Day and night, Linda Schildt’s phone rings. It is the police, the county administration and private individuals who have found new abandoned cats.
– People call at three o’clock in the morning who have caught a cat, who just think we are on duty. We are private individuals who work around the clock with this. The police call at half past twelve on a Saturday night, she says.
The cat shelter Hemlösa Tasar in Karlskoga is now full. Nevertheless, more and more cats need to be taken care of.
– The County Administrative Board came the day before Midsummer Eve with twenty cats. It never ends. I feel inadequate and hopeless.
150 thousand homeless cats
And Karlskoga is not the only place with abandoned cats. Around the country, cat shelters are struggling to make it through the summer, something like P3 News reported on.
– The cat shelters are overcrowded. It’s so hard when you can’t help all the cats, says Linda Schildt.
She wishes more people would pay attention to the problem.
– It is very difficult. There are 100 to 150 thousand homeless cats in Sweden. It’s terrible. The authorities need to get down to business and the public can stand up and relieve the cat shelters.
“We can’t wait for the holiday to end”
Anyone who is interested in helping can support the cat shelters financially, donate food or become a shelter for abandoned cats. And emergency shelters are something that many cat shelters are in desperate need of during the holidays.
– No one is nabbing as an on-call home now. We are longing for the holidays to end and people to come home, says Linda Schildt.
She now hopes that more people will come forward.
– Everyone can do something. You can open your toilet, boiler room or laundry room. Give the cat food and water and make sure it cannot escape.
And for those who are thinking about getting a cat, she has an invitation.
– That is the most important thing, to neuter, ID mark and register your cat. You can register yourself with your bank ID on the Swedish Agricultural Agency’s website. If you don’t castrate the cat, new kittens are born outside that suffer, become shy and homeless. A cat can have a lot of cubs during its lifetime and it becomes a colony very quickly.