Cat Behavior Helpline
Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary is proud to announce the National Cat Behavior Helpline, a free resource for shelters, rescues and cat owners!
While rescuing and providing lifetime care for farm animals is Safe Haven’s focus, we also want to prevent cats from being surrendered to shelters due to solvable behavior issues, thereby helping people and their companion animals stay together!
IF YOU ARE A SHELTER OR RESCUE: The Helpline can provide timely, free, phone-based behavior assistance to cat owners who contact you to surrender their cat because of a behavior issue. The Helpline can also help your cat adopters and fosters with behavior issues in order to prevent returns.
To refer a client to the Helpline, just send a brief email to felinehelpline@gmail.com with the person’s name, phone number, and brief line about the issue, such as “John Smith, (phone number), cat not using litter box.”
Click here to download the Helpline flyer as a helpful tool for your staff and volunteers to refer clients.
IF YOU ARE A CAT OWNER IN NEED OF ASSISTANCE: e-mail felinehelpline@gmail.com for free assistance. We will contact you within 48 hours, and if you indicate the situation is urgent, we will contact you within 24 hours.
IF YOU WANT TO BECOME A TRAINED HELPLINE VOLUNTEER, e-mail felinehelpline@gmail.com for information on next steps. The Helpline seeks more volunteers!
SHARE THIS HELPLINE IN YOUR COMMUNITY: Click here to download the Helpline community flyer for sharing online, in your community, etc.
Questions? Please contact Helpline director Matt Wildman (scroll down to read Matt’s bio!) at felinehelpline@gmail.com or (347) 938-7692.
Success Stories!
“Our cat’s actually been a lot better. She and the other cat haven’t been fighting, and she’s more engaged in play time. She’s been slowly warming up to my partner making attempts to play with her as well! The aggression has definitely toned down a ton though and she’s been able to get more roaming time!”
“Thank you again for chatting a week ago about my foster Freddie. He’s been doing great integrating, as are my resident cats. I decided to make it official and proceed with adopting him tonight! Thank you again for your advice, it really helped!”
“My big update is that the boy cat started letting me pet him. I didn’t force it so he started coming up to me and brushing up against my leg when it is food time. Then he let me pet him for real! Happy with the progress!”
National Cat Behavior Helpline Founder and Director Matt Wildman is a cat behaviorist who served for four years as the resident cat behaviorist at Humane World for Animals (formerly the Humane Society of the United States). During that time he created a variety of educational resources for the animal sheltering world, including The Guide to Cat Behavior Counseling and the Cat Behavior Counseling Course, along with a series of webinars and articles.
Matt has done dozens of presentations on cat behavior at shelters as well as at Animal Care Expo and at the annual conference of New England Federation of Humane Societies. Matt entered the animal sheltering field in 2006 as Animal Care Centers of NYC’s Humane Education and Volunteer Manager. Subsequently, he was an Adoption and Admissions Manager at the ASPCA in New York City and also served as Vice President of Community Engagement at St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center in NJ. .