**UPDATED L.A. animal shelters overwhelmed

Update: I received a call after this story ran from Debra Corwin, who operates Purrfect Partners cat rescue in the Sough Bay. She confirmed that this year is proving to be more than a challenge.

"It's more than a strain. The dam has broken," she said of the flood of homeless cats. "It's escalating. It was an epidemic before the economy changed, just ask the people in rescue or your vet."

She advocates more mandatory spay-and-neuter laws for local cities. In the meantime, rescue groups are at a breaking point, she says.

"Everybody is getting very burned out."

**************************************************************************

A story in today's Daily Breeze should be read by everyone concerned about what seems to be the still-growing problem of pet overpopulation.

Specifically, the city of Los Angeles is experiencing a huge influx this summer -- especially of cats -- and is having to euthanize healthy animals as a result.

The shelters are so overcrowded that the Los Angeles Department of Animal Services is offering two-for-one cat adoptions to make room for the feline influx.

(Above, Adan Lozoya checks the cats in the Harbor Animal Care Center, 957 N. Gaffey St., San Pedro. Photo: Scott Varley/Daily Breeze)

Capt. Daniel Pantoja, who heads up the new harbor shelter (which opened in June 2008) responsible for the Harbor Area, said they're using every space they can to house the kittens and cats that are being brought in. When I spoke to him Tuesday afternoon, the shelter had 104 cats. The problem: The shelter was built with only 24 permanent cat cages and has had to borrow dozens more portable cages to help handle the overflow.

"I'm at capacity and every other shelter is as well," Pantoja said. "We have cats in cages in the hallways, in the lobby, in rooms that are supposed to be for quarantined animals. ... We're using every space we can."

The economy has been the main culprit, according to reporter Dana Bartholomew of our sister paper the Daily News who wrote the story. There has been a surge in abandoned pets since May 2008, when soaring job losses and home foreclosures began fueling an increase in surrendered dogs and cats at city shelters.

But contributing to the situation, Pantoja told me, is the fact that because so many cats are free-roaming -- and do not fall under licensing laws in the city -- it becomes much harder to enforce any kind of spay-and-neuter ordinance on felines.

"How do we enforce (laws) on those stray cats that people feed all the time?" Pantoja said of the ferals that proliferate so quickly. "It starts out with people feeling sorry for the cats, thinking they'll starve to death, but that's not really the case. So they set up feeding stations and then it winds up being a colony and then the colony expands and the cats wind up at the shelter."

For every child that's born, Pantoja said, 45 cats are born. That gives you an idea of how this problem has so quickly spun out of control.

A sad case in point: Jooniper, the cat featured as last week's Pet of the Week in the paper, was euthanized after no one adopted him.

Any thoughts out there on what more can or should be done? How this problem can be more effectively tackled?