I live with a man who smokes two packs of Camel Filters a day. He smokes like it’s the 1950s. He smokes like no one’s ever mentioned it’s bad for him. And I have noticed one particularly life-impacting side effect to all of this tobacco consumption — one I’d never considered before.
It’s cats. Many, many cats.
Turns out, if you spend a lot of time outside smoking, you end up accidentally meeting a plethora of homeless kitties.
At our last house, there was Winter, the skittish black cat who rolled up our driveway every night for a can of Fancy Feast. Before that, there was Jerky, who we found starving in the parking lot of a La Quinta Inn, dumped there by her owners.
Now there’s Susan, a silver cat with striking white eyeliner, who recently waddled into our garden so extraordinarily pregnant she could no longer groom her lower half.
After a week of receiving snacks and pettings, Susan opted to come inside the house. It wasn’t long before I noticed the telltale gelatinous bulb emerging. I knew right away: Kittens were coming.
I let Susan pick a quiet corner and started putting towels and blankets underneath her. I laid down next to her, waited — and within 20 minutes, a tiny kitten slopped into the world, with its amniotic sac tethered to an umbilical cord.
Susan took one look at her new baby and promptly devoured the sac and cord in a manner that made me think of Hannibal Lecter and his nice Chianti.
I watched in wonder as Susan did this terrible, perfectly natural thing to each kitten as it emerged, then enthusiastically groomed them. Her efficiency was striking.
Susan birthed seven kittens that day. It took me three full days to realize it wasn’t six. Lord only knows when that last one popped out.
Seven kittens are, by anyone’s standards, too many kittens. We responded to the new arrivals by doing what we’d seen on TV and stuck them all in a massive cardboard box.
We kept Susan fed but largely left her to it. She gave us little choice, hissing and swatting any time we attempted to put a hand inside her new home.
Watching the kittens grow day by day, it was impossible not to think about all the other Susans in the world — cats forced to give birth outside, without a consistent food source, somehow trying to keep their babies alive.
According to multiple rescue organizations KQED contacted, those cats are rapidly increasing in number.
The exact number of stray cats in the Bay Area is impossible to confirm. The East Bay SPCA told me that, as of June, it had already taken in 430 kittens this year.
The organization anticipates receiving another 250 kittens in July alone, during what’s known as “kitten season.” The San Francisco Animal Care and Control (SFACC) reports that the organization takes in around 2,000 cats a year.
Rescuers around the Bay Area say those figures reflect a minuscule percentage of the true number of homeless cats in the region.
“The cat population is unlike anything I have seen in the over 30 years I have been in rescue,” cautions Toni Sestak, who spent more than two decades coordinating neonatal kitten fostering for the SFACC. “I fear it is only going to worsen.” Her position was eliminated in 2022.
One of the only effective ways to control the numbers is via TNR — trapping, neutering and releasing cats back to where they came from. The San Francisco SPCA website explains why doing this is so essential.
“Stray and feral cats populate an area when there’s food and shelter,” the SPCA states. “If the cats are removed, other cats will find the vacant space and move in … The new cats will have more kittens and repeat the cycle. With TNR, the original cats are returned to their territory, so new cats will not move into the area.”
For TNR volunteers like Sestak and Merry Bates of Island Cat Resources and Adoption, the boom in homeless cat numbers has made the last few years extra challenging.
“The demand is huge,” Bates says. “When it comes to cats, they are so efficient at reproducing. And when they’re semi-feral, it’s not as simple as just picking them up and taking them to get spayed. You have to catch them first. It’s definitely work.”
Bates helps cats in Oakland, Alameda and San Leandro, while Sestak is based in San Francisco. Both have been involved with rescue, rehoming and spay/neuter efforts since the early 1990s, and tell me that stray cat numbers are currently increasing at a rate that’s impossible to keep up with. This isn’t just bad for the cats — it can wreak havoc on natural ecosystems.
According to the American Bird Conservancy, outdoor cats kill roughly 2.4 billion birds every year. This is possible because there are tens of millions of cats in the U.S. that spend at least some of their time outside.
Making matters worse, TNR organizations say it’s becoming harder to find affordable veterinary care. Both Sestak and Bates say leadership changes at community shelters on both sides of the Bay have led to fewer annual spay/neuter surgeries.
“The cost of veterinary services has gone up ridiculously, too,” Sestak says. “We lost so many veterinarians during COVID. In San Francisco now, we only have three vet offices that are not run by corporations. That’s a giant problem.”
Bates describes a similar situation in the East Bay.
“There are very few resources left,” she says. “What is left is expensive and hard to get to. We’re seeing now that even though people want to help, they can’t make it work with transportation or costs.”
Still, Island Cat typically exceeds 2,000 spays and neuters annually, 75% of which are performed on homeless cats. The nonprofit estimates that it has successfully spayed or neutered 22,000 homeless cats in the past 30 years, despite having only 10 dedicated trappers and 20 foster homes that rotate in and out of use. In addition, Island Cat finds homes for 140 to 160 cats per year.
“That’s a really small number,” Bates notes. “Ideally, we’d love to get more cats off the street.”
Collectives of good citizens like Sestak — who now runs Toni’s Kitty Rescue — are scattered across the Bay Area, doing their best to reduce the homeless cat population.
One such nonprofit is Cat Town, an adoption center specifically focused on getting sick, senior and skittish cats out of traditional shelters and into foster homes, where they can undergo rehab to become more adoptable. The organization typically houses 30 cats at its Oakland adoption center and up to 50 in foster homes.
Since the pandemic, Cat Town Executive Director Andrew Dorman has noticed surging numbers of stray cats in the Bay Area.
“We work really closely with the municipal shelter here in Oakland, and their cat intake is up 42% in 2024, compared to 2019,” Dorman tells KQED. “During the pandemic, there was a huge scaling back of spay/neuter services. My sense is that the explosion of the population we’re seeing now is directly attributable to that. Our partners are being overwhelmed by the demand.”
Dorman says there are many ways for the public to help stray cats.
“We are blessed in this region with a really amazing network of animal welfare organizations,” Dorman says. “Every community, every city has a good shelter and at least a few good cat rescues. Get involved with the one that’s closest to you, whose work is aligned with your values as a volunteer, as a foster and hopefully as a donor.
“Spay and neuter your pets. And people who feed outdoor cats? We always say you should fix every cat that you feed.”
Cat Town is actively seeking experienced foster homes and volunteers for its adoption center.
For TNR, Bates suggests watching and reading as many tutorials as possible before volunteering as a trapper — essential, she says, for the safety of both cats and volunteers. The Island Cat website has extensive tutorials on cat care, including how to get started in TNR.
Alternatively, Full Circle Cats, an East Bay nonprofit that has fixed 4,144 cats and housed an additional 1,459 over the past five years, holds regular workshops to better educate the public on TNR. The organization also trains volunteers on how to care for neonatal kittens and socialize young cats.
Animal Fix Clinic in Pinole is one of the few clinics left in the Bay that still offers very low-cost services for homeless cats. One $45 fee covers a spay or neuter surgery, vaccinations, a parasite treatment and a microchip. The nonprofit fixed 2,224 community cats in the first seven months of 2025 — 400 more than the same period last year. Animal Fix is reliant on donations from the public to cover its costs.
As for my personal cat rescue operation, we opted to provide Susan a permanent home — and wound up keeping two of her kittens, too. All three cats have now been fixed and microchipped at low cost, courtesy of Stockton’s Animal Protection League.
We rehomed the other five kittens to friends and coworkers, including KQED Community Reporter Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí, who even takes his little one out on a leash.
Of course, we never intended for simple cigarette breaks to bring so many cats into our lives. But now? We’re in love.
