![NAP TIME — A kitten sleeps in its fuzzy bed. “We’ve had a couple of cats there [Eastridge and San Jose locations] that have struggled to get comfortable on the floor,” Romero said.](https://verdemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/P1010405-e1727998714559-1161x1200.jpg)
Amid a bustling shopping mall, a crowd gathers, eagerly peering through windows. Behind the glass, kittens roam freely, with toys and food bowls scattered on the floor.
In June, Mini Cat Town opened a new location at Stanford Shopping Center, the largest of five locations in the Bay Area. Claudia Romero, the lead animal care associate at the Stanford location, said that the main mission of Mini Cat Town is to rescue newborn kittens from overflowing shelters and nonprofit rescues and to nurture them until they are adopted.
According to Romero, Mini Cat Town has a unique, community-focused approach to kitten adoption. Visitors are charged $15 for a 30-minute session to play with kittens, with the option to adopt them.
“A lot of people will go to a shelter, you’re seeing them through the glass door and stuff — there’s not a lot of wiggle room to play with them,” Romero said. “Some places will have that area where you can take them out and play with them. We allow them to just rule the whole space, so it gives them freedom.”
Mini Cat Town was founded in 2015 by three sisters who discovered a passion for rescuing homeless cats at the young age of five. Growing up in San Jose, Calif., Thi, Thoa and Tram Bui lived in a neighborhood filled with undomesticated stray cats.
“We would use our allowance to buy Friskies, the dry cat food boxes from 7-Eleven, whenever we could to feed them,” Thoa Bui said. “We would also feed them with our own food, like any Costco chicken or canned tuna that we would have. That’s really where it all started.”
As the sisters grew up, they realized that there had been an increase in cats breeding, which led to an influx of stray kittens. So, in high school, they worked at their local Baskin-Robbins to raise money to put their neighborhood cats through the trap-neuter-release process.
In the TNR program, undomesticated cats are trapped and neutered before being released back into the community. Thoa Bui said that this process stops the cycle of stray cats breeding, which helps mitigate overpopulation.
“I remember being paid $8 an hour, plus tip, then we would use that money to pay for their surgeries,” Thoa Bui said. “At the end of high school, between my sisters and I, we fixed over 100 feral cats in the neighborhood and we essentially eliminated the problem.”
Throughout college, the sisters continued fostering kittens and posting their rescuing work on social media.
“In 2018, we did [rescued] 80 kittens out of our own home,” Thoa Bui said. “The following year, there was just so much stuff at our house because people donated so much. We were raising these kittens and holding meetings in our house. It was just getting out of hand, social media was growing fast.”
The sisters needed a larger place to keep up with this rapid expansion. So, in 2019, Mini Cat Town opened its first location in East Ridge Shopping Center in San Jose. Since Mini Cat Town would be in an unconventional public area, the sisters decided for visitors to share the space with the cats, instead of in individual rooms.
“A lot of other shelters or rescues don’t have our floor, essentially, where you can come to pay to play with them and socialize and then create that bond,” Romero said.
The kittens at Mini Cat Town are all rescued from other Bay Area counties’ animal shelters, nonprofits, rescues and other programs that trap kittens.
“A lot of the shelters are over mass capacity, so that’s where we come into to help,” Romero said. “We mainly go for kill shelters … we try to get them [kittens] before they get euthanized.”
At kill shelters, animals get euthanized if they are not adopted. According to a 2023 report by the Humane Society of the United States, 70% of cats living in shelters were euthanized.
When a kitten first arrives at Mini Cat Town, it initially goes through the foster program, then the TNR process.
“They’ll get an adequate weight and age, and then they go through the whole medical process,” Romero said. “They get neutered, vaccinated, microchips, and once they’re good to go, they get released in any of our five locations.”
Once released onto the floor of a Mini Cat Town location, most kittens adapt quickly to human interaction and get used to other cats.
“With this [open space], it just helps them [cats], so they’re not anxious,” Romero said. “That’s one thing that a lot of people have noticed about us, there’s no space like this where you can just come in and sit and hang out with cats.”
The kittens at Mini Cat Town are all rescued from other Bay Area animal shelters, nonprofits and other programs that trap kittens.
“A lot of the shelters are over mass capacity, so that’s where we come into to help,” Romero said. “We mainly go for kill shelters … we try to get them [kittens] before they get euthanized.”
At kill shelters, animals get euthanized if they are not adopted. Mini Cat Town’s mission is to limit the number of euthanized cats by rescuing them from kill shelters.
“This place, this job, it’s definitely very soul-filling and rewarding,” Romero said.
Kara Fitzpatrick, a regular visitor, agrees.
“I mean, are you not just filled with joy?” Fitzpatrick said. “I think this is one of the best things you can do for your mental health.”
As an employee, Romero also benefits from bonds with the kittens.
“We baby the new cats, we make them our own,” Romero said. “What I like to say is, we’re here for them, they’re not here for us.”
