Motley Zoo Animal Rescue: Cat Chow Building Better Lives Grant Report

How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?

The funds from this grant were used to offer reduced-fee cat adoptions for the cats in our shelter.

Being able to offer reduced-fee adoptions helped us to get more cats adopted as well as find homes from some cats who had been with us long-term.

How many pets did this grant help?

30

Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.

Jewel and Dido (used to be Kori and Kuri) are the most significant story of our use of funds from the Cat Chow Building Better Lives grant. They came to us months ago as a bonded pair. We expected they’d go pretty quickly as they were sweet and friendly, though one a tad more shy than the other. They were staying at one of our partnering pet stores and suddenly started losing hair. A vet’s visit determined they had acquired ringworm, which is a terrible nuisance, though not actually dangerous — however, many animals die in shelters every year for this very treatable condition people fear so much. Our rescue actually takes in dozens of ringworm cat cases every year in an effort to reduce this number, so although we have plenty of experience, this was unexpected and disappointing for these girls.

It took a while for them to get better — the average recovery time is 6-8 weeks. We were able to get them back to one of our partnering stores, but after a short period, the girls became sick — one with a urinary-tract issue and the other with some digestive upset. The culprit and theme behind all of these health issues is, unfortunately, stress — we knew that, in a home environment, they would recover and be healthy, but cats do not get adopted out of foster homes like our dogs do; they really need to be “on display” to show off their personalities to potential adopters.

Although these girls had plenty of interest, no one ended up adopting them for ages. They either changed their minds about adopting, or got kittens instead, or any of a number of weird and disappointing reasons not to pick them. We were starting to become very sad and frustrated for them. Then we received the Cat Chow Building Better Lives grant and were able to reduce their adoption donation significantly, and this spurned new interest in them. Finally, out of the woodwork came their new mom!

We were so happy to finally get them adopted, we practically had a party for them. The employees at their pet store were cheering and so excited. We are just so happy for them and can’t wait to hear more updates about their new fun lives as the queens of their domain! We’re thrilled they can stay together too 😉