Animal Friends Alliance: COVID-19 Operation Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
We are grateful for the opportunity to work with you to help homeless animals during this very disruptive time. We used your funds to provide pre-adoption Feline Leukemia Virus (FeLV) tests for our shelter cats, at a cost of $12.99 per test.
Before adoption, every animal who comes to us is spay/neutered if they arrive unaltered, tested and treated for disease, and microchipped. In addition to supporting our shelter medical expenses, by helping us confirm the presence of the devastating FeLV virus, you helped us fulfill our responsibility to our shelter cats and other cats with whom they may come in contact once they’re adopted.
We are one of the few organizations in the U.S. that actively looks for homeless cats with FeLV whenever we have appropriate space to care for them. Because animals with special needs like FeLV need extra help finding homes, we make an extra effort to step up for them as often as we can. We take extreme care when adopting out healthy shelter cats who are confirmed as FeLV-positive to prevent the virus from spreading to uninfected cats and continuing the cycle of transmission, infection, serious illness, and a lifespan that, sadly, is never as long as it should be when compared to that of a cat who doesn’t have the virus.
How many pets did this grant help?
58
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
Your gift helped us test 4-month-old siblings Ethel, Loretta, Earl and Eugene, who were born in a horse trailer in Platteville, CO. The property owner didn’t know that the kittens and their mother were inside the trailer until she noticed mom coming and going through a window at the top of it to find food for her family.
Our Community Cat program was called in to assess how we could help the five cats, whether with socialization and adoption or trap-neuter-return. We successfully socialized the kittens and all have since been adopted. Their mother was spayed and returned to live under the care of the property owner.
