"We’re starting to build our clinic! Randy, our carpenter extraordinaire, has once again volunteered his time and hard work. This time he is donating his talented hands to convert an old garage into a beautiful clinic space for our rescued cats. Naturally, the timing couldn’t be worse, we haven’t even begun to recover from the financial devastation left behind by Animal Charity and their big, bad and highly illegal raid of our shelter in September. We had been – for once – in reasonable shape prior to the raid and in a position to make this dreamed-of clinic a rocking reality.
"Then came the raid, like a tornado out of a clear blue sky. Stealing our cats, our records, and pretty much anything that wasn’t nailed down in one fell swoop. We tried very hard to take the high road here, which isn’t easy while listening to yourself being described as everything from a crazy cat hoarder who meant well but got overwhelmed to an actively evil human being who pocketed money meant for food and medicine while watching cats suffer and die. I’ve heard that I’m an incoherent drug addict, an escaped mental patient, a brooding sociopath, a woman on the edge… of what, God alone knows.
"Anyhoo, here we be. The carpenters are available for a few precious weeks between jobs and we have to build now, before they have to leave us to earn an actual living. And the fact that the raid left us financially devastated can’t be allowed to stop this from happening.
And this is where you, our friends and adopters and even those of you who aren’t cat nuts like the rest of us, can help us. We’re begging you to please help us. We’ve been able to scrounge enough 2 x 4′s to frame the room out. We received 2 small grants that paid for spray insulation on the ceiling and the walls. Randy and our wonderful landlord Gary have found enough pipe and parts to make the sinks a reality. But, even insulated, it is cold in there. And by summer, it will be hot in there.
"So here we are, once again begging you, our friends, for your help. We need to raise $6500.00 to finish this project and we have to do it while we still have carpenters here to finish it up. Please, please consider making a donation to our clinic fund. You can send a check directly to the shelter or use the button on our CLS website to donate online. Or, even better, drop by the shelter with your donation and see for yourself what we’re doing with it. Who knows, you might walk into one of our cat rooms and emerge with a new best friend!
"And we need YOUR help to do it right. Thanks to our local “humane society” the funds that we were going to use to build our clinic went instead towards keeping our shelter alive during the six weeks that we voluntarily closed to allow their investigation to proceed. Six weeks of paying rent and utilities for our building and retail vet care prices for the lucky cats in foster care who escaped the raid were enough to seriously deplete our finances. Add to that replacing the things that mysteriously vanished while the building was out of our hands and me having to pay a substantial legal bill with money that I wanted to donate to the shelter and you can understand why money is tight, tight, tight around here. So, you may ask, why start on the clinic project when finances are not exactly optimum? The answer is twofold. The first part is good news – our wonderful carpenter Randy had some time between jobs and offered to come up and do the building. The second part is even better news, we received a $1200.00 grant that was earmarked for our veterinary clinic. So, the timing stinks, but the time is now.
"If you’ve ever done a project like this, you know that even with volunteers doing the building materials add up to a lot more than $1200.00. The studs and insulation alone cost over $1500.00. Then there is drywall, wiring, windows, doors, primer, paint, counter-top and faucets. We have scavenged a lot of the materials we need, but we still have to purchase a lot of building materials. The most important – and expensive – part of this project is the climate control unit. The new clinic is very well insulated, but it did start life as a garage, hot in summer and cold in winter. We have been taking bids for furnaces, and the lowest bid so far comes to $5300.00. This clinic means a lot to The Cat Ladies Society. With it, we can continue with our primary mission of helping the cats and kittens that need us most, those who come through our doors battered and bruised and sometimes ill. This will insure adequate facilities for our vet tech, vet assistant and visiting veterinarian volunteers to isolate and properly care for cats who just need a little extra help before they are ready to become peoples’ beloved pets.
Please, please help us by donating to this project.
Checks can be mailed to: The Cat Ladies Society
2217 Mahoning Ave.
Youngstown, Ohio 44509
"Or just click on the Donate button on the CLS blog. Or, better yet, stop by and donate in person. You can tour the shelter, visit (and maybe even adopt!) our wonderful cats and check out the progress of the construction for yourself.
Please help us to keep helping them, and keep improving the ways in which we can help!"
"Last night the most amazing thing happened! A donor (who wants to remain anonymous) has offered to match all donations made for our clinic fund. This means that for every cent donated we will get two cents, one from the original donor and one from our wonderful benefactor. Please, make your donations count! You can go on our website and click the Paypal button to donate online. If you prefer snail mail, that is fine, too! Better yet, you can stop by the shelter, meet the Cat Ladies and the carpenters who are donating their time and labor, and meet the wonderful feline shelter residents!By the way Kimm was interviewed by The Fabulous Animal Rescue Project --- it can be read here.
"Our address is 2217 Mahoning Ave. on Youngstown's very happening West Side. Stop by, donate, volunteer, adopt or just schmooze! We'd love to see you".
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 11:28pm
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| 714 CLS cats found forever homes last year alone |
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| note the clever means of egress from room to room from above |
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| upstairs in one of the Eat Play Sleep rooms |
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| the cat tunnel doors from the other side |
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| so many nifty shelves for prowling |
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| more modular shelves and ramps |
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| the only cat about was this stone guardian over the stairway |
"However.... way back in 1883 Howard Williams published 'The Ethics of Diet - a Catena' a collection of articles by ethical writers. Williams was a friend of Gandhi at the London Vegetarian Society, and Gandhi clearly states in his autobiography that he read the book in the early 1890s. In the section on Schopenhauer, p.287, Williams quotes Dr. David Strauss (Die Alte und die Neue Glaube) "The manner in which a nation, in the aggregate, treats the other species, is one chief measure of its real civilisation." - so wherever Gandhi might have used his variation of the quote, he did not entirely originate it."
