Cat Haven was established in 1961 with the aim of “rescuing cats from the perils of the streets”. Over the decades since, it has grown to be Western Australia’s premier cat welfare organisation, with over 8000 cats surrendered to Cat Haven every year. As an ‘open admission shelter’, they operate with the ethos to never turn a cat away. They actively work towards their mission by; providing a facility to care for lost, stray, or unwanted cats, rehoming as many cats as possible through effective adoption and foster service, providing cost-effective sterilisation and microchipping, promoting community awareness of cat welfare and responsible cat ownership and by providing quality onsite boarding facilities. Cat Haven is part of the national ‘Getting to Zero’ program. Their euthanasia rate has dropped dramatically from around 75% a decade ago to just 12% in 2019 and is still dropping!
Judge, Tim Vasudeva said “I adopted my first ever cat from cat Haven 1994-95. At that stage, they were dealing with a lot of cats, but the facilities were relatively basic. Seeing the advances that Cat Haven has made in the last couple of decades, and particularly in recent years, the judges were extremely impressed with Cat Haven’s approach to animal management from a medical and best-practice sheltering perspective. They deal with a significant number of cats as an open-intake shelter and have managed to get to a very low euthanasia rate and very high adoption rate by being really focused on length of stay and best-practice disease management, which is always difficult when it comes to cats. The judges were really happy with the advances that they have made, and very happy with the standard they are setting and the example they are providing for open intake shelters around Australia.”
