black Cats make wonderful cats.

I've had a stray black cat that I missed dearly.

Who is the mayor of the block?

The perfect gentleman.

I think I may be biased towards Black Cats.

So if you see a black cat when you are trick or treating with your family, fear not.

It all goes back to an it all goes back to an edict by Pope Gregory the 9th, who came out against cats in a certain way, for a certain village, for a certain thing it didn't actually turn out to be.

Why anyway, it didn't result in a European wide, you know, decimation of the cat population.

But but there is, it does go back that far to what Gregory said.

So Black Cats on Halloween are not bad luck.

If you see one at ACC, consider adopting them because Black Cats also make wonderful pets.

Thank you all very much.

This has been our Cat Treat episode 68 and we'll see you in the next episode.

Bye for now.

I used to hate cats.

Used to be dogs all the way till a cat came along.

Changed my tune, now I shave.

I prefer cats to people, and cats seem to prefer me too.