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One of our favorite videos...Sara and her cousin Curt washing bottle babies in the bathroom sink and blow-drying them afterwards. Hilarious and educational.
In case you are wondering how Shelter Me, Inc. got started....
In June 2007, after Sara
Carlisle completed her sophomore year in college, a small group of family
members and friends got serious about forming a nonprofit to help Sara save
feral cats. Sara had grown up on her family’s farm and loved
animals. She started riding horses at the age of three, volunteering at
Buddy Dog Humane Society when she was 12, teaching riding as a young teen, and
began pre-vet studies when she entered college. As a child, her
enthusiasm for animals was compelling; today, it is contagious. So, when she
said she wanted to save feral cats, a bunch of us were happy to pitch in.
Our
initial plan was to provide rescue and free spay/neuter for feral and stray
cats in the Acton-Concord-Littleton-Westford areas. We also wanted to
produce videos about these activities. Sara’s father gave us access to
broadcast quality equipment and we set out to show-by example-what was involved
in rescuing cats, volunteering for shelters and fostering kittens.
The summer had barely begun when
Sara made her first rescue. She spotted a stray, pregnant cat at a gas station,
learned she was being fed, had kittens fairly regularly and belonged to nobody
in particular. The cat’s name was Boosty. There is not room to explain the
travails Bootsy had suffered; just to mention that her story ends happily. Sara
convinced her friend Lucy to foster Bootsy. Lucy kept Bootsy, spayed her and
adopted out her kittens to family friends. These were Shelter Me’s first five
rescues.
The second and third rescues were
two feral cats and their kittens that Sara “acquired” through her friend Meg,
the animal control officer in Westford. When Sara took the feral mothers to be
spayed, she learned they were both pregnant. You may read the details and even
see videos about these adventures by clicking here.
It is complicated to explain, but in
the process of spaying the feral moms and saving their newborn kittens, Sara
ended up with seven bottle babies of her very own. It was a baptism by fire and
a rare opportunity to produce a series of videos about trapping cats, mothering
bottle babies, and kitten development. A four-part installment appears on our
Blogtails under the title, “3 Moms, 4 Weeks, 22 Kittens.”
Our first summer, we built an
extended network of family and friends that could be counted on to foster
kittens and in many cases, find homes for them. A year and a half later, most
of Sara’s friends, her parents’ friends and their business colleagues remain
available to foster kittens that are not quite old enough to be placed in a
shelter for adoption. Since we began we have facilitated the rescue of 188 cats
all told. Call
Sandy at 617-549-8523 or email sandy@sheltermeinc.org to learn more.