Annual Newsletter
2023
Sonora Cat Rescue is coming up on a big anniversary! 2024 will mark 20 years since the non-profit was established. In those years, we have placed over 5,000 cats in loving homes and cared for countless community cats. After the heartbreaking loss of president Judith Rodan and a rocky start to the year, our new leadership is working to expand operations and more closely partner with other animal welfare efforts in the community. We’re excited to tell you about what we’ve done this year!
By the Numbers
Intakes
282
Adoptions
181
Rainbow Bridge
17
* totals calculated for Jan-Nov 2023
Ellie
Ellie was surrendered to us at 4 weeks old with a visibly broken leg. The folks at Twain Harte Vet confirmed a fractured growth plate. They assumed the leg would need to be amputated, but this 10-ounce kitten was too small to survive the surgery. They opted to splint her leg until she was older and see if we got lucky with her healing. She was so tiny, her first splint was made from tongue depressors!
Every 2 weeks, she got a larger splint to accommodate her rapid growth. She was so spunky and affectionate, she became a favorite at the vet's office. After 6 weeks, the splint was removed. While she was as energetic as ever, the leg was still completely frozen and misshapen 3 weeks later. It had to go. But on the bright side, she was finally big enough to survive surgery!
She underwent the amputation and spay surgery at the same time. She came home with 33 staples and a lot less dead weight to drag around. She learned how to walk within 3 hours and how to run and jump within 12 hours. By the next day, she was getting around better than she ever had.
As soon as the staples were removed, she was ready for adoption. We had lots of interest in this tripod girl with her milk mustache and crazy eyebrows and ear tufts. She went to the perfect family. Ellie's new mom stays in touch and sends us loads of photos of her. She keeps growing and playing and snuggling. Ellie's journey was long and expensive, but so uplifting for us and our entire community. She had many followers who cheered her on from the beginning, and we'll never forget her.
You Win Some, You Lose Some
We wish all updates were positive and uplifting, but the truth is that we can’t win every fight. Caring for vulnerable cats is a grueling job, and we have to be able to weather the disappointments. We have a couple of losses we want to highlight this year so you can get a look at some of the stuff that never gets public attention.
Coco came in with an eye problem. At first we thought it was a cherry eye, but when she went to the vet, we learned it was actually ruptured. It needed to be removed. She underwent a successful surgery, and we got ready to welcome her home the next day. Instead, we learned the next morning she had failed to clot, and she died of blood loss overnight. We always have to try, but sometimes even the best care is not enough. We can find solace in knowing she felt love and safety in the short time she was with us.
Cats lost to FIP in 2023
This year we saw unprecedented sickness in the kittens we fostered. We lost cats to FIP, panleukopenia, intestinal parasites, and leukemia. We had ringworm, calicivirus, and so many respiratory infections. We worked hard to keep everyone safe and healthy, but it was a real struggle this year. We saw such a huge spike in FIP, we even started a campaign to help make FIP treatment legal and affordable. Please consider signing the petition and sending an email or letter to add your voice to the cause!
Teenie and Weenie
Teenie and Weenie are three-year-old sisters whose human passed away. There was no family who could take them, so they lived alone in the house for months with only someone to put out food once a week. Then they ended up at animal control. Thanks to a huge community effort, we got them out of animal control and into a loving new home. The stars don’t always align when cases like this come up, but whenever it’s in our power, we are thrilled to turn cats’ stories around. Happy forever to these gorgeous girls!
Community Partnerships
Speaking of community efforts, we were honored to partner with Northside Pet Connection and Tuolumne Animal Control several times this year to ensure as many kittens as possible were saved. Northside Pet Connection pulls cats from Animal Control and ferries them to Oregon and Washington, where their communities are not inundated with cats like ours is. The humane societies up there find loving homes for all transferred cats and even get them spayed and neutered. It's a win-win-win! But of course there is only so much space on these transports, so NPC called on us to help relieve some pressure. They even helped with spay/neuter costs in return. All told, 32 cats were adopted through this channel in 2023. Community efforts like this are essential and so rewarding. The cat crisis can only be fixed when everyone works together!
Cats pulled from Animal Control
Bottle Baby Bonanza
We always have dozens of bottle babies come through our program. Bottle feeding kittens is hard work, and only a small subset of our foster volunteers have that skillset. This is the hardest population of cats to serve, and the most vulnerable, but also some of the most rewarding. It just kills us to turn away bottle babies, so we’re always looking for more people to become bottle feeders. To help with that, we have put together a comprehensive Bottle Baby Guide on our website. If you’d like to become a bottle feeder, we’d love to coach and support you! Please contact sonora.cats@gmail.com if you are interested.
The Feral Problem
It’s no secret to anyone local that we have a feral cat crisis. The population has exploded in the last few years, disease is running rampant, and spay/neuter services are prohibitively expensive and inaccessible. We receive multiple pleas for help every day as people see new colonies pop up on their property. This is a huge, multi-faceted problem.
To help alleviate any pressure we can, we rebooted our spay/neuter voucher program in September. On the 15th of every month, the public can go to our website and apply for a voucher worth $100. The form opens at 5:00am, and we accept applications until we run out of vouchers for the month. By the second month of this program, vouchers were all claimed only hours after the form opened. We hope to expand the program this year so that we can issue many more. We can also loan you a trap with a fully refundable $20 deposit if you’d like to try to TNR (trap, neuter, release) cats on your property.
We also collaborated with Guy McCarthy from the Union Democrat to try to get the word out about the feral cat problem. Guy wrote a stellar profile on the issue, and we hope this will help other community members and organizations understand the scope of the problem. We’ll need many people working together to make a dent.
Everything we’ve accomplished this year and for the past two decades is only possible due to the generosity of our community. We are a 100% volunteer organization, and all of our funding comes from small donations. Can you help us do even more next year? Here are some ways you can do that:
Get Involved
Donate!
Send a check to P.O. Box 4363, Sonora CA 95370
Drop off cash or a check at PetSmart in Sonora
Volunteer
Become a foster, bottle feeder, condo cleaner, transporter, fundraiser, grant writer, or anything else you can think of.
Attend our community meetings
We meet the first Wednesday of every month at 4:00pm at the Sonora branch of the public library. We report on the month’s activities, answer questions, and plan for the month ahead. Anyone is welcome!
Fix your pets
Every unaltered cat has the potential to become 30 cats in a year. Please spay and neuter your pets and any community cat that lives on your property. Fixing one cat is a nuisance; fixing 30 is nearly impossible. Don’t let a nuisance become a disaster!
A massive thank you to everyone who contributed to our efforts this year. It is a privilege to serve our community and the cats who live among us. We look forward to much more in 2024!