Early Monday morning, staff at the Vanderburgh Humane Society showed up for work and found 23 cats abandoned on their back porch.

This pushes the overpopulation crisis they’ve been dealing with even further over the edge.

VHS officials say this is the most unstable overpopulation has ever been.

Those 23 cats were found in four different containers. Some were older cats and some were newborn babies.

All those cats have to go straight into the shelter that has already gone beyond maximum capacity.

“All of those cats have been getting into foster homes, fortunately. But, it doesn’t make our work any easier. We still have over 400 cats in our care,” says Laurie Byers, VHS Development and Public Relations Coordinator.

In a perfect world, VHS says they’d like to have 0 cats in the shelter. However, a more realistic goal is 100.

At the moment, they have 4 times that number on top of 77 dogs and 22 other small pets.

“Shelters try to practice managed intakes for a reason. It helps us to stay above that “no kill” benchmark,” Byers says. “Until folks begin to spay and neuter their pets, we’re still always going to have a full shelter like this.

The shelter says they have proper ways to help anyone who truly needs to surrender a pet. So, dumping an animal on their back porch not only takes advantage of the shelter, but of those following their rules as well.

Byers tells 44News, “Had those folks made an appointment, we could’ve seen them as early as next week. But now, we have a lot of people that have been waiting on deck that have to wait even longer.”

So how can you help?

“You can always donate. If you can’t donate, you can foster. If you can’t foster, you can volunteer. If you can’t volunteer, just sharing our posts makes a huge difference,” Byers says.

More information on ways to help VHS can be found on their website.

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