Pet Talk

by Cathy Davis
www.houltonanimalshelter.com
    It breaks my heart. I go to the Shelter daily to drop off the mail and check in on what’s new.  Yesterday a lady came in with a great big fluffy orange long-haired cat from the B Road. This cat had been hanging around her house for several days, or longer, so she brought him to the shelter.
    The Shelter Director started making phone calls to everybody she could think of on the B. Road to see if we could find the cat’s owner.  He belongs to somebody, he’s healthy, friendly, well groomed, actually a bit on the fat side, so he hasn’t been out on his own very long. He smelled a little bad, evidently he befriended a skunk who wasn’t interested in a new friendship, but other than that, this is one beautiful animal.
    If you live in that area and are missing a cat, please call the shelter at 532-2862. Don’t let him spend the holidays in a cage, that’s just way too sad.
    There are so many animals that will be spending the holidays behind bars, and for what?  What crime did they commit? Why do they languish day in and day out in these little cages waiting for someone to come along and take them home?  
    The shelter does have a community room so some of these cats can get out of cages, lounge on windowsills or pillows and have a little bit of an easier time of it during their confinement, but we can only put so many cats “on the floor” legally. In order to get one out of a cage, a floor cat has to be adopted out.
    And as much as the community room is better, it’s still confinement, it’s still a relatively sterile environment. We are very fortunate to have volunteers who come in and just sit and play with the animals, this socialization is extremely important, but what would you rather have, a warm home, a loving family, a soft bed to sleep in at night, or a room full of other animals and a hard windowsill or worse yet, a 4×4 cage.  
    If I was rich, I’d take them all, have a big farm where they could all run and chase and play and have all the rooms set up with big fluffy beds for them to sleep on.  But the fact of the matter is, we don’t need one rich person to adopt all 200 cats, we need 100 people to each take a pair home for the holidays, fall in love, and keep them safe and healthy for the rest of their lives.
    In an area with approximately 26,000 people, certainly there are 100 families who can find room in their homes, and hearts, for just two more animals. They’re small, they don’t take up any room, they are very little bother, they don’t eat much, they don’t ask to borrow the car keys and they don’t drive up your insurance rates when they get their licenses, they don’t whine about having to do chores and they don’t give you dirty looks when you try to give them hugs!
    We have litters upon litters of the cutest kittens you have ever seen, I mean these are beautiful animals, very healthy, and they have the biggest set of purring lungs I’ve ever heard.  Just picking one up would make your blood pressure drop 20 points.
    Please consider adoption, or even just fostering a few animals for a little while. Our goal is, and always has been, to empty the Shelter, find good homes, forever homes, for every single animal in our care.  Tired of hearing us ask for donations?  We wouldn’t need any if all our animals were in new homes.  Tired of cooking for our fund raisers? No need to hold another fund raiser if we could find a home for every single animal.
    Please don’t let these animals spend Christmas in cages.