Transparency: The Future of Kittenaid Detroit

Posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 | 1 Comment

Hello Kittenaid followers, supports, and friends! For anyone who doesn’t know me, I’m Katherine, and I’m the founder of Kittenaid Detroit. Anyone who knows the Kittenaid Story knows that it started out as a very simple idea, and from there it grew into something much bigger. A lot of individuals and organizations made that possible, and I want to thank  each and every one of you.

First off, before anybody panics, we aren’t quitting, we aren’t leaving, we aren’t disappearing.

What we are doing is trying to be honest, with ourselves and our supporters. And honestly, we bit off a bit more than we could chew, and honestly, we got kind of ahead of ourselves there for a minute, and honestly, we need to scale back just a bit.

So for the time being:

+We are defining ourselves as a rescue/advocacy group. This means we will not be applying for not-for-profit status in the near future, and we will be functioning as a group of individuals.

+We will not be taking on additional foster/up-for-adoption cats and kittens. We will be focusing on our core goal of TNR, as well as helping those cats and kittens already in our care find loving homes.

 

Let me please explain that, while we do have a couple of fairly regular volunteers, there are three Kittenaid Detroit “members”. Only two of us are local. All of us have day jobs. All of us have our own cats. All of us also volunteer for other causes/organizations that we feel are important. All of us also have personal lives. All of us have very limited experience with this kind of work. We would love very much to help each and every cat we hear about, but the sad reality is that is not possible. We would love to see Kittenaid Detroit grow into a fully functioning organization, but at this point that is not possible either. Perhaps in the future.

For those of you waiting on us for a 2012 update, I am sincerely sorry it took so long. I got busy, I was human, and I am still human.

In 2011 we got some pretty great things accomplished. We held our second annual fundraising event. We adopted out 7 cats. We took 4 kittens who were born on the street off of the street, so that rather than being feral they now get to be happy housecats. We successfully trapped, had altered, vaccinated, and ear-tipped, 2 cats. We fed an unknown number of stray and feral cats. We learned a ton.

I can’t say whether 2012 will bring more or less success, what I can say is that we pledge to do what we can. We will have more updates coming soon.

Thanks,

Katherine.

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Wintertime, adoptables, and more!

Posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2011 | Leave a comment

We are currently suspending TNR trapping  for the winter. We know that a lot of people still trap year round, and we definitely respect their work. However, we are currently a very small operation, and if we can’t be certain cats will have adequate shelter, we are not going to risk their recovering from surgery in below-freezing conditions. Meanwhile, we continue to feed and monitor the ferals in our neighborhoods, as well as helping cats get adopted. We may have some changes coming up some time in the new year, stay tuned!

We are working on making a page where we will share the stories of aided cats in our communities, but in the meantime, here is a brief update. You can also see photos of all these cats on our facebook page (though they may not be the most recent photos).

Boudicca (now renamed Maizey) Apollo, and Artemis all got adopted! From what we hear it sounds like they are all adjusting well to their new homes. We are so happy for these babies!

Spike, Malcolm and Caleb, and their mom Babycat (who is honestly one of the nicest cats I have ever met, and that’s saying something), are all still up for adoption! Their foster mom is doing a great job with them, but they really do need forever homes. If you do not have room for them in your home, perhaps you know someone who does? Please don’t hesitate to share! We also currently have 2 kittens in fostering, that are not yet available for adoption, but will be soon.

Harold and Hugo were discovered and successfully trapped  in a backyard in Detroit by some friends of Kittenaid Detroit. Their mother is completely feral, and if they had been left outside much longer, they probably would be too! They are making extroidinary progress, as they learn all about what living with humans in a house is like. We don’t know their exact age, but we estimate they are between 10 and 15 weeks old. These two brothers are very close, and would probably be happiest to be adopted as a pair.

Hugo (left) and Harold (right)

You can see more photos of Harold and Hugo here on our facebook page!

They will not be ready to go home with their new family for several weeks, but please feel free to request a copy of our adoption questionnaire, in order to get started on the process early, if interested. We always ask that you include the names of the cat(s) you are interested in in the comments section of the request form.

I think that’s all for now, hope everyone enjoys whichever holidays they are celebrating!

-Katherine

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Friday Meow

Posted on Friday, November 4th, 2011 | Leave a comment

Hello All!

Your small Kittenaid Detroit team has been hard at work lately.

If you have recently e-mailed one of us, and we have been slow in getting back to you, or unable to help with your particular situation, we sincerely apologize. We wish we could help every single cat we hear about, but unfortunately our time, resources, and capacity, are all limited. Over the past few weeks, we seem to have gotten some good publicity, which is awesome, but the volume of people contacting us with questions (or cats that need aiding!) in the wake of that has been a bit overwhelming.

We are working on making the site more of a resource in and of itself, so that you can get the info you need without waiting for one of us to get back with you. We’re also working hard on being clear about what it is we do, and what we don’t do. To that end, we have created a FAQ page with some of the inquiries we get over and over again. Hopefully that will help. One thing we need to be really upfront about is that we currently cannot accept surrendered pets. This is not because we don’t care about them, or because we don’t understand that things come up. It is because we do not have a shelter, and we have very few fosters available, not to mention limited resources. If we start taking in surrenders, we will no longer be able to help any feral or stray cats at all.

We hope that in the future, we will be able to do more.

In good news, of 6 kittens currently up for adoption, 3 already have possible adoptions pending! In the event of multiple people looking to adopt the same cat, we will go with the first good home to complete the adoption questionnaire and interview. Spike, Malcolm and Caleb are still completely available and would LOVE to go home with YOU! Request a copy of the adoption questionnaire to get started! Please let us know who you are interested in the “comments” section of the form!

Also, we are trying to compile lists of volunteers available for specific things. If you are interested in helping out, or if you are already helping out but haven’t filled out the form yet, please take a quick minute to fill out the volunteer form. It only takes a second, and it will REALLY help us stay organized with everything.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

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A friendly kitten gets a new home, and a feral cat gets some needed aid!

Posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 | Leave a comment

Friends of cats and kittens, it has only been one week since Kittenaid2011, and already there is so much going on! We are so excited about improving the lives of cats in this great city, we can hardly contain it.

Pinkie has a new home, a new forever-mom, a new cat-brother, and probably a new name too! Thanks everyone for sharing him with your friends, it was due in part to his internet popularity that he found his great new mom! His little sister, Ella, has an adoption pending, so hopefully by the end of this week, two more Detroit kitties will have happy, loving homes. If you are thinking about getting a kitten soon do not despair! We are extremely likely to have more kittens to list for adoption very very soon. We’ll keep you posted!

In addition to adoptions, we are in the midst of a TNR campaign. There is a gorgeous little family that we were hoping to trap all together, but for some reason, only the mama cat was really interested.

Linda, a local feral cat we are helping out.

Her name is Linda, and as you can see she is quite beautiful. She is named after the nice lady who took in Blanche’s mother (read about it in the Kittenaid Story), a woman who is a mother herself and in many ways an inspiration for what we are doing here.  Linda the cat has already had two babies, which we are still trying to catch. Linda is a feral cat and not interested in living with humans, so we are helping her the best we can. This week she will be spayed and vaccinated at All About Animals, and then after she makes a full recovery, she will go back to the block where she has been living, which is where she will be happiest. We are trying hard to do right by Linda, and treat her humanely and fairly. She may never understand that we have her best interests at heart, but at least she won’t have to deal with three litters of kittens per year in the future.

In addition, we have been meeting with local community members to try to figure out how we can best aid feral and stray cats in our neighborhoods. We are hoping, for example, to have a shelter building so that ferals like Linda can have some solace and peace from the cold in the winter time. However, most of us live in rental properties, and we need safe places to put the shelters. If you are someone you know has property in Detroit, and would like to have feral cat shelters, please let us know and we’ll try and work something out.

One last note: Halloween weekend is coming up, which means lots of fun, but it also means it is time to keep your cats indoors! None of us like to think about people who are cruel to animals, but the reality is that these people exist. To avoid having to think about them, please, keep your cats safe.

That’s all for now! Hope everyone has a great week!

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Kittens and Social Justice (or) How Will We Decide Which Issue is MOST Important?

Posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2011 | 1 Comment

Jonah poses next to a pile of Kittenaid2011 zines.

About the most common criticism we hear about our work with and for cats is “but how can you be worried about cats when there is (insert world hunger, homelessness, or any other major problem the speaker is involved with or worried about) going on?”

 

The Implication is that we are woefully out of touch. Sure, people think, it’s sad that cats die every day, but there are so many other things going on. If you are trying to make the world a better place, shouldn’t you be focused on something else?

It can be difficult to explain to people with this mode of thinking that, in fact, this is exactly the reason we do the work that we do. Their logic seems to be that, in a world with many problems and issues, you must first assess which is the most important issue, and then work on making it better. Feral cats simply don’t make the cut. Our logic is, in a world with many problems and issues, well:

a) Who is qualified to know which is most important anyways? and

b) The issues that seem to be of lesser importance will always lose out. Even if we firmly established that the most important problem in the world was world hunger, that would still be problematic. With everyone working to solve hunger, no one would say, work on improving public education.

Animals seem to be near the bottom of the list for a lot of people. Even if animals make the cut, it’s rarely feral cats.

 

About two months ago, a bunch of us had a meeting, and decided that if at all possible, we should have our event, Kittenaid2011, on National Feral Cat Day. I contacted the Trumbullplex, and they said great, sure. So we booked it, and then we booked bands, and then we started planning, and making things.

And then a thing none of us who were at that meeting anticipated happened – Occupy Wall Street, and it’s many satellite protests. On Friday, Occupy Detroit started up. There are people who are very excited about these protests, there are people who think they are ridiculous, and there are people who think they need to be done better, and we should think critically about them. There is a way that people look at me, that seems to say that it is ridiculous for me to be staying up half the night getting ready for a benefit for feral cats when this very big, and very important thing is going on.

Today is National Feral Cat Day. It’s 1:00am now. At around 7:30pm yesterday, I put out cat food and treats for the ferals on my block. Later, the kitten who I keep seeing around came around to eat. She is small and it is starting to get cold at night. She had been existing mostly on bread crumbs left out for birds. We are hoping to catch her before she is too old to socialize, and then find a good home for her. We are hoping to catch and spay her mother, so that she can live out her life without the stress of constant pregnancies.

If I go and try to make the world a better place in the way that seems most important to someone else, she will still be hungry.

 

Want to help out? You can still:

 

Thank You!

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