and a couple toys. Figure on spending from $100 to $200 for the bare minimum. If your pet isn’t already vaccinated, wormed, and spayed or neutered, figure another few hundred, give or take, at the veterinary hospital.
The true cost of a cat is in the upkeep, but at least you get to make payments on that. You can keep the cost of the most basic, proper care — food, litter, basic gear, preventive veterinary care, boarding or pet-sitting while you’re on vacation, and perhaps grooming for longhaired cats — to a reasonable minimum of less than $1,000 per year or so. Add in occasional veterinary emergencies (consider pet health insurance, which will add to your monthly bill but comes in very handy in an emergency) and the strictly optional, but enjoyable, addition of tempting feline merchandise — lavish toys, high-end, high-tech litter boxes, catios, books and magazines, and cat-themed goodies for you — and a cat can be a pretty pricey pet.
The important thing is not the cost but the health and temperament of your new pal. Better you should get a friendly kitten glowing with good health from your local shelter than a sickly or shy “bargain” pedigree from a poor-quality breeder. Whether pedigrees or random-bred, go to the source that offers healthy, happy pets, and you’ll save money in the long run.
All sources are not the same, which is why you should take your time in getting your kitten or cat and not just fall in love with the first fuzzy face you see.
What You Need to Know about Shelters
At the beginning of her career as a pet-care writer, Gina went to a conference for shelter workers and sat in on a seminar on making cats comfortable and keeping them healthy in the high-stress environment of a shelter. One of the presenters was a woman who’d made great changes in how her facility handled cats, and she had the pictures to prove it.
Previously, the cat facilities at her shelter had been a converted dog run with a lid on it to prevent escapes. All the cats were thrown into that run — and “thrown” is exactly how they got there. The only way a cat left that run was for adoption or death, and either way, the escape was the same: He was lassoed by a noose on the end of a pole and lifted out by the neck, hissing in anger and crying in terror. Imagine what a horrible impression a cat who’d been treated that way would make on a prospective adopter! (Not that the impression mattered much, however, because nearly all the cats were put to death at that horrid place.)
That shelter has changed so much today, and so have many others (sadly, though, not all). Cats and kittens are treated with more respect and caring, even at the end of their lives, and are housed in ways that make them feel more comfortable and keep them healthier, even in the challenging environment of a shelter. Many shelters today offer clean cages in a quiet area away from dogs, or multicat “colony” housing, making the surroundings as pleasant as possible for the cats.
Creative outreach programs — especially online — working in partnership with the media and with businesses such as pet-supply superstores take pets where the people are to increase the volume of adoptions. And shelters themselves are changing — after years of listening to people talk about avoiding the gloomy surroundings, progressive organizations are giving their buildings a face-lift to make them light, bright, and inviting. The best shelters have well-trained, caring staffs and a healthy core of volunteers to keep cats socialized and counsel potential adopters about their responsibilities to their new companion.
Today’s shelter cats are more adoptable than ever before, thanks to programs that evaluate pets and perform basic health services — and some extraordinary ones — before animals are made available to the public. Forget your old ideas about shelters as nothing more than gloomy places for pets to die — bright, clean, airy, and upbeat are the words to describe many shelters today.
All shelters are not the same. Some are run by municipal animal-control facilities, some by nonprofit humane organizations — and decent shelters exist in both categories. Good kittens and cats are in any shelter, no matter how run-down the facilities and demoralized the staff. After all, a cat can’t help where he’s dumped. But just as you can improve your odds of buying a healthy, happy kitten by choosing a reputable breeder, you can better the chance of a successful adoption by choosing a progressive shelter, one that visibly cares about the animals, the adopters, and its staff.
Animal-control shelters
Municipal animal-control facilities are perhaps the easiest to figure out. Finding homes for pets was not the reason these facilities were founded and is not their primary purpose to this day — although many of them do a good job of it, nonetheless.
Animal-control departments were formed to protect people from animal-borne
