With the holidays having ended just a couple weeks ago, and Southern Nevada's community cat breeding season on the horizon, the region's ongoing problem of pet shelter overcrowding is only likely to worsen.
Lori Heeren, executive director of the Nevada SPCA, says shelter intake has outpaced adoption rates for years. Between the pandemic and the economic recession, the problem has only gotten worse.
"I just recently saw a statistic that said one in eight pet owners in the country have had to give up a pet," Heeren says. "Our real focus these days is community support and offering people resources, food and veterinary assistance, so that if they want to keep that pet, and we will provide that financial resource so that we can keep those pets in the homes.'
Heeren added that the Nevada SPCA started its food pantry in 2020, during the pandemic, and its community support in 2023. In 2025, she said, the shelter paid more than $300,000 for people's veterinary assistance "to keep pets where they belong: with the owners that love them."
She added that those members of the public who are prepared and committed can help the situation immensely by becoming one of those owners ... of an adopted shelter pet.
Joanna Moritz, owner of Fur and Feather Works in Reno, said an important thing people can keep in mind when adopting is, the better a pet is socialized and trained — even a cat! — the more rewarding it will be for both adopters and adoptees.
"On the training side, we are most concerned with keeping animals in their homes and out of shelters," Moritz said. "A lot of cats and kittens are unfortunately relinquished due to behavior problems like aggression or inappropriate elimination problems" — all things that can be avoided with the proper attention.
For information and assistance, they added, interested pet people should start with their local rescues.
