Happy 13th Birthday Purrfect Pawprints!
I can’t believe Purrfect Pawprints is turning 13! As I look back over the years, it seems like it was just yesterday, we became officially a 501(c)3. It has been a fantastic journey, with many lessons and challenges along the way.
When I first started Purrfect Pawprints, I never imagined it would grow as it has. I imagined it would be just me! Now, we have a fantastic family that works incredibly well together. We started out helping a local shelter to get their animals adopted out. We thought the important thing was finding them a home and didn’t worry about the spaying and neutering. Boy, we quickly changed that opinion. We would help with medical treatment and we would transport the shelter animals to get fixed and then transport them back to the shelter; then they stayed at the shelter until they were adopted into a home or were, sadly, euthanized. We were doing adoptions weekly, transporting the dogs in the back of my little Mazda truck to the Riverdale Petsmart, a 70-minute drive one way for the weekly adoption event, and then transporting any unadopted dogs back to the shelter.
Unfortunately, our connection with the local shelter ended due to issues surrounding the inappropriate treatment of animals by shelter employees. The shelter manager used a muscle paralyzer, rather than a euthanizing drug, which amounted to long and painful deaths for the animals. Thankfully, the shelter manager was moved out of the shelter and the treatment of the animals improved. At the time, we were small, and our focus was on helping the shelters, thus it was vital to find another shelter. Happily, we were able to find another shelter to focus our support efforts.
We felt that we could do more to support our local cat community. We started to expand to utilizing foster families for our rescued cats. Foster families allowed us to greatly increase the number of cats and kittens that we were able to rescue.
We obtained a few more PetSmart stores along the way and built an excellent relationship with PetSmart staff. The employees genuinely love every animal we bring in for adoption. The associates are very supportive, and without their support, we would not save as many animals as we do.
Rockstar Pets is another location we adopt cats out of. Their associates are always looking out for the cats and helping us find them a perfect home. Some of our most challenging cats have found the purrfect home because of Rockstar Pets. I don’t know what it is but, this location has such a calming effect on the cats.
We have been actively Trapping, Neutering, and Returning (TNR) cats back to their colonies. There was a point our most aggressive trappers had fixed most of the cats in the Tooele Valley. Kittens were hard to come by. All that changed with the loss of the voucher program from another large rescue and the hit of COVID-19. Where we are mostly a cat rescue, there isn’t the profit like with dogs. So, we had to cut back on the number of feral cats getting fixed.
2020 was an excellent year for us. We had more adoptions than we have ever had and said goodbye to some negative volunteers. Some people are like clouds. When they disappear, it’s a beautiful day. We did 185 more adoptions in 2020, which is outstanding because of the closure of surgery clinics and the social distancing. Purrfect Pawprints is so blessed to have such a fantastic family that can overcome any challenge.
One thing I am super excited about is we are starting to treat FIP cats. We had heard about another rescue treating them and had lost a few cats to what looked like FIP. It can be very costly and time-consuming. The cats receive a shot daily for 85 days, then are monitored for another 85 days. They also receive bloodwork every 4 to 6 weeks. We are currently treating five kittens. It is amazing the difference we see within a few days of starting their treatment. We have tiny Cindy Lou Who, who was about three months old when diagnosed but was the size of a 7-week old kitten. In a little over a month of treatment, she has gained 2 pounds. She was diagnosed with wet FIP.
If you are interested in helping us continue our mission to save cats, here is our Amazon wish list! Our greatest need is kitten food.
We also have a wish list on Chewy
https://www.chewy.com/g/purrfect-pawprints-inc_b77469581