Dear Friends and Animal Lovers

Seasons Greetings from Love ‘n’ Care Pet Sanctuary (LCPS).  We wish you a very Happy Holiday & a wonderful New Year.  We hope & trust that 2011 will be a good year for you & a better year for us.  If you could help us with a donation it will be very gratefully received.
 
We are sending this letter primarily by e-mail, which avoids the cost of postage.  If you receive our newsletter and wish to be removed from our list please let us know.
 
Thank You! 

We want to thank all of you who have adopted cats & kittens, donated money, towels, blankets, bottles & cans, or food to us, or supported us with volunteer work this year.  We would not be what we are today without your valuable & continuing support.  LCPS has now completed its ninth year dedicated to rescuing & providing care for stray & companion cats.  We currently only deal with cats & kittens since the proliferation of cats in the wild is a major problem in Greene County as well as the neighboring counties.  We help rescue dogs when the owner / rescuer can keep the dog until a loving new home is found.  Dogs & kittens usually get adopted very quickly, but it’s a different story for adult cats.
 
Community Service 

In July we received a call from Sandy that she had a mother cat, Matilda, and 7 newborn kittens.  She also had three 5 month old kittens from Matilda’s previous litter that were still nursing and depriving the new kittens of milk.  We rushed over to pick up the three older kittens so the mother cat would properly attend to her new kittens.  That evening we got another call that the mother cat was still not feeding the kittens.  We rushed over with some milk substitute and fed the 7 kittens with an eye dropper, but one died while we were there.  We took the mother cat and the 6 remaining kittens to our shelter, but one by one 5 more kittens died over the next week.  One kitten lived and we were hopeful that it would be OK but it too died after about 8 weeks.  According to our vet, Matilda must have become a carrier of distemper and passed it on to her kittens.  After a waiting period we were able to get Matilda spayed and she was returned to Sandy.  The older 3 kittens thankfully remained healthy.
 
We received a mother cat and 3 kittens from Sylvia in August.   Suddenly these kittens also started dying, which could only have been from distemper.  Luckily the mother cat and one kitten survived.  No other cats have been infected so we thank our lucky stars for that! 
 
Our Reduced Board 

Scott Symons decided this year to step down as a Director.  We miss him, but he does still help us with funding from his foundation.
 
Adoptions

Our adoption rate this year has been off, presumably due to the economy.  We have adopted 22 kittens & 4 cats, which is only 60% of our 2008 rate, but similar to our 2009 rate in the spring.  We have spayed / neutered 30 animals & are currently full with 47 cats & kittens.  We need to up the adoptions so we will have room when kitten season starts.  Since we are a no kill shelter we are falling into the trap that all shelters eventually fall into.  All our foster homes are at capacity & the adoptable cats are mostly gone leaving primarily the less socialized, special needs, & senior animals.  Our slow adoption rate is because of the huge number of available “free” kittens, the high cost of fuel, the uncertainty of the economy, & the lower disposable income of our Greene Country residents.  We pray for an improvement.
 
Our Population 

We are currently caring for over 75 cats in foster homes & are helping to support almost 150 cats in 11 feral cat colonies!  We are, unfortunately, frequently given animals that are not healthy.  We treat them for fleas, ear mites, ticks, & worms & take them to the veterinarians for tests, shots, spay/neuter, & anything else they may have, like an upper respiratory infection or an eye infection.  Almost all of our income goes to paying for spay/neuter & medical care. 
 
This year we discovered a disease new to us, Bartonella.  Luckily it is curable, but it is also contagious.  Two of our cats tested positive for Bartonella and they have been cured!  We do not have the money to test all of our cats at $65 per test so we decided to test only those cats with a chronic eye or throat infection, which are the primary signs of Bartonella when normal medication doesn’t cure them.  The cure is a 20 day stint on a special antibiotic.  We will then retest the cats at 6 months.
 
Cat Sitters

Our devoted cat sitters come in twice a day 7 days a week.  Carl Hegney & Kimberly Burger continue as our regular cat sitters & have been with us for many years.  They are the ones who make it possible to care for all the cats we have.
 
Web Site

Our web site, provided by Petfinder.com, continues to connect us to potential new parents for our cats & kittens.  The Pet Adoption Portal allows us to add pets or revise information about a pet & the information is automatically sent to 3 additional web sites where our animals are listed.  This gives us extra exposure & hopefully increased adoptions.  There is now a sync available to update our cats on the Petfinder site from the Pet Adoption Portal so we no longer have to do double entry.  To view our available pets please go to www.lcps.petfinder.com.  We have a few adorable older kittens available.  Rescued kittens & cats are wonderful & eternally grateful to us for saving them from a harsh outdoor life!  They are loving, thankful, intelligent, compassionate, & understand they were previously unwanted or abandoned & now have a second chance in life.  You can help by adopting a pet or by referring us to your friends & family when they are looking for a new pet. 
 
Second Web Site

 Thanks to Frank & Mary Hoffman of The Mary T. & Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation, we have a second web site, which is www.all-creatures.org/lnc/.  It is still under construction but we are populating it with information as quickly as we can.  The new site is designed to give us much more flexibility to tell our story & the story of our rescued animals & their adopters.  We can expand categories & add pages as needed.  We are most grateful to Frank & Mary Hoffman for providing us with a vehicle to increase our community outreach & also to Katrin Hecker of AnimalKind who directed us to them.
 
Stray Cat Problem

The only ones taking any responsibility in our county for cats are the private rescue groups.  The number of stray & abandoned cats continues to grow through breeding in the wild and is overwhelming.  We are given many kittens because local residents do not have the money to spay/neuter their pets or because they cannot feed the wild strays in their yard.  We are also given older pets, which are far less adoptable than kittens, when people go into nursing homes or pass away.  If you put $1,000 in your will per cat for us we will take care of your cats for the rest of their lives &/or see that they get adopted into a really fine, loving home.
 
We Need Your Help

If you would like to help us as a volunteer to provide a foster home, set up a feral cat colony, assist with transportation to spay/neuter clinics &/or veterinarians, help clean the shelter, write a newsletter, write for grants, write articles for the media, or set up fund raising events please call us.  We are very under staffed and can use all the help we can get. 
 
Fund Raising

We have received $2,964.49 from the 2009 Federal & State United Way Campaigns – thank you Joe Guastella and Suzanne Maloney!  This year we were again approved for both the Federal Campaign & the Capital Region State Employees Federated Appeal (SEFA).  The campaigns close the end of December & we will know in January how much we will be awarded.  This year we have our friends Helen Schneider, who works for the NY State Department of Motor Vehicles, & Ellen Miller, who works for a federal agency both telling fellow workers who we are & what we do.  We hope this will increase donations.
 
The Twin Counties Cultural Fund & the Greene County Council on the Arts has again awarded us a grant for a theater arts project & performance spearheaded by our sponsored Project Director & Artist, Margo Muller – thank you Colette Lemmon. 
 
We would like to raise money to design and build out a large barn on our partner’s property into a stand alone animal shelter.  If you would like to donate materials, labor, or money to our construction fund please let us know.
 
Please Donate

If you can send us a donation, it will be very gratefully received & will be put to good use as we have virtually no overhead expenses.  All donations are 100% tax deductible.  Please make checks payable to Love ‘n’ Care Pet Sanctuary, Inc. & see if your employer provides matching contributions.  God bless your generosity & best wishes for a happy, healthy & prosperous New Year.

Sincerely,

Carol E. Farren, President and Treasurer
Love ‘n’ Care Pet Sanctuary, Inc.
7080 Route 81
East Durham, NY 12423-1159