GRAY, LA – You may not be able to live like cat all day, but the Terrebonne Parish Animal Shelter is offering the next best thing – a Kitty Kam.
The Kitty Kam livestream gives viewers a real-time glimpse of what shelter manager Valerie Robinson calls the “cat colony.”
Subscribers have a front row seat to watch between 10 to 15 cats and kittens frolic, play, nap, and climb on the room’s custom-built hanging play area.
“We get a lot of visitors that, as soon as they walk through the door, the colony is the first thing that they see on the adoption side,” Robinson said. “We get so many people that say they would love to just sit here and watch the cats all day, so the idea just kind of popped into our heads.”
The shelter’s IT department began working on the Kitty Kam concept at the beginning of 2018, and the stream went live on September 14.
The cats are generally most active in the morning, Robinson said, while they tend to nap after lunch.
Shelter workers turn off the livestream once a day to clean up.
And there are always cats up for adoption at the Terrebonne Parish Animal Shelter.
“We have a very large population of stray and feral cats in our parish,” Robinson said. “We started our spay/neuter efforts in 2009, and we’ve seen a decrease in intake, but we still have such a long way to go.”
With 50 cats up for adoption right now and 50 more in the facility, Robinson said she hopes the Kitty Kam will get more people interested in pet adoption.
“When people think ‘I want a pet,’ I want them to think ‘let’s go to the animal shelter,’” she said. “I want that to be a household thing, and I think that’s a passion of mine that will never go away.”
