Street Cat Clinic Inc

Street Cat Clinic is a non-profit veterinary surgical clinic dedicated to the spay/neuter of outdoor cats and kittens being prepared for adoption.  

“Kitten Season” is a term used to express the seasonal wave of kittens born outdoors during the warm months that inundate local animal shelters. The Humane Society of the United States estimates there are 30-40 million community cats living outdoors in the United States. With numbers estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands in just Miami-Dade County alone, unowned community cats capitalize on the year-round warm south Florida temperatures to proliferate continuously. Outdoor living is a particularly hostile environment for kittens with many dying from exposure to the elements, starvation and tragic disease.

Spay/Neuter is a surgical procedure to surgically remove the reproductive organs of an animal to prevent procreation. For unowned community/outdoor cats, TNR (Trap, Neuter, Return) has been established as the most humane method of surgically reducing their population. TNR involves volunteers from the community who trap cats, bring them to be sterilized and then return them to where they were found outdoors. Unfortunately, spay/neuter clinics and animal shelters are typically overwhelmed by the need for spay/neuter and can only do limited, if any, TNR. This leaves cat trappers with very few, if any, places to bring their trapped cats to be sterilized. Street Cat Clinic will help to fill this enormous void in southeast Florida.

Collaborating with cat trappers and operating solely on outdoor cats, Street Cat Clinic is the only independent non-profit high-quality, high-volume TNR clinic dedicated solely to community cats in south Florida. Designed with a large room for volunteer community cat trappers to bring up to 70 cats in a day, Street Cat Clinic is capable of spay/neutering 10-14,000 cats per year. The building was intentionally designed to accommodate this number of surgical cases with four “prep” tables where the cats are prepared for surgery, four surgical tables where a high quality/high volume spay/neuter surgeon can operate seamlessly between tables and a large recovery area where the cats can recover from surgery while being monitored. In addition to the surgery, these cats who likely will never experience veterinary care again, are treated for fleas, any minor medical conditions and vaccinated for common feline diseases (FVRCP vaccine) as well as rabies, a very serious virus for both humans and animals. Once recovered they are returned to their traps, removed from the clinic by their trappers and kept in a safe comfortable setting for 24-48 hours before released back into their outdoor home where they were originally trapped.

Fortunately, there are also cat trapping organizations that not only TNR, but remove the young kittens from the streets, foster them and adopt them into homes. Street Cat Clinic will be providing these organizations with access to spay/neuter and vaccination services for these kittens so that they can transition into their new homes sterilized and vaccinated.

Unfortunately, some community cats that have had to fight for survival or encountered an unkind human, suffer from serious wounds, broken limbs, or ruptured eyes. In situations where these cats can be safely returned to their outdoor home once recovered or moved into an adopted home, Street Cat Clinic provides surgical remediation of the injury in the form of wound repair, amputation or enucleation as well as spay/neuter. In situations that involve irremediable suffering we also provide humane euthanasia.