A cool October evening does little to dispel the warmth inside Best Friends of Baker City.

Visitors to the thrift store are greeted by volunteers from the nonprofit organization that rescues animals, finds forever homes and helps pet owners with spaying and neutering and other expenses.

Those who venture near the back of the building at 2950 Church St., near the railroad tracks, will hear the mews of kittens.

Quincy Martin, 38, stands amidst the young felines awaiting adoption.

Best Friends, which turned 35 this year, offers a variety of services, all designed to ensure that cats and dogs have loving homes for the rest of their lives.

Cats, and especially kittens, constitute a big part of Best Friends’ work, as volunteers rescue kittens from online and other ads.

“For cats, we provide spay and neuter vouchers for low-income families, we provide weekly food out from our thrift store Friday and Saturday mornings,” volunteer Farrell Riley, 47, said. “You can, once a month, come by for food, again for low income. We rescue stray kittens from the street. We are making a difference.”

Best Friends has multiple kittens ready for adoption.

Although the thrift store building also serves as a holding facility for kittens awaiting adoption, the organization is struggling, said Carmen Ott, 77, a longtime Best Friends volunteer.

“We are wanting to get a message out to people, not just Baker City itself, but the entire community we help, we’re overwhelmed and we’re exhausted,” Ott said on Monday, Oct. 2.

She is concerned that Best Friends won’t be able to continue into 2024 if it can’t bolster its roster of volunteers.

“We want to keep going,” Ott said.

Cats are a constant issue

With kitten season in full swing, Best Friends is finding it challenging to keep up with the demands for help.

Volunteer Barbara Golden, 72, said Baker City has a “very, very large feral cat problem.”

Volunteers help socialize kittens by playing with the animals and making sure they’re well fed and otherwise taken care of.

Martin said many of the kittens have medical needs, and all need human contact to become ready for adoption.

“It happens every day. Cat calls come in every day,” volunteer Jane Barrett, 74, said.

Best Friends strives to help every animal, and volunteers don’t like to turn away people who show up with their pets. But the organization is not an animal shelter and lacks space to hold animals for long periods.

Best Friends depends heavily on people willing to foster animals until they’re adopted.

“We are really short on fosters,” Barrett said. “We don’t have a shelter building and so we’re dependent upon other people to take in the cats or the dogs and there are just a handful of people willing to do that.”

Golden said a community effort is needed to handle all the needs related to pets — including spaying or neutering their animals to reduce the number of animals.

“People need to realize that because we’re a holding facility, we’ll help you with vet bills, we’ll help you with food, we’ll help you with spay and neuter. That all costs a lot of money,” Golden said. “They need to understand that if they don’t spay and neuter their cats, and they end up with a litter of six to eight kittens, they need to help us. In other words, they need to hold onto their kittens until we can maybe get them transported out to Portland. Everybody in this whole community needs to work together and be helpful. Everybody needs to help.”

Mary Boyer, 74, helps operate the thrift store. For a time, Best Friends had no other volunteers to work there. Two volunteers recently started, with one more starting soon, but Boyer said none is interested in taking over the thrift store.

“If we get a few more volunteers, we could have more store hours which would be helpful to people that want to leave stuff here for donations and the income,” she said.

The thrift store is open Fridays from 8 a.m. to noon and Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

In the past, Best Friends offered free bags of cat and dog food. But the organization, which relies on donations, can no longer afford to do that, although smaller amounts of free food are available.

“We have a sign in sheet and, again, there are some people that. … I will say a majority of them are truly low income and they support the store, they always come in and buy something when they get the food,” Ott said. “But at the same time, we have people that can afford to go and purchase food that they have now discovered that they can come down here because they know that we don’t do a background check or anything. We’re going to take you at your word.”

Martin said Best Friends tries to disburse donations, both money and food, as widely as possible.

“Every single thing that we provide though is based on donations and so if people aren’t donating, whether it be bags of food that we can split up for the community, whether it be food we feed our foster kittens, or a just a check, if you don’t donate we can’t split it up and help anybody,” Martin said.

Ott said Best Friends works with the Baker City Police Department, Baker County Sheriff’s Office and Oregon State Police to help, if possible, with animals found wandering.

Best Friends always needs residents willing to temporarily care for dogs, cats and kittens. People interested in serving as foster homes, who want to volunteer in another way, or to donate, can find information at www.bestfriendsofbaker.org.

Riley said she had done research on cats being in foster care and they average just under three weeks.

People interested in fostering dogs can answer questions about which dogs they wish to foster, choosing a breed, age and size.

“We need help,” Golden said. “We need donations. We need some money. We need volunteers. We need foster homes. And we simply cannot help everybody, every day, with everything. We just can’t. It needs to be a whole community effort.”

Best Friends of Baker, Inc. advocates for the needs of domestic pets, particularly dogs and cats, within Baker County, Oregon. Best Friends promotes dignity, humane treatment, and responsible population control through education, spaying, and neutering. Best Friends facilitates medical needs, foster care and thoughtful placement of all animals.

“We are wanting to get a message out to people, not just Baker City itself, but the entire community we help, we’re overwhelmed and we’re exhausted. We want to keep going.”

— Carmen Ott, longtime volunteer with Best Friends of Baker Inc.