The Cat Lounge Rescue and Adoption Center: Operation Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
We were very grateful to have received a $1,500 Operation Grant intended to purchase dry food for our shelter. We have been using the same food for the last several years and, as our supply was dwindling, we were getting nervous about how we'd be able to buy more knowing the cost and that we were operating in a deficit throughout the year. Being able to use this grant to purchase dry food was incredibly helpful, as it allowed us to put the money saved towards medical care for our cats ($1,500 translates to 13 spays, 150 fecal tests, or 1,500 vaccines!), which is just as crucial to maintaining a healthy facility as having nutritious cat food. Thank you so much for your help!
How many pets did this grant help?
The grant award covered 28 bags of cat food, approximately 2.5 months worth of food. That helps about 112 cats in our care!
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
One of the cats whom this grant helped is Aphrodite. When we got Aphrodite, she had been living at a vet hospital in Mexico after being attacked by a dog while pregnant. They were able to house her and provide her with a safe space to give birth and nurse.
Sadly, only two of her babies survived. She lived with them for two months while nursing, then was spayed and brought to us.
When we met her, we noticed that she was covered in scabs (either due to flea-bite dermatitis or healing wounds), both ears had mites and were packed with debris, her spay site was open and infected, and her skeletal structure just didn’t feel right. We immediately took her to our veterinarian, who cleaned, numbed, and stapled her spay site, and she was provided with strong pain medications and antibiotics to deal with the infection.
We also received confirmation that she had four broken ribs. Two of them had already begun healing, but had fused abnormally, and one of the ribs was broken so badly that there was a floating bone fragment that would never reattach. She also had a small spinal injury, which we hope will not cause any issues in the future, but as of now, she has full function and feeling in her legs, which we are thrilled about!
After some time in foster care to heal from her broken bones and infection, she was brought back to the Lounge and adopted! Through this journey, her nutrition was key in her healing. We were able to provide the foster with bags of food to support her, keep her on it when she returned to our facility, and have her adopter also continue her diet once she went home. Photos of Aphrodite before we rescued her (photo 1), during her stay with us (photo 2), and now in her forever home are above (photo 3)!
