Animal shelters are overwhelmed now that the Montgomery County Animal Resource Center has stopped taking cats.
The ARC stopped taking cats in April, and since then, SICSA in Kettering has been getting hundreds of calls a week from people who are confused because there are many stray or community cats.
“There are a lot of stray cats. I have noticed that in the community,” said Brittany Kilburn.
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Nora Vondrell who runs SICSA says she and the Humane Society supported the ARC’s decision because only three percent of cats that came into the ARC were lost and reclaimed by owners and 1,700 of them were euthanized in 2017 and 2018.
“And the reality was it just didn’t work,” she said. “We were just creating a vacuum effect. New cats were coming into the territory.”
>> RELATED: ARC no longer providing shelter, care for cats
Experts estimate there are at least 50,000 cats wandering around Montgomery County, but state laws only requires the ARC to help dogs so they stopped accepting cats.
“But I can tell you as a community, we were not ready for that decision,” Vondrell said.
