Whiskers Animal Benevolent League: Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
We purchased 3016-lb. bags of Purina ONE Healthy Kitten Food and 15 16-lb. bags of Purina ONE Tender Selects for a total of 720 lbs. of high-quality cat food. An image of two invoices from Petco.com is attached below, showing the total spent was $988.38.
Quality nutrition matters.
*It helps pets look and feel their best
*It increases their chances of being adopted
With this grant we bought high-quality Purina ONE dry food to distribute to our foster homes so that our cats and kittens would be assured a healthy diet.
How many pets did this grant help?
The grant directly helped about 50 cats/kittens. We believe that many more are indirectly helped by setting a good example for both fosters and adopters to feed cats high-quality food.
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
Lily was born in the city of Schenectady to a stray cat. She and her sister and their mom were eating out of dumpsters and living under a shed. Lily was lucky enough to be caught one rainy evening by a kind person who brought her to Whiskers. Lily was only 8 weeks old and in rough shape — she was grossly underweight and infested with fleas and covered with scabs from their bites; she had patches of missing fur and had an upper-respiratory infection with runny eyes. The first night of her rescue, a volunteer combed Lily for hours to get the fleas off of her. Lily didn’t make a sound; she just trembled and accepted the baby food she was offered. The next day, Lily went to see the veterinarian for a complete examination and we learned she had ringworm on top of all her other problems.
Ringworm thrives in a cat with a suppressed immune system. Many shelters will euthanize a cat simply because they have a ringworm infection, but we never do that at Whiskers. Lily went to a foster home where she could be treated and isolated from other cats while she recovered. Lily’s recovery depended in part on good nutrition, which happened to include Purina ONE, to build her immune system. As her overall health improved, Lily was able to fight off the infection; her fur grew back with luster and her spirit became bright.
Our beautiful and healthy Lily was adopted on Nov. 25, 2017.
