Roaming Cats Multiply During Covid

Since the start of the pandemic, the population of cats living on New Haven streets has ballooned, according to cat rescuers. Some animal shelters in the area are at full capacity. More and more cats wander the roads, darting behind houses and slinking beneath parked cars, often after sunset.

The animals tend to be less active in the winter, according to Attenberg, but their paw prints have been visible in this week’s snow.

“It’s been out-of-control crazy since Covid,” said Michelle DeRosa, a manager at Animal Haven, a North Haven-based regional shelter.

The number of cats on the streets has been ​“off the charts” due to the pandemic, Attenberg echoed.

Cat overpopulation is a concern, according to advocates. As domesticated creatures, cats are safest, healthiest, and happiest when living with human beings. On the streets, the animals are vulnerable to attacks, disease, and starvation.

The number of cats roaming around the city tells a lot about how humans are faring, too. Some people abandon their cats because they can no longer afford to care for them. Frequently, cats are left behind after evictions. And mental health challenges can feed into well-intentioned animal hoarding, which can, in turn, lead to dozens of neglected or wandering pets.

So the uptick in wandering cats during the pandemic can be seen as a symptom of human struggles.

“The reason they’re out there to begin with,” Attenberg said, ​“is because of people.”

“They’re All Over”

Attenberg has volunteered as a feral caregiver and rescuer in the city for over ten years. By now, she has her routine ​“down to a science,” she said.

It takes her four hours to travel to Fair Haven, East Rock, near Westville’s Southern Connecticut State University, by the police headquarters on Union Avenue. Around 80 cats await food from her each day.

“There are always new ones showing up,” Attenberg said. ​“They’re all over.”

A particular hotspot of cats is a block of Goodrich Street between Winchester and Newhall, she said. ​“It’s like the Bermuda Triangle to me.” New ones keep showing up.

Neighbors have sometimes blamed Attenberg for encouraging the cat population. ​“I’ve had my life threatened,” she said.

But neglecting outdoor cats, or simply capturing them and removing them, won’t ultimately make a dent, Attenberg said. When cats are removed from a particular location, it’s only a matter of time until another colony moves into the ​“vacuum,” as cat rescuers term it. ​“If I take ten cats out, ten more are going to show up,” Attenberg said.

Instead, part of Attenberg’s role in taking care of the colonies is ​“TNR” — trap, neuter, and release — so that the cats can no longer reproduce.

This process involves trapping and covering cats, keeping them ​“somewhere safe and warm” overnight — with food — so they can prepare for anesthesia the next day, and then bringing them to a veterinarian who can perform surgery and dole out vaccinations. A universal sign that cats have been neutered is a snipped left ear, or an ​“ear tip.”

Some cats can be ​“rehabilitated,” Attenberg said; if they calm down after the trapping process, she believes they can thrive in a home with humans.

But for cats who remain ​“freaked out and aggressive” during the TNR process, she releases them back to the locations where she found them, ensuring that someone — often herself — feeds them.

In addition to the 80 cats across the city that Attenberg tends to, she lives in Cheshire with four felines of her own, all of them rescues. By day, she runs East Rock Grr and Purr, a petcare business.

This year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, she’s interacted with nearly double the number of cats as usual. In an average year, she said she traps, neuters, and releases 50 to 60 cats across New Haven. This year, she’s completed the process for over a hundred.

She urged anyone who discovers a cat colony to contact local shelters and TNR organizations. ​“Don’t assume that the cats belong to someone,” she said.

Leading animal rights organizations like the Humane Society call for the spaying and neutering of roaming cats so that they can no longer reproduce. A minority hold that this practice infringes on animals’ bodily autonomy.

“Can you hear me rolling my eyes?” replied Rhea Hirshman, another colony caregiver, when asked about the counterarguments to spaying and neutering. ​“TNR prevents a lot of suffering that would come from having uncontrolled populations of animals who will suffer and starve and be killed by cars and be taken by predators.”

“The issue with both cats and dogs is that we have, to some extent, domesticated. We have some responsibility to look out for them,” she said.

For the past three and a half years, Hirshman has taken care of a colony right outside her Fair Haven Heights home. She first noticed that a black mother cat, whom she called Jazzy, would cross the street with her kittens between Hirshman’s house and a house across the street.

Hirshman called the Greater New Haven Cat Project, an all-volunteer TNR program where she now helps out. Members of the organization neutered the cats and provided Hirshman with portable shelters for the outdoor: big plastic storage bins with holes, filled with cardboard-like insulation and straw.

Hirshman placed a couple of the shelters near the front of her house and distributes food there each day. Since then, two cats have begun sleeping in the shelters. Another two come by regularly for food, and a fifth stops by occasionally.

Caring for cat colonies isn’t inexpensive. As a freelance writer, Hirshman faced financial strain at the start of the pandemic. A friend began spotting her for the food Hirshman buys for the outdoor cats.

Both Hirshman and Attenberg say their work is worth it, though.

“It’s like having an extra furry family outside. They’re extra conscious of my presence,” said Hirshman. ​“They know the sound of my car.”

A Kensington Colony

One colony of cats exists behind an Elm Street apartment building. A gray tabby cat had been walking in an alley near Kensington Street on Wednesday night. I followed it to a wooden outdoor staircase behind 536 Elm St., where seven other cats laid about in the snow. They swiveled to face me in near-unison. I tried not to scare them.

The cats have been there for months, according to Genette Diaz, who lives in a first-floor apartment right next to the colony.

She’s not against cats, she insisted, but the ones outside are bothersome. She doesn’t know what to do. ​“I see the cats jumping on the window,” she said. She thinks they try to get inside her house, so she keeps every possible entrance to her apartment shut so they can’t come inside.

There’s an elderly man who comes each day to feed them, Diaz said. ​“He don’t live around here.”

When she tried calling an animal shelter about the cats in the past, she said it didn’t want to pick the animals up. That experience isn’t uncommon; many shelters aren’t equipped to handle feral cats.

For the past few months, I’ve seen more and more cats wandering around neighborhoods throughout the city. Over the course of three chilly days this week, I spotted 11 different cats wandering around in the New Haven snow, including the eight in the Kensington Street colony.

Michelle DeRosa, a manager at Animal Haven, theorized that the increase in street cats is the consequence of an initial wave of pet adoptions when the pandemic began.

“A lot of people adopted a lot of cats in the beginning when Covid started,” she said — and many have since realized that they don’t actually want to take care of the pets they took in. DeRosa said she’s noticed a surge of people trying to return pets, which in turn takes up shelter space; people may be abandoning unwanted animals, too.

As unemployment has spiked during the pandemic, people are likely abandoning cats when they can no longer afford to take care of them, DeRosa said.

She added that Animal Haven has noticed a rise in hoarding cases since the pandemic began — part of a broader trend of heightened mental health challenges as people face more stress and isolation. The shelter has recently encountered several cases of people hoarding anywhere from 15 to 60 animals — which have taken up much-needed space.

Animal Haven is completely full, DeRosa said, as it has been throughout recent months of the pandemic. The shelter is currently caring for approximately 20 dogs and 90 cats.

Hoarders are often well-intentioned, Derosa and Attenberg said, but they can easily get overwhelmed with animals they don’t have the capacity to care for. As the economy plummeted, more have often found themselves unable to financially sustain large numbers of pets.

Since the pandemic, many cat rescue and shelter organizations have found themselves overburdened.

“A lot of the rescues that I’ve known have been pretty overwhelmed with the cat population,” said Acadia Crouse, the manager of Westville’s ​“cat cafe,” Mew Haven.

Crouse said they’ve seen a recent surge of cats in the Westville and Edgewood neighborhoods, where they work and live. They echoed theories that rising unemployment has led to the increase — and also noted that climate change could be a factor. Scientists have posited that cats’ breeding cycles have been affected by rising global temperatures. The year 2020 is likely to be the hottest on record.

At the same time, Crouse said that Mew Haven — which takes in rescued cats who are ready to be adopted and connects them to potential new homes — has seen a rise in adoptions during the pandemic.

“Someone was talking to me about the fact of being deprived of connection. We were surprisingly busy during quarantine and during this entire pandemic because people wanted to come in and have some kind of touch,” Crouse said. ​“Adoptions have been steady for us.”

And not every shelter has seen a surge in calls. Joseph Manganiello, the police officer charged with running the New Haven Animal Shelter, said that the shelter has received fewer calls during the pandemic. He attributed the downward trend to the state’s moratorium on evictions. (The shelter, which is linked to animal control, doesn’t often handle stray cats, he noted.)

Typically, evictions are a driving cause of animal displacement, according to Manganiello. ​“That’s usually the biggest thing: people moving from one apartment to another apartment,” he said. The pace of work at the shelter is quieter now, he said, but he’s preparing for a surge when legal evictions possibly resume in the spring.

“Once spring comes, we might see an uptick in displacement, so we’re anticipating an uptick [in stray animals] then.”