Please help us pay our debt at the veterinary clinic

About us

We are a Hungarian cat rescue team that consists of four members who volunteer besides their normal daily work. Cat-Flow Cat Rescue was formed 4 years ago by our "kitten lady", Judit Hosszú - an enthusiastic, responsible animal lover with a heart of gold. The rest of us joined her in the (seemingly) never-ending fight to save the lives of abandoned, mistreated, injured, sick or stray cats in Budapest and it's vicinity.

Judit Hosszú with one of our lovely adoptable kittens

We also have a handful of other volunteers who help us foster our cats or do some other tasks such as maintaining advertisements or sharing our posts in relevant Facebook groups and websites.

We rescued, neutered, treated and found forever homes for nearly 600 cats and kittens in the last 4 years and have currently nearly 60 adoptable kitties. We also do TNR (trap-neuter-return) and in the past years we live-trapped and neutered about 350 cats in stray colonies with the help of other rescue organizations. We are not an official organization (yet), we all are civilians, we do not have an official shelter, nor office. We foster our rescued cats in our own private homes. We do not get huge amounts of donations like the 1% yearly tax that official Hungarian organizations get from their supporters*.

We rescue mothers and baby kittens, and abandoned, injured, sick cats from the streets. We also try to help other animals if our path crosses with any other living being in trouble (hedgehogs, birds, dogs, foxes, etc.). Even if we do not have the capacity anymore we still try to do our best to help anyone who contacts us by giving advice and educating people what to do in certain situations.

We take all of our cats to the vet where they get treated if they are sick, operated if they need any life saving or life improvement surgeries, all of them gets neutered if they are old enough (if not, then we require in the adoption contract that the surgery has to be done when kittens get 5-6 months old), and they also get vaccinated, chipped, and we do a FIV/FeLV test for each of them. And to state the trivial, we are a no-kill rescue. We try to find forever homes for all of our positive kitties too, even if it is much-much harder and usually takes a longer time.

We provide all our foster cats warm & safe homes (indoors & cat enclosures, or cat-proof fenced gardens), feed them, love them as our own furry family members, and try to find someone who is willing to protect and love them the same way as we do.

Our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/CatFlowMacskamentes

Why we need help

We reached the point where we can no longer continue what we do without your help. We have a huge amount of debt towards our favorite veterinary clinic (about $1570) where we take most of our rescue cats and we already feel like abusing their trust in us. They are letting us keep bringing cats with a later payment, but we are financially ruined, living day-to-day... We also have debt towards some fostering volunteers (about $170 medical bills) in other cities.

As we do not get enough donations, we typically spend our own money to pay veterinary bills, food, or anything that our cats need. Here is our calculation about our average monthly expenses:

• Basic needs (dry food, wet food, meat, cat litter): $17/cat/month. For 60 cats this is $1020/month.
• Basic veterinary care (vaccination, parasite prevention, chip, vitamins, immune strengtheners) and treatment of diseases + surgeries: approximately $500/month.

So our monthly average expenses are approximately $1520. This may not sound too much in the US or UK (especially for 60 cats), but in Hungary our average income is much lower (the official monthly average income was $815 in 2018) and we do not get any support from anywhere else besides a few generous Facebook followers.

We have reached, even exceeded our budgetary limit to cover these costs on our own. We rather not travel, or buy anything for ourselves, just to be able to feed our 10-20+ cats in our homes, or pay a lot of petrol to transport them to the vet, or to their forever homes when they get lucky and find their loving families. Not to mention higher phone bills (adoption interviews with candidates), buying an extreme amount of cleaning products, cat litter and all the tools that are needed to keep our furry friends healthy and happy.

The Hungarian stray cat situation is getting worse and worse each year, with new litters born to the world in every corner. It's getting harder and harder to find forever homes and responsible owners (we do thorough screening) when anyone can find a couple weeks old cute kitten at their neighbors, families in rural Hungary or even in front of their door on the street...

Even though we announced a rescue-stop many months ago, we still find (by just walking around, feeding our neutered colonies) again and again new families with newborn babies, or find injured cats and cannot leave them just there...

We would be eternally grateful for any small amount of donation

Without your help we will soon find ourselves in a disastrous situation where we can barely afford even cat food anymore. Please help our sweet cats and kittens to get properly fed and medicated, so we can concentrate on improving our cat rescue services and continue saving many more furry little lives! We aim to become an official non-profit organization in the future, but until then we cannot keep going without the help of kind-hearted people.

With great appreciation and all our love,
Cat-Flow team

Thank you for caring <3

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*Hungarians can select a non-profit organization each year that they want to support with 1% of their yearly tax. NGOs typically get most of their income this way.