Just because we've been quiet over the past few weeks doesn't mean we haven't been busy! The past few months have been pretty crazy for us, luckily all in good ways!
To start, this year we were awarded our first grant. Last year, we were nominated for this grant by one of our supporters, Jennifer Mayer (who is also an associate board member of the foundation) and wrote our very first grant application. The wonderful Nathan Cummings Foundation decided to award us $9,900 towards our general mission of rescuing homeless animals, especially those with medical needs, and placing them into adoptive homes. We are eternally grateful to this foundation for believing in our goals and helping us to save more animals. Because of this grant, we've already been able to save a few critters that we otherwise would not have had the funds to treat. Over the next few months, we'll be highlighting some of these "special" cases, who had no other options and were slated for euthanasia, and who we were able to save and place into homes due to this generous grant. Thank you again and forever!
While that news has certainly been at highlight of the past few months, it's far from our only accomplishment! Another one of our volunteers, Amy Lefever, a marketing and publicity guru, offered to help us to "get our name out there"! She's helped us to develop a marketing and publicity plan and took the initiative to develop a Cares4pets facebook page, which already has 36 fans!
In addition, our website has been launched!!! Jason Kraley, one of our supporters, has been kind enough to donate his time and design skills to setting up a website that is not only eye-catching and fun, but also easy for all of us techno-illiterate folks to update. It looks amazing and will hopefully also serve to help our efforts be noticed! We're still a little behind in getting it up to date, but many of our adoptable animals are finally listed!
Finally, I have to take a minute to thank Ashley Mosser and Christy Hoffman. Ashley, our resident Girl Scout, has been doing an amazing job collecting updates from all of our adoptive homes, organizing them, and putting them on both our petfinder site as well as our newly launched website. In a few months, we'll hopefully have a much more complete list of our previously adopted critters with new pictures and updates. Christy is one of our volunteers that started out as a foster home and has been willing to donate even more of her time to our organization. Christy has been updating our facebook site, learning how to update our website, searching for new grants, and emailing food companies to see if anyone is willing to donate dog and cat food to our organization. She's amazing; we already don't know what we would do without her!!!
But that's not all! In the past few months, we've also had a number of donation drives done for our organization; the Long family (also proud owners of on of our rescues) did a donation drive for us over the Christmas holidays and brought us tons of wonderful goodies; everything from toys and treats to lots of food! Local Girl Scout troops also put together a drive for us, garnering us a ton of blankets, towels, food, cleaning supplies, and more!
So as you can see, we've been super busy! We hope that the next few months will be just as exciting! We'd like to expand even more and start publishing a bi-annual newsletter as well as plan a fundraising and networking event (or two!). Thanks again to everyone who has helped make the past few months such a success!
Monday, March 30, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Being a Foster Home
Because Cares4pets is a foster-home based rescue group, we don't keep our animals in a central shelter. Every now and again, we need to kennel a dog for a few days until we find it somewhere appropriate to go, but for the most part, all of our critters are in loving homes. It's really easy to take something like this for granted, but it takes a lot of time and effort to place animals in appropriate foster homes and to keep them there. In addition, fostering is a ton of work for the foster home too; teaching a dog or cat basic manners while learning about their personalities can be a daunting task, especially when one is not looking to adopt their foster animal.
Although each of us running Cares4pets can share our foster stories, it's hard for us to remember our first overwhelming foster experience. However, one of our foster homes just started a blog to share their first fostering experience with the world. It can be found here: Foster Home Blog. As all of us who have fostered animals know, the true reward from being a foster home comes when your animal finally gets to his/her forever home and settles there. Brutus, the first foster dog for FosterDogMom, just went to his forever home last weekend. In the next few weeks, we'll get pictures and updates from his new home to share with his temporary foster home. Already, FosterDogMom is gearing up for foster number two. For all the trials and tribulations, she and her family will be back for more!
On the other hand, running a foster home-based rescue group is hard for us as well. We are constantly on the lookout for foster homes, especially homes interested and willing to take on large dogs, pit mixes, cats, and special needs (medical or behavior) critters. Quite often, we find a great foster home, only to have them "fail out" of our foster program, meaning that instead of fostering, they end up falling in love and adopting the animal. That's wonderful for them, the animal, and us, but it also means that we are forever on the lookout for more foster homes.
If you or anyone you know might be interested in fostering for our group, we would love to speak with you! Please send us an email, and we'll give you more information and answer any questions you might have!
Although each of us running Cares4pets can share our foster stories, it's hard for us to remember our first overwhelming foster experience. However, one of our foster homes just started a blog to share their first fostering experience with the world. It can be found here: Foster Home Blog. As all of us who have fostered animals know, the true reward from being a foster home comes when your animal finally gets to his/her forever home and settles there. Brutus, the first foster dog for FosterDogMom, just went to his forever home last weekend. In the next few weeks, we'll get pictures and updates from his new home to share with his temporary foster home. Already, FosterDogMom is gearing up for foster number two. For all the trials and tribulations, she and her family will be back for more!
On the other hand, running a foster home-based rescue group is hard for us as well. We are constantly on the lookout for foster homes, especially homes interested and willing to take on large dogs, pit mixes, cats, and special needs (medical or behavior) critters. Quite often, we find a great foster home, only to have them "fail out" of our foster program, meaning that instead of fostering, they end up falling in love and adopting the animal. That's wonderful for them, the animal, and us, but it also means that we are forever on the lookout for more foster homes.
If you or anyone you know might be interested in fostering for our group, we would love to speak with you! Please send us an email, and we'll give you more information and answer any questions you might have!
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Babies!!!
In just one afternoon, we managed to acquire 6 puppies (5 girls and one boy) and 3 kittens. It's always a "mistake" to look around when we're helping out at local shelters, and last weekend was no exception. Shana was heading to the shelter to help with spays and neuters, so I asked her to take a quick look around to see if there were any cats or kittens in desperate need of foster, either because they were medical cases that needed treatment or because they were too young to stay in the shelter without getting sick. Shana asked one of the volunteers at the shelter, and it all went downhill from there. The conversation went something like this...
Natalie: If you see a cat that needs a foster home, let me know, since I currently don't have any foster cats.
Shana: They just told me that they need a foster home for two kittens; are you game to take two?
So I arrived at the shelter ready to take home two kittens, only to look in the cage to see that there were in fact three. And so, it's no surprise that instead of taking home one cat to transfer to Cares4pets, we ended up taking three.
The puppies were another story... We all know better than to walk through the shelter when we visit, knowing that something will catch our eye. The last time we visited, we left with a sheltie and two american bulldog mixes after promising ourselves that we wouldn't take anything home.
And so, since we have more than enough dogs in our program currently, Shana avoided the adoption rows. However, as she walking out the front door, she almost ran into a big tupperware bin with holes poked in the top. She opened it up to find a litter of adorable puppies inside. No note, no information, just a tupperware bin full of puppies.
And thus, in a matter of hours, we found ourselves with 9 more critters in need of homes. All in a good days work...
Natalie: If you see a cat that needs a foster home, let me know, since I currently don't have any foster cats.
Shana: They just told me that they need a foster home for two kittens; are you game to take two?
So I arrived at the shelter ready to take home two kittens, only to look in the cage to see that there were in fact three. And so, it's no surprise that instead of taking home one cat to transfer to Cares4pets, we ended up taking three.
The puppies were another story... We all know better than to walk through the shelter when we visit, knowing that something will catch our eye. The last time we visited, we left with a sheltie and two american bulldog mixes after promising ourselves that we wouldn't take anything home.
And so, since we have more than enough dogs in our program currently, Shana avoided the adoption rows. However, as she walking out the front door, she almost ran into a big tupperware bin with holes poked in the top. She opened it up to find a litter of adorable puppies inside. No note, no information, just a tupperware bin full of puppies.
And thus, in a matter of hours, we found ourselves with 9 more critters in need of homes. All in a good days work...
Monday, December 1, 2008
Doesn't anyone want an old Rottie?
When one of our volunteers saw two dogs running down the streets of West Philadelphia, she of course stopped to see if they were ok. They were both petrified and one of them was dragging a chain behind him, but other than that they were both friendly and healthy. After a few days of looking for their owners, it became pretty clear that whoever had lost these two dogs didn't want them any more. Momma Bear (as we named her) is a sweet, old Rottie. Her son, Buddha Bear, was mixed with mastiff. Being young and healthy (he was only around a year old), we found Buddha Bear a home pretty quickly, where he is being spoiled just like he deserves. Poor Momma Bear, however, hasn't gotten her lucky break yet.
When we first brought her in, we noticed that she always had a lot of nasal discharge and that her eyes seemed pretty uncomfortable. When we had our vet look at her, she was diagnosed with entropion, a condition where the eyelid folds back over the eye, causing her fur to scratch the cornea of her eye every time she blinked. This poor old lady lived the first few years of her life with painful eyes. Now that they've been surgically corrected, her eyes are much clearer and she's a much happier dog. But being a happy dog doesn't necessarily get you a home, especially when you're an old lady rottweiler. Momma Bear loves to be snuggled; she will curl up in her foster mom's lap for hours at a time. She doesn't ask for much; a few scratches, a few minutes of play time, and she's pretty much content. And yet, she sits in foster care, still waiting for her new family to come take her home. She's not a spring chicken, so we cross our fingers that we'll be able to find her a home soon, that she gets to enjoy being the love of someone's life, even if it's only for a few months or a few years. She deserves that much.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Just because we love them doesn't they don't need homes too
Sometimes rescue is fun; you pick up a stray kitten off the street, watch him grow from a little sickly fuzzball into a Tazmanian devil of kitten craziness, and then adopt him out to people that will love and adore him for his whole love. Sometimes rescue is crazy; you drive 4 hours (each way) to do a home visit for a dog that is being fostered 4 hours in the other direction, and somehow find a way to get dog and people to meet. Oftentimes, rescue is just plain frustrating.
Some of our critters are harder to place than others. For example, kittens that we post on petfinder in the midst of kitten season. Very few people are inclined to wade through an adoption procedure when they can go onto craigslist.com or walk into a shelter and have a happy kitten within an hour. And anyway, just because WE think our kittens are special doesn't mean that they look any different than the 1000's of needy kittens rotting in shelters and crossing their fingers for adoption.
Every now and again, we get an email on these little guys; something about our kitten has caught someone's eye, and they email us to get more information. We're always in a flurry to get these people in to meet the kitten ASAP, dropping personal plans to make it home to meet a potential adopter. And oftentimes, they fall in love with the kitten, because, again, our kittens are awesome (and really, who can meet a kitten and NOT fall in love). We love them as a home, they love the kitten, the rest is just paperwork... Or not...
All to frequently, the next day we get THE email... it says something along the lines of, "I LOVED so-and-s0-cute-adorable-kitten that I met yesterday and would LOVE to adopt him... except then I got home and (insert name here: neighbor, co-worker, friend) called me about this sad little kitten that they found out in the rain. It needed a home, and since your kittens are happily in foster care, I figured it needed to be adopted more."
And so our kitten sits in foster care for days, weeks, months longer than it should. And yes, he is loved, adored, and taken care of, but every day he sits in our foster home is one more day that he misses out on being the center of someone's universe, one more day that he thinks he's in a home where he belongs when in fact he hasn't found it yet, one more day for his foster mom to fall in love and cry that much harder when he finally leaves. And more importantly, that's one more day that the foster home is full and has to say "no" to all the other kittens that she just doesn't have room to help. One more day that sick (and even healthy) kittens at the local shelter die because there were no foster homes open to take them.
This doesn't just happen with kittens, it happens with our dogs too. Just today we got an email from a woman who had been planning to meet one of our critters. The dog she had been interested in has been in rescue for a few years, just waiting to go to the right home. After speaking to this woman, we were ecstatic; FINALLY, our pup would at least have a chance at a real home. And then again, this morning, the email: Even though I think I would LOVE your dog, there is this other dog who needs it more...
And the dog that has sat in foster care for years sits a little longer. She's a special dog that needs a one in a million owner, but unfortunately, there are millions of dogs for that owner to choose from. The dog in a rescue group always loses to the abandoned dog on the side of the road, to the dog about to be euthanized by her owners, etc. And again, that dog spends yet another day in a foster home where she is not someone's baby, she is just one of many. And her foster mom falls more and more in love with a dog she can't keep. And her rescue group turns away multiple dogs that need medical care or special treatment every day, simply because they don't have room to foster one more.
And the hardest part is that we can't really be mad. We certainly can't tell someone that our critters need it more; there are ALWAYS animals that need it more than ours. We know our animals are lucky, and we have to be happy that some lucky creature was slated to die and didn't have to.
But at the same time, we cry when it happens. We cry for our foster pets and the families they could have had. We cry for ourselves and how much more we'll fall in love with this foster baby before he finds a home. And, mostly, we cry for the dogs and cats that we just don't have room to save.
Some of our critters are harder to place than others. For example, kittens that we post on petfinder in the midst of kitten season. Very few people are inclined to wade through an adoption procedure when they can go onto craigslist.com or walk into a shelter and have a happy kitten within an hour. And anyway, just because WE think our kittens are special doesn't mean that they look any different than the 1000's of needy kittens rotting in shelters and crossing their fingers for adoption.
Every now and again, we get an email on these little guys; something about our kitten has caught someone's eye, and they email us to get more information. We're always in a flurry to get these people in to meet the kitten ASAP, dropping personal plans to make it home to meet a potential adopter. And oftentimes, they fall in love with the kitten, because, again, our kittens are awesome (and really, who can meet a kitten and NOT fall in love). We love them as a home, they love the kitten, the rest is just paperwork... Or not...
All to frequently, the next day we get THE email... it says something along the lines of, "I LOVED so-and-s0-cute-adorable-kitten that I met yesterday and would LOVE to adopt him... except then I got home and (insert name here: neighbor, co-worker, friend) called me about this sad little kitten that they found out in the rain. It needed a home, and since your kittens are happily in foster care, I figured it needed to be adopted more."
And so our kitten sits in foster care for days, weeks, months longer than it should. And yes, he is loved, adored, and taken care of, but every day he sits in our foster home is one more day that he misses out on being the center of someone's universe, one more day that he thinks he's in a home where he belongs when in fact he hasn't found it yet, one more day for his foster mom to fall in love and cry that much harder when he finally leaves. And more importantly, that's one more day that the foster home is full and has to say "no" to all the other kittens that she just doesn't have room to help. One more day that sick (and even healthy) kittens at the local shelter die because there were no foster homes open to take them.
This doesn't just happen with kittens, it happens with our dogs too. Just today we got an email from a woman who had been planning to meet one of our critters. The dog she had been interested in has been in rescue for a few years, just waiting to go to the right home. After speaking to this woman, we were ecstatic; FINALLY, our pup would at least have a chance at a real home. And then again, this morning, the email: Even though I think I would LOVE your dog, there is this other dog who needs it more...
And the dog that has sat in foster care for years sits a little longer. She's a special dog that needs a one in a million owner, but unfortunately, there are millions of dogs for that owner to choose from. The dog in a rescue group always loses to the abandoned dog on the side of the road, to the dog about to be euthanized by her owners, etc. And again, that dog spends yet another day in a foster home where she is not someone's baby, she is just one of many. And her foster mom falls more and more in love with a dog she can't keep. And her rescue group turns away multiple dogs that need medical care or special treatment every day, simply because they don't have room to foster one more.
And the hardest part is that we can't really be mad. We certainly can't tell someone that our critters need it more; there are ALWAYS animals that need it more than ours. We know our animals are lucky, and we have to be happy that some lucky creature was slated to die and didn't have to.
But at the same time, we cry when it happens. We cry for our foster pets and the families they could have had. We cry for ourselves and how much more we'll fall in love with this foster baby before he finds a home. And, mostly, we cry for the dogs and cats that we just don't have room to save.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Adoption Event Re-Cap
Even though the weather report for this weekend was a little worrisome, Sunday morning dawned clear and sunny! We loaded up Squee (the coolest one eyed kitten in the world), Mama Bear (our wonderful Rottie), Gingham/Lola (the sweet pit mix), and Porter (our new beagle mix), and drove over to the Natural Pet Expo in Northern Liberties. The whole day was wonderful. Tons of people came to say "hi" to our rescues; they all felt like stars! We also got a chance to meet some other wonderful exhibitors and to spend a day with some of our wonderful volunteers. Thanks to Casey, Philippa, Ashley, Patti, Micki, and Carol for taking some time out of a beautiful Sunday to be with our critters!
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Adoption Event THIS SUNDAY!!!
Come join Cares4pets (and other local animal oriented businesses) in Northern Liberties this Sunday! We'll be participating in the Fifth Annual Natural Pet Expo from 10-5 on Sunday, September 7th on 2nd St in Northern Liberties. We'll have some of our adoptable animals there to meet you- both feline and canine!
Other exhibitors include homeopathic veterinarians, chiropractors, Reiki, massage, natural food choices, etc. In addition, there will be a parade at 1 pm, a BBQ (for dogs and people alike), free samples, and more! You can check out more information at Natural Pet Expo.
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