Henry County Humane Society-Geneseo: Kia Pet Adoption Grant Report

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

Grants like these allow our shelter to offer reduced adoption fees on all our senior animals, special-diet animals, and harder-to-adopt animals to give them a better chance of getting adopted much sooner than if an adopter had to pay the full adoption fee.

This grant has been especially helpful this year in that we are using the grant money to offer reduced adoptions on all our animals with hopes to get them adopted quicker during a year when adoptions seem to have slowed across the country.

We want to be able to help the overcrowded shelters, and we can’t do that if it is taking longer to adopt out the animals in our shelter.

How many pets did this grant help?

40

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

Kalil and Vixen (first photo; Kalil is the black cat) were two male cats at our shelter who formed a bit of a bromance when they met.

Kalil and Vixen both came in as strays, but not together. From the time Vixen came in, he was super friendly and affectionate to everyone. He was a bit of an attention hog and immediately ran to get lots of pets any time anyone came into the room he was in.

Kalil was the complete opposite. He was incredibly frightened when he first came in and no one was able to pet him, as he would hiss and hide in his cage. So when he was fixed, his ear was tipped because we figured the best thing for him would be to find a barn to live in and be an outside cat.

One of our regular volunteers started sitting with him and quietly talking to him outside of his cage, and after a while eventually noticed that Kalil didn’t immediately try to hide and wouldn’t hiss when she put her hand up to the cage.

We decided to give Kalil a bit more time to see if he would adjust before making the final decision on whether he would do best as an outside cat. So Kalil was moved to a transition cage in one of our community cat rooms and that’s when Kalil met Vixen and learned that people can be loving and caring.

Vixen was super curious about every new cat that was brought into the room, but we noticed that he would spend most of his time trying to interact with Kalil through his cage, and then eventually when Kalil was acclimated enough to be free-roaming in the room, you would always find these two lying together.

Eventually, Kalil would follow Vixen up to volunteers and ask for pets. It was because of their bond that we decided that it would be best to try and adopt them out as a pair.

We knew this would make it a little more difficult to get them adopted, but we also knew this was probably the best situation for Kalil to continue to thrive.

It took about three months before a wonderful couple from out of state saw these two listed and knew that they were the cats for them. So Kalil and Vixen get to continue to live their best lives together and bring so much joy to their adopters.