Cat Vando had a booth at the recent farmers market held every 1st & 3rd Saturday in St. Eulalia's Parking Lot at 9th and the Eisenhower. It was fantastic! Good fruits vegies, wonderful plants friendly vendors, music, people from the Extension Service answering gardening questions and medical students from Loyola addressing health and wellness issues and lots of fun and fabulous people. Pictured is Maywood's own, the uncomparable, Johnny Diggs, documenting every Maywood event we've attended photographing the entertaining, invigorating talent of the Proviso East High School Band - again, excellent!
We were planning on doing the 3rd Farmers Market of the month but after our experience at this one, we plan on attending each Farmers Market of the season. We met many wonderful people, cat people and civic minded people. We'll go into more detail at a later date but we have a grant writer! And, someone to help us with Publisher and Cannon Zoom Browser. We connected with many feeders and were told of many colonies. While we work in other areas, our main interest is to help Maywood make TNR a community effort. We believe that cats are an opportunity to learn respect for life and to help counteract the violence rampant in our society, we want to start that in our own community and to help spread this to other communities.
We're actually working with the U of I Extension Service to bring in a program for animal education. The 4H people to develop a specialized 4H group to build cat houses for feeders yards. The Village is interested in TNR and working on a program to help the cats of Maywood. All is good!
We've been incredibly busy getting this in place while continuing our TNR efforts. We are working on several colonies, with reservations for our limited supply of traps. We're doing a tremendous amount of education. Many of our calls are for 'relocation', which we don't do... most TNR groups don't. There just isn't any place for the cats other than where they are. The most effective method of reduction and control is TNR. Then there are the details of TNR. While the process is similar, each project brings it's own story. And, there's some doozies! Wish I had the time to list the details some of the stories are quite funny. From skunks to missing then found kittens - it's been well worth the story - just don't have the time!
To clarify TNR, Trap Neuter Return is our focus. Not only do we not have the resources for Trap Neuter Rescue, our mission is to prevent the birth of cats that there's no place for. Hundreds of thousands of cats that are wonderful adoptable animals are being euthanized because there's no place for them to go, no one to adopt them and take them into their homes. Rescue takes lots of time, energy and space. and ultimately, keeps us from our mission of preventing the birth of cats that don't have feeders or are creating an overpopulation problem in a neighborhood, jeopardizing the existing cats because neighbors are concerned about the 'numbers' of cats.
Having said that, sometimes it's impossible to Return, such as the case of Sweet Cheeks the stray (who's amazingly identical to the Stone Park Colony but was abandoned in Maywood) who doesn't like cats and ended up disrupting a whole colony of well fed cats and their feeder. She's darling, affectionate and still here! Or, Hoover and her young kittens, or today's addition of the 6-7 week old kitten found stuck in the pipes. Such is the life of a CatVando'r!
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