IN the middle of Orange, Laura Ferguson and her mum Bec live with up to 28 cats at a time, but they are on a mission to stop the creatures breeding.
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The pair run a small rescue home called Blossoms Rescue, from their house in March Street where they scour buy swap and sell sites looking for people advertising "free to good home" kittens and cats.
"People give us strays and stuff as well, or cats who they know have been victims of cruelty and stuff," Laura said.
The Fergusons then take the pets to the vet, vaccinate them, de-sex them, worm them and microchip them, all at their own cost.
Laura said the cats she found through advertisements, were rarely desexed, some had been abused and most were unwanted kitten litters.
She wants to stop the cycle.
"My mum and I, we just want to help animals... we couldn't do the same thing with dogs because we don't have the room," she said.
"I just love seeing the looks on people's faces when they come to adopt a cat, they just look so happy."
The pair then advertise the wormed, desexed, micro chipped cats for adoption where they usually charge about $150 per cat, which means for vet bills alone they run at about a $70 loss per cat.
That does not include the daily costs of cat litter, food and the occasional emergency callouts from the vets.
"Since April we've been able to re-home 42 cats," she said.
"We just want to make sure that people are getting de-sexed cats rather than buying them from shops or off the internet and then not bothering to get them done.
"We want to stop unwanted kittens from happening."
The cats live inside and outside the home but they are always fully enclosed, the largest number of cats they had at any one time was 28.
The Fergusons recently adopted two litters of abandoned kittens on a farm and Laura has been up every four hours hand feeding the days old felines.
"All the vets comment how friendly and socialised they are," she said.
The pair have started to struggle recently with finances because they have had a few emergencies with the fragile orphans but Laura said no matter how financially draining the project was, she would always find a way to continue re-homing healthy pets.
Orange City Council spokesperson Allan Reeder said there was no "hard and fast" rule about the number of pets a resident could own but two cats was a guideline.
Information can be found here https://www.facebook.com/pages/Blossoms-Rescue/1412525955646958