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ATTLEBORO - Tabby and Sylvester are just making do these days.

They occupy two cramped cages at the city's animal shelter that are much less comfortable than their previous digs - a regular, human-size house.

Their former owners, who lost their home to foreclosure, sent the cats to the shelter when they couldn't take them to their next home, adding them to a growing number of fur-bearing victims of the nation's foreclosure frenzy.

Both kitties appear well fed and well adjusted, but now, like their owners, they have to move on to new homes and new lives.

Tabby has already been placed, but Sylvester, who needs a special home because of a chronic illness, is still waiting, along with 13 other cats who were strays or were surrendered for various other reasons. While pet surrenders and worse - abandonments - have always been problems, foreclosure is the reason cited most often in recent months for giving up pets, animal care workers said.

Ellaina Knight, secretary of the Friends of the Attleboro Animal Shelter and a cat volunteer, said "foreclosure" is a word she hears a lot when people call hoping to surrender their pets - especially cats.

"We've definitely gotten more calls in the last couple of months because of the foreclosure problem," Knight said during a busy Wednesday night at the shelter off Pond Street.

The anecdotal evidence of increasing surrenders mirrors the actual evidence of increasing foreclosures.

First quarter statistics show that the number of foreclosure deeds in Attleboro, alone, has more than tripled from the first quarter in 2007 to the first quarter in 2008, from eight to 28. That bodes ill for pets because of limited shelter resources - not just here, but anywhere where foreclosures are on the rise, workers said.

The Attleboro shelter can handle only 15 cats and 12 dogs at a time. And the cat cages are usually full.

But Tabby, 8, and Sylvester, 6, are two of the lucky ones. Their owner showed up at the right time.

Spaces don't stay empty for long, cat care workers said.

"We've gotten more calls, but we can't take them all," Knight said.

And Cat Care Coordinator Diane Beltran is concerned the worst is yet to come. "My guess is the number will continue to increase, but, hopefully, not by a large amount," she said.

Meanwhile, around the country, news reports indicate pets are suffering to a much greater degree elsewhere.

WKYC TV in Cleveland reported in late October that Cleveland's Animal Protective League was in a "crisis mode."

The APL had almost twice as many cats as it could handle and foreclosures were blamed.

Some cats and dogs were found in "horrific conditions" in abandoned homes, WKYC said.

Rooms littered with feces and saturated with urine were among the conditions in which abandoned animals were found.

And some animals were found dead, having been left with little, if any, food or water.

In Orange County, Florida, almost 700 pets were given up from October to February, triple the number surrendered during a housing boom in 2005, according to TV station WESH. Again, foreclosures were through the roof and were blamed for the surge of surrenders.

Things aren't that bad here, but signs are troubling, said Meagan Rock, manager of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Boston.

She echoed Knight's observations.

"We've definitely seen a rise in pet surrenders for foreclosure, Rock said.

However, foreclosures haven't seemed to result in an overall increase in the numbers of pets surrendered or abandoned, she said.

But the numbers of foreclosure surrenders over the past eight to 10 months bear watching, and the MSPCA has begun that process, she said.

MSPCA workers have started to record foreclosure surrenders to keep an eye on the situation.

No numbers are available yet.

"We're starting to track it now," Rock said. "But because it's a recent occurrence, we don't have any hard data."

While part of the concern is that the number of surrenders will increase, there's a worry that the number of adoptions will decrease because of faltering economic conditions, Rock said.

People with fewer dollars are not as likely to take on a pet, and that will leave shelters jammed and less able to deal with surrenders and abandonments, Rock said.

"The economy in general is making it less likely that people will adopt animals," she said.

While foreclosure is a growing reason for surrendering pets in Attleboro and elsewhere, cats are the victims far more often than dogs.

"We really haven't had a lot of inquiries about dogs," said FAAS Canine Care Coordinator Nancy Robinson.

City Animal Control Officer Jeffery "Butch" Keefer believes that cats are more likely to end up surrendered or abandoned without any shelter or source of food.

They seem to be thought of as disposable, he said.

A false belief that a cat can survive and thrive on its own helps people rationalize setting them loose, if they can't get them into a shelter, he said.

"Cats are a throw-away pet for some people," Keefer said. "When people don't want them, they just get rid of them."

Assistant Animal Control Officer Kathy Pereira agreed that cats are more vulnerable. Surrender numbers can be known, but abandonment numbers can't, she said.

"It happens a lot," Pereira said of people literally throwing out their cats. "A lot of people don't even call here. They think cats can fend for themselves, and they really can't."