Rescue Story: Donate Food for Denise’s Colony
You’ve heard plenty about my neighbor Denise who feeds the colony at the top of the hill. We work together to keep her colony under control and healthy, and also to keep track of all the cats who come through and what their situation seems to be.
Each autumn she posts a food drive for her colony with an Amazon wish list with brands and flavors and food types that her colony needs that can be purchased anywhere there’s a good price. She has helped out other cats with foods from her food drive including food for Simba and Midnight Louie, for other caretakers around the neighborhood, and even for others in need outside our neighborhood. She’s also given some to me to help me make ends meet a few times. And she’s also helped me through my hip replacement and caring for my cats on the rare occasion I’m away, and much more day to day.
If you’re not familiar with Denise, she lives a half a block away from me at the top of the hill. When she moved here in 2015 she found a litter of four kittens under her deck, and a few months later another litter of four, both litters born to a feral mother we couldn’t trap. She had begun to feed them and thank goodness she met someone in a store who was aware of HCMT.
Since the first big trapping effort in 2015 I’ve helped her keep after the new ones, injured or ill ones, and the kittens who were born to moms we didn’t trap in time. Over the years just about every cat who ends up outdoors passes through there, some stay, some disappear, some are friendly, some are feral, some live around the house, others head off to other places they’ve found to live, and a few had chips and were either returned to the shelter or surrendered to a shelter or rescue. A varied number of others show up now and then, or for one meal or the other, and also show up where others feed too. Some of them are freeloaders who come for a free meal. It doesn’t matter—everybody gets their chance at a meal and several bowls of water.
Feeding that many cats is a huge undertaking, and not done with just a few cans of food on hand at a time. Denise can touch or pet or even brush just about all of them, and of course they all have names, and they are friendly and trusting with her. That means, of course, like all cats they get under foot when you feed them, and they act like their starved! (More pretty pictures below.) Here is a little gallery of Denise feeding them.
Shimmer tells her to hurry it up, lady!
They haven’t eaten in days, of course.
They have shelters on the porch and around the house, as well as happy spots here and there around the yard. Right now she and her husband are building their winter shelter palace, a combination of shelters and sheltered spots on the front porch behind tarps to keep out the cold.
In the heat of summer, the shade under a bush is great!
Chessy can be suspicious, but he’s become more friendly to me over the years.
MooMoo shows up a few times because he’s excessively cute. He acts like he’s scared of me and runs away, then he rolls around. Here, he’s waiting for lunch.
Sterle and Ebby have some differences. It’s interesting to keep up with their activities.
If you’d like to help Denise feed her colony…
Here is the link to Denise’s Amazon Wish List: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/134VUQQE1V2K8?ref=cm_sw_em_r_un_un_M50ztCgw8f8RR
Amazon doesn’t always have the best price, and the food doesn’t have to be these brands, but the flavors and types of food are important. We try to stay away from shreds and chunks in gravy because, compared to pate, there is far less actual food in that can. As I mentioned above, if you want to donate but don’t want to use Amazon, you can purchase different food from different places or send gift cards to stores.
I’d certainly appreciate you helping Denise, as it benefits all the cats in our neighborhood, and me too, in many ways—having their food taken care of is a big burden of time and effort out of the way so we can get to the business of TNR, rescue and care for them.
I have a special THANKS for you if you do!
Many of my readers have often been generous in helping with the costs associated with rescues and other issues needing funding. I will give you a gift certificate toward shopping on my website in thanks—for every donation in goods or cash I’ll give you a gift certificate for $10.00 off a minimum $25.00 purchase.
How it works:
- Donate something to Denise and make sure you include a contact point: email, text, Messenger.
- She will let me know your name and contact information.
- I will send you your digital gift certificate.
Read other stories in my Rescue Stories series.
Gifts featuring cats you know! Visit Portraits of Animals
Feline Gifts from Portraits of Animals!
I worked out the manufacture of my own “die” or basically a cookie cutter to use for creating consistent shapes of one of my sketches. Each magnet is hand-painted. Read more.
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Weekly schedule of features:
Sunday: Essays, Pet Loss, Poetry, The Artist’s Life
Monday: Adoptable Cats, TNR & Shelters
Tuesday: Rescue Stories
Wednesday: Commissioned Portrait or Featured Artwork
Thursday: New Merchandise
Friday: Book Review, Health and Welfare, Advocacy
Saturday: Your Backyard Wildlife Habitat, Living Green With Pets, Creating With Cats
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