On the far northern end of Santa Fe, a two-story home off Tano Road is bursting at the seams with the cats it shelters.
At the entrance to the building (named Santa Fe Cats) is an outdoor “catio” with scratching posts and platforms for the cats to play on. In the entry room, visitors are greeted by the sight of Buster and Cyrus, two older, FIV-positive cats who are usually mid-nap. Surrounding them are two rooms full of adoption-ready cats from Felines & Friends New Mexico, the nonprofit that runs the shelter, and another small room hosting the cats with veterinary needs. Upstairs are all cats with special needs, from dietary to behavioral challenges.
On the second floor, Lisa Phifer, a volunteer who prepares cats for adoptions, serves a bowl of food made from rabbit to a tiny brown tabby cat named Chile. At first glance, Chile looks like a kitten.
“Her tummy is very, very selective,” Phifer explains. “We've tried all kinds of different limited protein foods to try to make her more comfortable, and she will, on and off, have a bad experience of just days and days of vomiting … because she needs a special diet, she can't really be in the [same] household with cats that eat regular food, so that makes it a challenge.”
“Challenge” is a common descriptor of handling the cat population at the shelter these days. Felines & Friends Executive Director and Founder Bobbi Heller tells SFR the shelter would ideally hold a maximum capacity of slightly less than 100 cats.
Mo Charnot
Sophie Sunshine is at Felines & Friends awaiting adoption.
Heller founded the organization 22 years ago, and says the mission of Felines & Friends was originally to be a “second-chance shelter” for cats that don’t do well at other shelters, or that have special needs.
“Now, we're getting the calls for basically everything: owner surrenders, strays in the backyard, you name it,” Heller says. “We're no longer second-chance; we're first-chance. And that's put an incredible strain [on us].”
Lately, the average number of cats in the shelter has been boiling over capacity regularly. As of April 3, Felines & Friends had 140 cats in their care, according to Phifer. Of these cats, 84 are adoption-ready, 20 are on “trial adoptions” with new possible owners and 36 are on medical hold or being prepped for adoption. From January through March this year, Felines & Friends found homes for 120 cats.
But as April begins, so does kitten season.
“All of these suites are for the Felines & Friends cats,” Heller says, gesturing toward a few cat cages against a wall that have yet to be filled, “They will be full in a matter of a week or two. We're getting calls daily for help, and we're just trying to stagger them so that they don't all come in at once…our big worry is that the calls keep coming to take adults and seniors, and at some point we're going to really get hit with the kittens.”
Because the nonprofit organization solely depends on donations from the local community for funding (as well as donated services from veterinarians and the Espanola Humane Society), Heller says she is worried about how the anticipated influx of kittens will affect their capacity, and Phifer says the shelter will have to prioritize new litters of kittens over older cats in need of homes.
“The hardest thing is to say no. There is so much need, and it's very frustrating to not be able to help everyone,” Phifer says. “During kitten season, any litter of kittens that you can't help—say it's a litter of a mom and five kittens. That's six parents lost, if we don't say yes.”
Heller notes that Felines & Friends has been dealing with an increased number of neighborhood cats for a few years now. The rise, she says, specifically coincided with the Santa Fe Animal Shelter’s temporary Capacity for Care model, which led to lower animal intake at the main shelter.
Mo Charnot
Felines & Friends has many cats available for adoption as it prepares for an influx of incoming cats this spring.
SFAS Senior Director of Shelter Operations Dylan Moore tells SFR this model encouraged residents who found stray dogs or cats to hold onto the animal for a few days while the shelter posts information online about the animal to see if it’s a missing pet and to look for the owner, and focuses its attention on the animals already in its care so shelter resources would not be spread thin. He says this model “wasn’t accepted very well” by the public and was “rolled out poorly,” and says the shelter no longer uses this framework for animal intake.
“We pay attention to our capacity, and we know when we are over capacity, but it's more of an internal measure, rather than a driving force behind operations,” Moore explains. “We haven't turned away a cat in recent memory.”
Since pivoting away from the Capacity for Care model, Moore says that when it comes to cats, the shelter has focused on growing its foster capacity in anticipation of kitten season. Between now and May, he says, the monthly cat intake will triple, and will reach another sharp intake between the end of the summer and October.
At the end of March, the shelter had 23 cats in care and 138 dogs in care, a gap that Moore notes exists because cats are typically adopted within 10 days of arriving at the shelter, and dogs are typically adopted within 26 days, causing their population to run higher.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Moore also says the Santa Fe Animal Shelter temporarily halted its trap-neuter-release (TNR) program with feral cat colonies, which he says has likely contributed to a rise in the feral and stray cat population in Santa Fe that the organization has yet to catch up with, especially after losing all but one of its TNR surgeons.
As an example of the cat population growing each year, he says the number of cats the Santa Fe Animal Shelter has had from January through March in the past three years. This year, the shelter has taken in 233 cats in the year’s first three months. Last year, that figure was 158 cats, and in 2023, it was 109. He also notes that in the cat intake data he has tracked for 11 years, since the pandemic, the waves of increased cats from kitten season reach higher peaks and last longer than before the pandemic.
Lex Gowans, the Santa Fe Animal Shelter’s manager of marketing and communications, adds that a sustainable TNR program has to be a community-wide effort. Gowans says SFAS is "definitely interested in expanding" its current TNR program, and the shelter encourages the community to participate if they are interested.
“SFAS hasn't had any interest from the community, to my knowledge, of continuing this program [to] where it would be 100% functioning,” Gowans says. “As of right now, it's low-functioning, but we still have a TNR program.”
Both the Santa Fe Animal Shelter and Felines & Friends have expressed a need for volunteers. Felines & Friends, Heller says, has been in need of more foster parents for their cats, and the shelter works with those interested in fostering to match them with special-needs cats.
The Santa Fe Animal Shelter, Gowans says, recently held an adoption event where they also train individuals on how to bottle-feed kittens, encouraging them to sign up to become volunteers as well. Moore says volunteering to provide enrichment for cats and dogs (through walks, grooming, socializing, training and more) is one of the best ways those who can’t afford to donate money to the shelter can help out.
“Since the pandemic, we have been financially challenged, and I think that that is true of most nonprofits and a lot of animal shelters,” Moore says, noting how the shelter is now attempting to make up for a $4 million deficit in funding from last year. “People are very concerned about food on their plate and gas in their car, and donations are challenging ... it's not in everybody's power to donate money. But people can donate time. We rely very heavily on volunteerism right now.”
Note: Both the Santa Fe Animal Shelter and Felines & Friends accept donations, volunteer applications and fostering applications on their websites, sfhumanesociety.org and fandfnm.org.
Editor's note: As of April 15, SFR has added a sentence to this article preceding a quote from Gowans to further clarify to readers that the Santa Fe Animal Shelter's TNR program for cats is still active and seeking help from the community to expand it.
