Meet Alyssa, one of our dedicated shelter administrators who worked at a veterinarian's office before joining Town Cats last summer, 2002.








She could easily make more money working in the profit sector, however Alyssa is a unique person who loves animals and decided to work at Town Cats where she could utilize her cat care skills and help animals that really need her. She starts her mornings cleaning the cats' cages, medicating the ill ones including administering subcutaneous fluids, hand feeding, providing special care to our senior and special needs cats as well as special attention to our kittens.

Now with 80+ cats and kittens in our shelter, this is a lot of work. Luckily, we have a couple of other people to help...Alyssa then spends her afternoons at Town Cats retrieving and calling back the messages from our hot line. Notice how long the list of messages is on the paper in front of Alyssa? We get an average of 20 phone calls 7 days a week on cat related issues ranging from "I've got a mama cat and kittens in my yard" to "I'm moving and can't take my cat with me" to "my cat's spraying all over the house, what do you recommend?" and so on...

When we started our hot line we were amazed that cats were such a problem to so many people...but thank goodness there are more people who don't see them as pests, but love them and want to help them. We are here to help the cats...as many as possible which is about 1,000 annually...And thank goodness for people like Alyssa who give so much of themselves to help the cats...Rusty sure loves her, as we all do!

Alyssa lives with her husband, 2 dogs and the 4 cats that she adopted from Town Cats. She chose to adopt adult cats because they had been at our shelter for a very long time, overlooked by adopters who tend to prefer kittens...


Alyssa's last day of coming physically into TC is today (06/12/03), since her baby's due August and driving from Watsonville 4 times a week is getting a bit much...she will be retrieving phone messages from home and calling people back advising about our and other available programs and helping them with their cat problems.

We will all miss her smiling face at the shelter but wish her the best with her new baby!"