by Cathy Davis
What an exciting weekend we just had! If you weren’t able to attend the Homes for the Holidays event, you missed a spectacular and diversified fund raiser! Mechanic Street was closed off and there were beautiful decorations, a nice fire going in the fire pit, trees and wreaths for sale, music playing.
At the Vault Restaurant there was a buffet lunch of stews and apple pie, at Hollywood Pet there were craft tables, raffle tables, Santa Claus and his elves taking photos, there were carolers, there was a fabulous raffle and best of all, an extremely successful adopt-a-thon. Ten cats were adopted Saturday, and we were dancing with glee to see them go into good homes.
Over $4,000 was raised to help with the vet bills at the Shelter and in a future column, we will list all those who contributed so we can thank them properly. A very special thank you to Lorraine Monfils for all her hard work organizing this event, and all her little “elves” who worked tirelessly to assist her!
In the meantime, we still have about 140 animals that need homes. I would encourage you to consider adoption and making a deserving pet part of your family.
You know, we could not be more fortunate, we have so many families who support us and contribute to our special projects. They cook, sew, stand on the street corner and sing, they walk and dance, and organize fund raisers, they save yard sale items for us and they bring blankets and towels, and they drop money into the donation buckets at the convenience stores. Every single day we count our blessings.
We would like to be able to give something back. We have no money, but we do feel that this year is going to be extremely difficult for people with the cost of fuel oil being so high so we were looking for any possible way that we could help people get through the season. It often happens that we have pet food donated to the shelter and sometimes we have only six or seven dogs, but enough food for 20 or 30 dogs so we were thinking we would set up a pet food bank to help those who have animals and find themselves trying to decide whether to feed Rover or themselves.
We want to make sure that families donating food understand that some of it may go to needy pets who are not currently shelter residents. We feel this is still a shelter issue. If people can’t afford to feed their pets, they may abandon them, bring them into the shelter, or the animals may go hungry, and we feel this is a very important outreach service we can provide.
In order to apply for the program, we would just ask that you call the Shelter at 532-2862 and complete a simple application over the phone, or stop by the Shelter between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. and you can complete the application right there.
This program is subject to availability of food, and we cannot guarantee any specific brand will be available. We will have more dog food than cat food but we will do our best to help all those who need help with what food we do have available.
If you would like to donate food for this program, please feel free to do so, or if you would like to donate something that will stay right at the shelter, we need cat litter, tons and tons of cat litter – do you know we go through almost three full tons of cat litter a year! Unbelievable! But this has been the worst season for cats that we have ever seen and we are bulging at the seams.
This year we all need to help each other get through the winter, and we appreciate all you do to help us each and every day. It’s all about the animals. And for all of you who care for them, thank you.
