How to give the DC a cat

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After an impressively persistent campaign the DC are about to get their wish of a cat/cats. They don't know it yet. Its 25 years since I last acquired cats and things have changed! Very put off by pet-selling sites charging ££s for mongrel kittens and £££s for named breeds, instantly worried about exploitative breeders. CPL don't seem to want to home cats with families, and my local branch closes for a month to prevent cats as Christmas presents, which I sort of get but isn't helping. Plus, this is loosely associated with Xmas, at least from the DC's perspectives. I'm a bit bemused by the options, to be honest, and looking for advice and ideas. The main runners seem to be:

Get a kitten/kittens off a private seller where I can see the mother on gumtree in the next 2 weeks - there are some near me - and present them as an early surprise

Give DC a wrapped cat toy at Xmas and sort the whole thing out afterwards in relative calm with their input (they're 3 and 9, main cat enthusiast is 9)

I would rather have a young ish cat /kittens as my 2 beautiful girls each lived to 21 and spent the last 5 years getting increasingly frail, expensive and worrying- I'm over-riding DH anyway to do this as he's still traumatised and would rather have some young healthy time before the frail years. Plus I think younger cats will bond with the DC better. I'm very tempted to get 2 siblings rather than 1 but not sure how much that's me projecting human values!

Help me choose how to do this

A lot of vet practices here (Sydney) look for homes for kittens/cats through their FB pages. They are often animals that have been abandoned or handed over to be rehomed. There is a fee that covers neutering, flea treatment etc. Not sure if it's the same where you are but worth a try?

Do you live by a busy road? Because if so you need to think carefully about how you can keep your cats safe.

Thanks everyone. Im going with the shelter after xmas option based on good advice on here. As I've said, my prev 2 (rescue) cats lived to an advanced age in the lap of luxury and devastated the family when they died, which is behind the DCs current cat campaign, so I'm not too worried about the Xmas component of the plan diluting the responsible commitment bit. I may be back with photos in a month or so!

Give them a cat calendar for Christmas, and mark up the day you're visiting the shelter to look for your new family member(s).

The calender is a nice idea but I'd be a bit wary of naming a specific date of "This is when we get our cat!" until you've picked the cat/s, had the home check & it's all sorted. It'd be so awful to say to the kids that you're going to choose a cat on X date & then the shelter doesn't have any cats that would suit your home on the date you visit and have to come home with no cat.

I didn't mean the date FutureCat would be coming home, just the date OP and DCs would be going to look at cats.

Perhaps buy one from a cat charity showing real life rescues. They often have a little blurb about the cat and it's background. We always get the CP one and December is called "Killmouski" which is a great name.

Get them both a kitty surprise (cat soft toy which unzips belly and a load of kittens pop out) and some cat care books for Xmas. Every time they pester you for real cat tell them to go make a list/draw a picture of all the things you need to buy, arrange with vet, do to take care of real cat. Works a treat with distracting mine.

I was in a similar position as you last year and Agree with getting the kids involved in the actual rehoming. We visited rehoming centres, no luck finding a cat but we had some fun days out, donated to RSPCA etc and they learnt about responsible pet ownership . I finally found our beautiful boys on Pets4homes website. They were 2yrs old Bengal brothers, who needed rehoming due to owner moving. I told my kids we were just going to look (in case I got bad vibes and decided against taking them), then surprised them taking our boys home. They make our family complete

So is there an ethical way at all of getting a kitten? Rescues near us don't have any or if they do they just disappear before we can find one available. Our last rescue was 6 years old (the youngest available) and although she was lovely and gentle she never interacted with the children or played. After so many years of them asking for a pet it was a big let down. We would really like a kitten now.

If you're having trouble getting a kitten from a shelter then you have some steps you can take to help:

• Check the website/Facebook page of all your local rescues frequently. As someone posted up above, kittens are more frequently born at 2 points in a year - Spring & late Summer. So those are the times you really want to be focusing on looking at the shelters for kittens needing homes.

-Check out the Cat Chat website, they'll have lists of all the shelters in your local area. Check that list as there might be smaller rescues you are currently unaware of. -Ask the shelters if there is anyway you can go on some sort of list to be notified. Not all of them will do this but asking can't hurt. -Expand the area you're looking in. We live in Essex but we travelled to Watford to meet our current cat. We did have some requirements that most of our local shelters wouldn't accomodate though (we live in a flat with no garden access so we found it harder to find a rescue that would rehome to us.)

LaCerbiatta A lot of rescues won't put all cats/kittens on their websites so you're best contacting them directly and asking. And yes as others have said, kitten season is from early spring til early autumn when shelters are always inundated with kittens. This time of year you don't get as many litters, although there will usually be slightly older kittens still waiting to find homes.

@LaCerbiatta This isn't kitten season. Between late March and October rescues are bursting at the seams with kittens. Always. Every year. Individual kittens are rarely put on website as well, apart from the colours, kittens are basically all the same. There isn't much you can say about their personalities or whatever as, well, they're kittens.

So if you want kittens wait until Spring and then contact the rescues near you.

Thanks for the advice but from our experience and others here kittens are like hen's teeth, no matter what time of the year it is.

We’re in a similar position OP, 4.5 and 7 year old who is cat mad. (i love them too. DH is not overly keen but resigned ) Looking at getting cats in the NY. I was despairing of finding any rescue cats suitable for young children but having looked again, there are a few.

Depending where you are you can look at:

• cat chat
• cats protection
• rspca
• celia hammond
• battersea

Probably various other smaller local rescues too which may not have websites.

I think you have to be willing to ring round and find out which shelter(s) has a child friendly cat or pair available, and wait if they haven’t got a suitable one just then. And obviously you can’t really be too fussy about colouring, sex etc. I was looking for girl cats but have reconsidered as most of the family friendly ones seem to be boys or mixed boy/girl pairs.

A mother/older kitten pair might be a good option for you if you’d like a kitten but they are like hen’s teeth?

Actually a question for everyone who knows about rescues:

If I want to get cats in January (say 8/9 onwards) is now too early to contact rescues?

Minipie - no it's not too early. Assuming they do home visits they can get this done in readiness.

I'm with Celia Hammonds. We certainly don't have a blanket ban on cats and young children - but we would need to find child friendly ones for you. We don't even have a blanket ban on kittens and young children. Very tiny kittens would be at risk from young children, but slightly older ones would probably be fine. It very much depends on the children and the parenting.

minipie - it depends on the rescue. You can certainly contact to get the process started but don't expect to meet cats this week and reserve them for a month. Most will only reserve your chosen cat for a few days or up to a week as they need the space for other cats in need of rescue space.

Cats Protection volunteer here-the staff deal with this side of things but you can certainly complete application forms prior to viewing cats. The adoption centres will be closed over the Christmas period (branches work differently).
January is a very busy month for cats being homed so don't be disheartened if you don't find the right cat straight away as there will be plenty more. Sadly some people expect the centre to have exactly the right cat for them at a given time. Fortunately most people aren't like that!

Battersea are really good. Both my childhood dogs came from Battersea. I Think you fill out a form online and they match you to suitable animals. Although rightly so they won’t rehome over Christmas.
You could buy an activity tree for the cats for Xmas and build it up on Christmas Day!

Thanks all. Sounds like I should get in touch with some shelters then but not look at specific cats just yet (dammit!)?

Aaaand here is Extracat! DC fully involved in finding her and completely in love already, she although she's only been with us 3 days she's already playing, purring and eating. Thanks for the masterminding advice last month!

Oh she's gorgeous!!

What a beauty! Looks like she is in charge already!

Love the 'oh hai' pic. She's a beauty.