Friends For Life: Cat Enrichment Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
Most feline residents at Friends For Life are housed in foster homes or free-roaming cat rooms with abundant enrichment opportunities. However, some cats are temporarily housed in kennels for purposes of medical observation, quarantine, settling in, or awaiting foster.
In order to help meet every cat's enrichment needs during these periods, we provide each cat with a place to perch, a place to hide, and a place to scratch; interactive toys, a soft bed, scent enrichment, the opportunity for human interaction, and adequately separated food and litter box resources.
With the Cat Enrichment Grant from the Petfinder Foundation, we were able to buy 350 kennel-door scratchers, which helped ensure that all cats were able to have their enrichment needs met while in temporary kennels, and the cats all had the opportunity to practice their natural instinct to stretch and scratch.
How many pets did this grant help?
350
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
Most of the animals who are benefiting from the kennel-door scratchers purchased with our Petfinder Foundation grant are in kennels, as they have either just arrived at Friends For Life, are undergoing medical observation, or are part of the Fraidy Cat program, and are therefore not quite ready to be adopted yet.
Yeti (first photo), however, is a proud graduate of the Fraidy Cat program! He’s still a little unsure around other cats, which is why he prefers to be in a single kennel and not one of the free-roam cat rooms, but while he awaits his furever home, he has plenty of enrichment thanks to the scratchers (second photo) and toys provided for him.
Seventy-five percent of the animals in our programs are considered “unadoptable” at other shelters, and Fraidy Cats make up a large part of this number, along with animals who have certain medical conditions or look like they belong to particular breeds.
Fraidy cats are those cats who, although not feral, are incredibly shy, hostile, or fearful – or maybe all three! At many shelters, these cats are deemed unadoptable; however, Friends For Life has proved time and time again that all Fraidy Cats need is some love, patience, and a safe space in which to adjust to their new surroundings, and they too can become loving, trusting animals that anyone would be lucky to have as a pet. Just like Yeti!
