A special day celebrating the Paws and Claws cat sanctuary will give people the opportunity to have one of their kittens free to a good home.

The kitten rehoming day, which will run from 2pm to 4.30pm on Thursday at the sanctuary located near KAPS Supermarket, will also feature music, standup comedy and spot prizes.

Paws and Claws sanctuary manager Shannon Paul said all of the cats onsite had been desexed and dewormed, and it was now time for them to go to a responsible home owner.

“Hopefully we can get as many as we can to a responsible home owner,” Paul said.

She said the sanctuary, which opened in August, had already seen more than 18 cats and six kittens looked after on site.

Before the sanctuary was built, Paul had been looking after stray cats at a variety of locations.

“It was particularly bad during Covid-19. People left the country, and left their cats here to fend for themselves,” Paul said.

“Unchecked, those cats breed like anything. A lot of them had kittens in the wild.”

Paul said many of the cats that came to the sanctuary were “feral and angry”, but their job was to make them “happy and domesticated”.

“We had a group of kittens that had been dumped in a taro batch before someone delivered them to us. It’s really sad that some people just choose not to look after the cats,” she said.

Paul said the best possible outcome would be for the sanctuary to be virtually empty and for 85 per cent of the island’s cats to be desexed.

“There have been people on the island who have been really helpful. I just want to see these cats go to a good home,” she said.