Alina Hauptman of the Best Friends Animal Society showed off some recent kitten arrivals and promoted the organization's goal of making all shelters no-kill by 2025. 

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Wake Up With Cheddar

Cheddar Paws: Making All Shelters No-Kill by 2025

So, hello, friends. Welcome to Cheddar News. I'm editor over Cheddar studios in New York City and I make a and June is national adopt a cat month. Did you know that I did not? But now I do and which makes today the perfect time for Cheddar pause. And we have our good friend Elena Hoffman from Best Friends Animal Society here with another adorable adoptable kitten. Elena. Great to have you and introduce you. This is Taho. Taho is a male. He's two months old and he came from Pope County and he's available for adoption at our New York City Center. So cute has so much energy and is like really turning on for the also um, all of our cat adoption fees are waived this month. Thanks to a partnership with litter robot. Oh, that's amazing. That's such good news. Ok. So one of the other things we love about you guys over our best man's best friends Animal Society is you release some new data looking at some of the numbers of dogs and cats that entered the shelters every year and the research that you guys did found that cats like Tahoe are more at risk at these shelters. Explain what, what you guys found here. Sure. So what's really interesting is cat adoptions are actually outpacing dogs. But kittens like Tahoe are at risk like dogs because they're so vulnerable and so many kittens are entering the shelters due to kitten season going on now. And there's some of the data right there for our viewers at home and some more data, the report found that 4.4 million animals entered shelters in 2022. That's a lot. It's also an increase of 1%. Alina. Why is that? So that's because the intake shel the dogs and cats going into shelters are not being adopted fast enough. Also, industry data is showing that more people are buying from breeders and pet stores and not choosing the adoption option. Yes, gosh. And we know best friends wants to make all shelters. No kill by 2025. How does this data sort of reflect how close we are to achieving this goal or are we still a ways away? So, right, we have three states that have reached no kill, Vermont, Delaware and New Hampshire, which is so great. So congrats to them, but we're really excited that 57% of shelters across the country have reached no kill. And that's an all time high for us. That's great. So let's say you can't afford to donate or can't adopt an animal but want to help. What can you do? You should get out there and adopt or foster. That's what's gonna take us to no kill 2025. Especially fostering if you can, even if it's a week or so because as you mentioned, intake is just so hard right now because there's a lot of these places aren't able to bring in new dogs and cats because they just still have the previous ones already there. And fostering is no cost to the person if everything is paid for the vet care food. So it's an amazing way to really help out and we need the community to step up. Uh, Elena people live in a city or a state that hasn't banned puppy mills or changed to no kill shelters. What's really the best way here to advocate for those animals? Sure. Well, you can go to best friends dot org and click on a see. We have a best friends 2025 action team that you can join or contact your local government officials and, you know, help get bills passed. There's so many things you can do. All right. And of course, for anybody that wants to adopt. Little Cute Taho, where do they go? That's friends N Y dot org. And there's other ones like available. Um, our thanks to our friend Hopman and Little Taho. There he is. And to foster adopt or volunteer to help more animal shelters. Go to best friends dot org.