Taking a Break
After December 15th, we will be on hiatus until about February 15th. Too cold for the females after surgery and boy do we need a break!
New One Day Record!
I would never have imagined bringing in 63 cats in one day to PAWS. Back when Chicagoland Stray Cat Coalition first started (about 9 years ago), having over 40 cats in one day at a Spay Day at PAWS from multiple groups was a reasonable day. Since then those individual groups are bringing cats in independently on multiple dates in a month, instead of one or two days of combined effort. How far we all have come! Since more people know about TNR as an accepted practice, since PAWS has increased their ability to do an even higher volume of cats and we have such great volunteers to transport and recover the cats, so many more neuters are possible!
Can We Do It Again?
As I write this, we are 122 cats away from 1,000 for the year. And, as I write this, we have 16 cats ready for a trip to PAWS tomorrow. Think we can manage 106 more cats before the end of the year? That would be two years in a row, what a great accomplishment!
Many Thanks!
Thank you to everyone who came to our Celebrate 3000! Breakfast and to our Shop4Strays Bazaar! It was wonderful seeing everyone and you all have such nice things to say!
Thank you to everyone who has donated in response to my plea last month. We have a little breathing room once again, thank you all so much!
Upcoming Events
On November 20th, we will have our first Oberweis fundraiser. We picked Elmhurst as the first location to try this event out in. Every store coordinates their own fundraisers, it would have been cool to have a fundraiser at every Oberweis in the area at the same time, but the logistics to do so were intimidating – there are a lot of Oberweis stores! The way it works is that you bring the flyer to the store and we get a percentage of what you spend on that day. The more people who shop, the more we get, all the way up to 30%! That is a good fundraiser! Oberweis has more than milk, more than ice cream, take a look at their pies and take it easy for Thanksgiving and let someone else make dessert!
And on November 29th, when you might still be feeling a little overstuffed, come to Sweet Tomatoes and dive into some veggies to balance it all out!
Then on January 15th is our big event, Frosty Claws. We are already planning to have a lot of fun, come join us and share a good time with other cat-lovin’ folk! The silent auction items are already coming in, we have promise of two feral cat shelters, a quilt, who knows what else we will have on hand! Recycled2New will be there with new products and ideas. Stay tuned for further developments!
We’re Not Running Out Of Cats
One would think with almost 3,400 cats neutered, we would be running out of cats to TNR. We are still encountering colonies of 20 here and there and of course, the people who think they only have two cats and are still trapping 10 cats later!
We can’t wait to see what the numbers are for 2011 at DuPage County. We hope they will be much lower, how much will the numbers be impacted by the economy – people abandoning cats that then do not act friendly when they get to Animal Control and therefore are entered as feral, we don’t know.
Its hard to measure on a spreadsheet, but we know for sure that we are impacting the lives of humans and cats alike by all of the positive response we get every time we hear from you, our wonderful supporters!
We couldn’t do it without you!