19/10/2026
We and every other rescue receive a lot of messages like this, demanding or pleading with us to take cats off their hands. We understand people’s desperation because we are confronted with it every day, and because we feel the same desperation.
But we, and most other rescues, are just a small group of people with a small handful of foster carers. We don’t receive any external funding. We don’t have a shelter where cats can be housed. We don’t have a vet on-call to see all the cats in our care. We don’t have someone who supplies our food for us. We don’t have endless homes lined up for cats to be adopted into.
If we were to say yes to every person who asks for help, what would that look like? Where would those cats go? What would happen to the cats already in our care? Who would be paying for it all? Who would that be fair to?
It’s not heartlessness or cruelty that leads us to say no to people. It’s the promise we made to one another when we started this rescue that we would never take on more cats than we could reasonably care for. Because taking on too many cats would simply not be fair to anyone. And there are countless of examples of rescuers trying to say yes to every person who asks for help, and the end result is a human with severely impacted mental health, and dozens of neglected cats who can’t be cared for properly, can’t be socialised, and have nowhere to go.
We will never, ever say yes to taking on a cat if we don’t believe we can give it the best possible care, because the entire reason we’re doing this is to improve cats’ quality of life. It is utterly unfair to ask us to take on more than we can handle, to impact the wellbeing of our foster cats and our own pets, to erode our own mental and physical health.
Animal rescues do not exist as a pet disposal or retrieval service. We are not standing by, ready to receive all unwanted cats in the local area. We are all already inundated with cats needing homes, love, socialisation, vet care, and are doing our absolute best to improve the lives of as many of them *as we reasonably can*. We are all working tirelessly to help fix a problem we didn’t create.
We don’t get paid to do this, and everything we do for The Lucky Cat Project - trapping, transport, vet trips, home visits, fostering, adoption days, social media posts - is in addition to working full-time jobs, having families, having our own pets, and trying to have a social life. When we received this message, we were trying to figure out what to do with the body of a dead kitten after Susan had been up all night with him. Being attacked and derided for the work we do is incredibly hurtful and thoughtless. And no, we don’t feel ashamed for having boundaries.
