By: Levi Fistori
With each New Year, Town Cat’s reflects on the previous year of rescue; the joyful adoptions, the happy endings, our new friends, and on the hardships, the losses, and the bittersweet goodbyes. We sort our files and catch up on cleaning; we close our book on the previous year and open a book for the next.
The book of 2021 wasn’t quite what anyone expected it to be, the sequel to 2020 that no one wanted. But even while much of the world remained on lockdown, the world of animal rescue never stopped. As businesses wrestled with whether or not to open their doors, Town Cats continued rescuing and helping cats in need.
Over 300 cats came through our shelter doors in 2020, and 85% of them went into foster care. Fostering is done entirely by volunteers and is invaluable to the animal rescue industry. With each foster volunteer we have, a space is opened in the shelter to save another cat, and for each foster home that opens its doors to those in need, a cat or litter of kittens get to grow up safely and happily while they wait for their forever home. In a year of many uncertainties, the cats at Town Cats were fortunate enough to have almost 100 foster homes opened to them.
Our dedicated fosters took on a record number of ringworm infected kittens, a treatable condition that is still a death sentence to cats in many shelters in the country, as well as bottle babies – the most fragile and labor-intensive foster group there is, with feeding required every two to three hours. Fosters navigated through virtual meet-and-greets, socially distanced adoption meetings, and long delays in spay-and-neuter services, all out of the goodness of their hearts and love for those in need.
As we close the book on 2021, Town Cats is thankful to each and every one of our fosters, whether they foster once, twice, or over and over again.
In the book of 2022, we hope to grow our community of foster volunteers and work towards our goal of having all of our rescued cats recover and recuperate in foster care, rather than the shelter, while they wait for their forever homes.
If you would like to join our team, email us at volunteer@towncats.org, or sign up for our newsletter to find out when Town Cat’s Kitten Season 2022 Summit will begin!