If the above links do not work, click here to view the video and here to access the GivingGrid fundraiser.

Black Cat Giving Tuesday

Upcoming Adoption Events

• Saturday, 12/7, 11am-3pm, PetSmart Finley Square Shopping Center (1550 Butterfield Rd, Downers Grove)
• Sunday, 12/15, 1-4pm, at Feral Fixers, 330 Eisenhower Ln N, Lombard
• Saturday, 12/28, 11am-3pm, at Feral Fixers, 330 Eisenhower Ln N, Lombard

Come visit the selection of cats we will have available on Saturday at PetSmart! It a big help to get pre-approved, tell us what you are looking for and we will do our best to arrange a meeting even if your choice is not PetsMart during this event. Come visit and learn about our cats and find the right fit for you! Application here. Make a difference!

December Already!

This is the time of year when we work very hard on adoptions and fundraising. We are hoping that changes in veterinary resources in the area will help us TNR more at the beginning of the year and avoid the end of the year pressure in 2025. Think about becoming one of our trappers, keep an eye on new cat arrivals to your neighborhood, and pay attention to when the overnight temperatures are consistently above freezing again.

11/21 – DCAS – 2 friendlies, 1 feral, all 3 males. We were told that all 3 of these boys were “kittens.” Not so much as 8 – 10 months is not a kitten to us. One went back to his caretaker, his brother started purring in his trap as soon as he looked me in the eye (transferred to Cat Guardians) and the third went back to his people as they decided to try him inside – could not give him up.

Total: November - 49, to date - 834, since 2007 - 15,714.

As Many As Possible As Soon As Possible

Frosty Claws 2025

The date is set! Sunday, January 19^th, from 12 noon to 4PM. Again at the VFW Post 2801, 39 E St. Charles Rd, Villa Park. Join us for food, beverages, boutique, Silent Auction, door prizes, raffles and the company of fellow cat lovers! We welcome donations for our fundraisers, please contact Tammy, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to donate new or antique items. If you would gift it to a friend or family member, our attendees would love to bid on it! Put the date on your calendar, hope to see you there!

Still Need Fosters and Volunteers

Andy before surgery, a stuck 3rd eyelid can result in constant watery eye and risk of infection.		Andy's stuck 3rd eyelid was corrected during his neuter on 11/12 - looks good!

Upcoming Adoption Events

• Saturday, 11/23, 11am-3pm, at Feral Fixers, 330 Eisenhower Ln N, Lombard, IL
• Saturday, 12/7, 11am-3pm, PetSmart Finley Square Shopping Center (1550 Butterfield Rd, Downers Grove, IL)
• Sunday, 12/15, 1-4pm, at Feral Fixers, 330 Eisenhower Ln N, Lombard, IL
• Saturday, 12/28, 11am-3pm, at Feral Fixers, 330 Eisenhower Ln N, Lombard, IL

We have so many adoptable cats on hand. Our volunteers are working very hard to host our Adoption Events – but you do not have to attend an event to adopt! Get pre-approved, tell us what you are looking for and we will do our best to arrange a meeting. We will have a Sunday event on 12/15. Please share our information with friends and family and help us find the best homes possible for the cats in our care. Come visit and learn about our cats and find the right fit for you! Application here. Make a difference!

Corner Bakery Fundraiser

I visited Corner Bakery Warrenville on Saturday as a test flight. Hadn’t been to a Corner Bakery for a very long time – I’ve been missing out! Join us on Saturday, November 30, 2024, 7:30am-7:30pm, 28258 Diehl Rd, Warrenville, IL, US 60555 between 7:30am-7:30pm. I hope to attend around 1:30 in order to support Feral Fixers! Corner Bakery will donate 25% of your order to Feral Fixers! Breakfast, lunch OR dinner! If you are out shopping, tired of cooking? Would this be an easy location for your good Friendsgiving? A place to take the relatives who are still visiting? 25% is highly unusual in dining fundraising and we really appreciate Corner Bakery’s participation! Give yourself a break and support Feral Fixers! Please RSVP on our Facebook page!

Cats At Work Participant

Many organizations are working to employ feral cats to combat rat issues in residential and business neighborhoods. Similar to Feral Fixers’ Working Cats program, Tree House has a standout representative that has dispatched dozens of rats in a very short period of time.

Christmas Trees Are Coming

We’ve all seen those oh-so-cute pictures of the cats nestling in the Christmas Trees, and the pictures of mass destruction as the trees have hit the ground! To limit hazards in my own house, when we could not give up on a live tree, the only decoration were white lights, and the cats remembered when we had spritzed the tree with water to make it inhospitable. They still nestled underneath on the base cover, gently sniffing the branches above. Idyllic, right? But we were fearful all the time that we would come home to a very different picture! As you decorate for the coming holidays, here are some tips to consider for the safety of your felines.

Bear With Us

We are close to the end of November; we’re still working on neutering our fosters and have had a couple of situations where we could not say “no.” Doing our best to shut down ‘til the Spring as we are behind in all the other tasks that we need to take care of – fundraising, building improvements, self-care! We are doing the best we can, please bear with us! We hope to have sufficient volunteers and spay/neuter slots in the Spring to hit the ground running! What we’ve been doing:

• 11/12 – ADOPT – 10 friendlies, 6 female, 4 males.
• 11/12 – GEAH – 1 friendly male kitten that also had eye surgery to correct a third eyelid issue.
• 11/15 – ADOPT – 10 friendlies, 5 female, 5 males. 8 of these friendlies were just one litter. Litter sizes have been increasing, 6 – 8 is much more common, when we started so long ago, 4 kittens to a litter was the norm. Are the cats working against us?
• 11/18 – DCAS – 4 friendlies, 2 female, 2 male. Working away at the backlog, our thanks to DuPage County

Total: November to date 46, 2024 to date 831, since 2007 15,711.

Empty TNR!!! Before this picture was taken, Nana, a feral from 2018 was loaded up to go back home - she had an immense amount of fur matting and we had gotten her shaved - she will be housed in a crate at the caretaker's home til the fur grows back enough.		Nana may not look happy but getting all her mats shaved off had to feel so much better!

As Many As Possible As Soon As Possible

Donate Newspaper in March

We have stopped TNR ‘til March. The response to our pleas for newspaper have been great! But now that we’ve got everyone in motion, we have to ask that our donors hold on 'til March when we resume trapping. With storage limitations we cannot continue to take the volume we’ve been getting. Hope you can resume dropping off with us in March!!!!

Frosty Claws 2025

The date is set! Sunday, January 19^th, from 12 noon to 4PM. Again, at the VFW Post 2801, 39 E St. Charles Rd, Villa Park. Join us for food, beverages, boutique, Silent Auction, door prizes, raffles and the company of fellow cat lovers! We welcome donations for our fundraisers, please contact Tammy, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to donate new or antique items. If you would gift it to a friend or family member, our attendees would love to bid on it! Put the date on your calendar, hope to see you there!

Still More

• 10/28 – DCAS – 5 friendlies, 3 female, 2 male. Kittens on hand - neutering will speed up getting into foster.
• 10/30 – ADOPT – 10 friendlies, 5 female, 5 male.
• 10/31 – ADOPT – 6 friendlies, 2 female, 4 male.
• 10/31 – DCAS – 2 friendly, 3 feral, 4 female, 1 male. Three kittens who are insisting on being feral, hoping s/n will change their minds. Update – nope, they were returned to their colonies and one relocated to be with other relocated kittens.
• 11/6 – ADOPT – 10 friendlies, 7 female, 3 male.
• 11/7 – ADOPT – 6 friendlies, 3 female, 3 male.
• 11/7 – DCAS – 5 friendlies, 5 males.

Total: October 118, November to date 21, 2024 to date 806, since 2007 15,686.

As Many As Possible As Soon As Possible

One of the kittens in TNR built her own fort from the sheet covering her crate!

Upcoming Adoption Events

• Sunday, 11/10, 1-4pm, at Feral Fixers, 330 Eisenhower Ln N, Lombard, IL
• Saturday, 11/16, 11am-3pm, PetSmart Finley Square Shopping Center (1550 Butterfield Rd, Downers Grove, IL)
• Saturday, 11/23, 11am-3pm, at Feral Fixers, 330 Eisenhower Ln N, Lombard, IL

Can you imagine having 100 adoptable cats? Neither can we, but that’s where we are! We have such wonderful adoptables and know so much about them, helping us to find the best homes possible for them. Our Sunday adoption events have been very popular, but this Sunday may be the last one until next year. Come visit and learn about our cats and find the right fit for you! You can find our Application here. Get pre-approved and make a difference in their lives!

Hold The Newspaper Til March?

We have stopped TNR 'til March. The response to our pleas for newspaper have been great! But now that we’ve got everyone in motion, we have to ask that our donors hold on 'til March when we resume trapping. With storage limitations we cannot continue to take the volume we’ve been getting. Hope you can resume dropping off with us in March!!!!

Corner Bakery Fundraiser

Imagine the luxury of picking a time within 12 hours to support Feral Fixers! Saturday, November 30, 2024, 7:30am-7:30pm, Corner Bakery Cafe will donate 25% of your order to Feral Fixers! Breakfast, lunch OR dinner! If you are out shopping, coordinate around this location to stop in for any meal or snack at the Corner Bakery Cafe located at 28258 Diehl Rd, Warrenville, IL between 7:30am-7:30pm. Tired of cooking? Need a place to take the relatives who are still visiting? 25% is highly unusual in dining fundraising and we really appreciate Corner Bakery’s participation! Give yourself a break and support Feral Fixers! Please RSVP on our website!

Frosty Claws 2025

The date is set! Sunday, January 19^th, from 12 noon to 4PM. Again at the VFW Post 2801, 39 E St. Charles Rd, Villa Park, IL. Join us for food, beverages, boutique, Silent Auction, door prizes, raffles and the company of fellow cat lovers! We welcome donations for our fundraisers, please contact Tammy, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to donate new or antique items. If you would gift it to a friend or family member, our attendees would love to bid on it! Put the date on your calendar, hope to see you there!

2023 – What A Year

The challenges have been immense. 

Kitten numbers have increased dramatically –societal changes may be the biggest impact: lack of vet access, money, movement of our population – combining households, isolation and hoarding, etc. People are actually paying more attention to the cats outside and are discovering the pregnant cat, the litter of kittens much more readily than in the past which results in overall increased volume that we are contacted about. Every shelter is full. Everyone is doing their best to save every cat they can. Adults and kittens are becoming friendly at an increased pace. Years ago, a feral was a feral was a feral. Not anymore. Kittens sometimes are friendly from the time they are trapped, adults will have a complete turnaround to being friendly. National organizations are seeing this and the only advice they can offer is that even if a cat is friendly, put it back outside – there just aren’t enough homes.

Volunteers. The data can be looked at in many different ways, but finding information that DuPage County ranked 2^nd in 102 Illinois Counties of charities per square mile illustrates why it is so difficult finding and maintaining volunteers. No one seems to have as much time as we used to. There are so many choices of where to spend that valuable volunteer time. Our lives can change in an instant and our personal responsibilities must take priority. Feral Fixers has wonderful volunteers, and we treasure them every day. We need more, the volunteer staff is not a constant and can change quickly. From trapping to transport, fostering and shifts of cat care at the building, cleaning – oh my, the cleaning! We do need volunteers who can snuggle kittens just as much as we need those who can sweep floors and do laundry. Social people who can interact with adopters on adoption days, help with events, host events! Everyone has their own strengths and abilities, please share them with us!

Need everywhere. We can average five calls a day for help.

*Discovered kittens under the shed, come help. *My mother let a pregnant cat into her house, come trap and take the kittens. *My cat has lost its mind and is attacking me, help. *I have 15 cats in and around my house (usually results in 60+ cats). *I live outside your area, but I can bring the cats to you. *Been feeding a cat for 2 years, not neutered, now he’s injured from fighting, come help. On social media, you may often see “call Feral Fixers, they will help you” and we do help so many!

With all these challenges we must remember the impact we have had, can you imagine how many cats would be roaming the streets, producing more and more, the suffering we have alleviated, feline and human alike! We have much more work to do but what a difference has been accomplished! 

You - donors, volunteers, caretakers, are all responsible for the huge difference Feral Fixers has achieved in the last 16+ years!

What Can We Expect In 2023?

We continue to face the unknown. Who could have expected that across the nation, we are short 15,000 veterinarians? Who could have expected that our nation could be short millions of spay/neuter surgeries? So many different factors are affecting daily lives, it will be interesting to see the impact on cats outdoors, how many kittens will be born to these unneutered females still roaming that no one was able to get to. Prices have gone up for cat food, cat litter, gasoline to take them to appointments & adoptions, and on and on. What can we do? We can continue to get as many spay/neuter appointments as we possibly can and to FILL those appointments, making caretakers aware that they must contact us as soon as a cat is consistent in attendance. It is the ONLY way to lower costs in the future. Once those kittens arrive, we will care for them, using resources for current day expenses, not for preventing even greater expenditures in the future – that is unsustainable and returns us to the past when feral cats were euthanized regularly.

Trapping will resume around the end of March, beginning of April. Keep an eye out for ferals in your area, talk to your neighbors, help us help you to care for those cats.

What Can You Do?

The Amazon Smile donation in November, which covered purchases made between July 1, 2022, and September 30, 2022, came to $606.70. That means that our donors spent $121,340 in that time period and .5% was donated by Amazon Smile – Yay! Use AmazonSmile and designate Feral Fixers – could not be an easier way to raise funds!

Visit our wish lists at Amazon & Chewy – we always need food; canned food in particular goes fast when you are supporting so MANY kittens! Gift cards allow us to purchase what our greatest need at the time is – paper towels, bleach, laundry detergent, litter boxes – amazing the variety of things we purchase to keep going! 

Spread our information to coworkers, family, social media – we have donors across the country! Cats have a ripple effect, they don’t stay in one place and affect wider resources than those on their street, in their town, in their county – even in their state! New people are volunteering with us due to sharing information, but we need more volunteers, many more. Trappers, transporters, cleaners in the building, animal care in the building, fosters, event volunteers, the list goes on. You tell us what you want to do to help, and we try to make that fit for both of our benefits!

Frosty Claws in 2023 

We seem to be returning to some degree of normalcy. As a result, we will be holding our 2023 Frosty Claws on Sunday, January 15^th from 12 noon to 4pm at the Villa Park VFW. We may have huge attendance that day because of skipping years, please be patient. This is an event for our caretakers, adopters, donors, to talk about cats and network with some fundraising and food. We are about to start assembling our Silent Auction and door prize items – we may not have as much “stuff” as in previous years – we will post items as they are created, as soon as we have a chance. We look forward to seeing everyone who can attend!

We appreciate all the people who have continued to care about the cats. Many new caretakers had the time to resolve the cats around them. Extra time spent at home led to lots of new fosters and some foster failures as those families adopted their fosters, unable to part with them. People spending more time at home led to many more kittens being brought in and the longest "kitten season" we've ever experienced with the extended balmy weather. We formed tighter bonds with the area rescues as we all went thru the same challenges.

All those kittens took a toll on our fosters, our s/n transporters and Sue, our adoption counselor. There were individual kittens that actually received 40 – 50 inquiries EACH! But each of these kittens go to the best home possible for them as individuals and the alumni stories we receive validate the effort put into that goal. Please take the time to read the foster story included in this newsletter, we have some very impressive volunteers.

Thru it all we kept going as our physical interactions with people are limited and usually outdoors. A few fosters experienced COVID, most of us have been able to remain healthy.

Our ability to fundraise has been greatly impacted as cat people are much more social with other cat people than one might think and they greatly enjoy our in-person events!

A Few Notes About the Building

We try to wash and disinfect our traps before they go into Winter storage so they can be used immediately in the Spring. We were able to transport them all to the building, the railing spacing on the ramp made it very easy to get them into the building, the new washtub was able to hold 4 traps (3 large, 1 small) at once, so simple! And there was plenty of room for spraying with a blast of disinfectant, rinsing and shipping off to storage!

Fundraising

Just a few more days of our Black Cat Giving Tuesday Fundraiser. We hope the 2021 Feral Fixers Happy New Year! Raffle helps to replace our Frosty Claws event and provide something our donors will enjoy participating in.

For many reasons, I receive emails from a great many non-profits. That means that I see how they promote their organizations and ask for money. We do our very best to be different, low-volume and specific about our needs. I can't imagine how weary some of you must be, bombarded on a daily basis by every group for human, environmental, political and animal needs. I could say negative things about those other groups but would instead reaffirm that funds donated to Feral Fixers work to benefit the cats in this geographic area. Surgeries, medications, food, transportation, supplies, a building to house them in, it all goes towards the cats. The percentage of funds used for fundraising (administrative costs are often a high percentage of total costs) is minimal. We adapt ideas and make our asks as enjoyable as possible 😸. We will never be able to give up fundraising but promise to keep the annoyance to a minimum!

We have personal relationships with our donors and we appreciate them so much!

Happy Holidays!

We wish you a Wonderful Holiday and the Best Possible New Year!

Thank you all for your personal messages this year, they are greatly appreciated. Wish we could thank you all individually!