Every Christmas morning, we trip downstairs to give our cats gifts—utilitarian ones like scratching pads, which are the equivalent of socks and underwear (although the cats seem to like them); treats and goodies that they sniff once and walk away from; toys that, much like their human-child counterparts, either fight over, play with for five minutes and then ignore, or get wild with the bags they came in (two gifts for the price of one—who could complain?).
But do our pets really know that it’s Christmas? We figure that cats couldn’t care less—they’re just getting their due, just like every other day. Dogs are no doubt reacting to their owners’ excitement over the holiday (Cooper! Cooooopie! Look what Santy Twaus got de good puppino!)
This article won’t give you indulgent pet owners a commercial rundown of the latest robotic mouse for the cat or the darling Santa suits and yarmulkes for the dog. You’ll find them. But there are pets and their human mentors who would definitely benefit from the season of giving. They’re the people running themselves ragged rescuing dogs and cats and living off scraps so that they can pay vet bills and render the animals adoptable. They’re the community cat trappers who stay up at night trying to coax an ornery feline into a cage. They’re the volunteers up at dawn to ready a mobile spay/neuter clinic for people who couldn’t otherwise afford the procedure and spend the rest of the month fund-raising and booking appointments.
Here, then, are the 12 Ways of Giving to our local animal mentors to ease some of the burden and to let them know that our community supports their efforts to get abandoned and unwanted pets forever homes and help stem shelter overpopulation. Most of the organizations have nonprofit status (check their websites), and donations to those that have this status can be deducted from taxes. Click on the links to read about each organization’s efforts and donate to one. Or more.
You don’t need 12 drummers drumming to give fanfare and a hurrah to the excellent work done by the Seal Beach Animal Care Center (SBACC). This all-volunteer organization allows every animal taken in to stay as long as it takes to find a home. Their grounds boast a new kitty house that includes meet-and-greet rooms; the dogs have walkers out with them every day. SBACC is supported solely by donations, and you can make one here. There’s also a wish list on Amazon, on which you can gift them everything from food to cleaning supplies.
Long Beach Spay & Neuter Foundation helps local cats through trap/neuter/release, fostering, feral-colony management and adoption. The mom and dad cats are released into the colonies when fixed unless they’re adoptable, and they’ve had some big beauties! And if there are litters, all the little pipers piping usually can be adopted as well. The food, the procedures, the vet bills all cost money. Donations can be made here.
Back a few articles, cat rescuer Deborah Felin (again, yes—that’s her last name) was introduced in a three-part series about bottle-feeding newborn kittens. Felin is also co-founder of Helen Sanders CatPAWS, an organization inspired by the dedication of its namesake to feeding and rescuing cats and maintaining feral colonies in the area. CatPAWS volunteers promote spay/neuter through education and providing vouchers, support trap/neuter/release efforts by providing medical care and food, and save cats/kittens from public shelters where they might otherwise be euthanized. And bottle-feed, too, when they can, and find fosters for their charges. It all costs money. I don’t know about lords, but if you make a donation here, at least 10 volunteers will be a-leaping for joy.
Zoey’s Place Rescue is a small-enough operation to be called a boutique rescue. There is, in fact, a boutique offering on their Facebook page of some very attractive jewelry that can be worn to honor a pet living or deceased, and all the proceeds go to the rescue. The women who take part in the operation rescue as many cats and kittens as they can and get them vetted, fixed and ready to adopt. That takes time and money. Needs at the moment include food for the cats, which can be purchased through their Amazon Wish List and money to help pay their mounting vet bills, which can be donated through PayPal through this address: [email protected]. As for time? Hope that the ladies get that, too, so that they can get some dancing in.
Eight maids a-milking 24 hours a day couldn’t approach the milk of humane kindness that Friends of Long Beach Animals (FOLBA) has running through each member’s veins. OK, that’s a hokey reach, but it’s true of each FOLBA member. FOLBA is Long Beach’s most venerable animal-advocacy organization, in existence for over 25 years. It’s not a rescue, but the proceeds from membership and fund-raisers go toward their SNIP spay/neuter voucher program, humane education, helping with medical bills for Long Beach Animal Care Services (ACS), and improving the shelter in general. Recently, FOLBA assisted with the construction of the Bunny Barn on ACS grounds and installed a dual-purpose vet clinic at the shelter. When the clinic opens, it will be used as a working space for the shelter vets and to provide low-cost spay/neuter procedures for the pets of low-income families. Membership helps to achieve these goals, as do donations, purchasing merchandise, and attending events. Information about all of these things is available here.
Fix Long Beach has been making free spay/neuter procedures available to the pets of low-income residents since summer 2013. So far, over 3,000 cats and dogs have been fixed at their monthly mobile clinics. The grassroots organization is made up of volunteers who get up very early in the morning to set up the clinic. During the event, clients are given free pet supplies and gifts to thank them; the organization gets them through donations. To donate items, check the Amazon Wish List or make a monetary donation here. Monthly procedures have been funded, but there’s a need for cats-only clinics as well, which they’re not funded for. Donations for cat clinics can be made here. Fix Long Beach hopes to spay and neuter 60 more cats with this clinic, which leaves Long Beach with exponentially fewer unwanted felines. And I swan, that’d be a blessing (land o’Goshen, stop me)!
If you’ve been around Long Beach and are enamored of animals, you’ve heard of Justin Rudd and his Community Action Team. Every year around this time, the Team organizes Operation Santa Paws: Donation boxes are set up in friendly businesses, and people toss pet toys, treats, food, and shelter and rescue supplies into them. Then, generally on the Saturday before Christmas, Justin in his Santa Paws suit and his volunteers—OK, elves, if I have to—collect the goodies and give them out at shelters and rescues. This year, the event will take place December 19—well, that’s the sixth day before Christmas. I’ve got goose pimples thinking of the coincidence. For suggestions for what to give out and where the volunteers will meet on the 19th, look here.
The volunteers at West Coast Animal Rescue (WeCARe) go above and beyond. They take in dogs that would be looked at in horror by most people and rehabilitate them so well that they’re unrecognizable as the dogs that they were before. What’s more, even the dogs who have lost limbs or have been disfigured have gotten adopted. The work, which goes on night and day, is exhausting, and the medical bills for the animals are exhaustive. Nothing much we can do for the exhaustion unless we manage to find every dog in the kennel a home—and sadly, there will be others to fill the vacuum. But you can help with the vet bills. Go to WeCARE’s website WeCARE’s website to donate. Check out the before-and-after photos while you’re there. And if you happen to have five golden rings lying around, they could use those, too.
Four calling birds would sing for a donation to Live Love Animal Rescue except that they’d rather I do it because I’m stretching this theme to the ridiculous. No matter—Live Love Animal Rescue was founded by a lively, lovely person who devotes herself to dog rescue nearly singlehandedly. Live Love needs all kinds of things for the dogs—toys, food, crates, leashes, the usual—as well as adoptive homes, and they’re all available on the rescue’s Amazon Wish List (gad, technology makes it easy to give!) Donations via PayPal help pay the vet bill.
They sit around, as still as French hens with nary a cluck, waiting for the wily community cats (strays, ferals, abandoned and unsocialized felines) to fall for the bait—literally—in one of the humane cat traps. When they’ve made a successful capture, they go back, stinking of sardine oil, to take the kitty to the vet for spay/neuter. Then, they’re out again on the hunt. And when these volunteers aren’t doing all that, they’re maintaining colonies and adopting out the adoptables. Stray Cat Alliance is an L.A.-based organization with a faction here in Long Beach. Its vision is of a time when all cats are cared for, including cats in feral colonies who, thanks to spay/neuter procedures, will steadily decline in population. Want to help make a difference? Here’s the link to their website.
Jellicle cats, as you know, are small. So is the Jellicle Cats Rescue Foundation, a one-woman operation run by a self-described crazy cat lady who has scratched many furry faces under the chin and coos like a turtle dove to every one of them. The founder rescues adoptable cats and does trap/spay-neuter/release for the unsocialized ones, although she’s had success in changing some stubborn little cat minds toward cushy living with human people.
Long Beach Animal Care Services (ACS)’s staff and volunteers work very hard to lower the numbers of animals undergoing euthanasia in their shelter and at the same time raise the number of adoptions and owner returns. And they’re succeeding—every month, the euthanasia rates are lower than those of the same month the previous year and live release rates rise in the same way.
The shelter has received and assisted with every type of animal—cats, dogs, rabbits, horses, lizards, everything except a partridge in a pear tree—gone somehow astray within ACS’s service area. The innovative programs that the shelter manager and his staff put into place—ways to recover lost pets, vouchers for spay/neuter, use of social media for adoption (the Facebook page and the stories are a delight), the Twitter page LBLostFoundPets for real-time location of a missing pet—are time consuming and also cost money, so donations are always welcome. ACS, too, has an Amazon Wish List, and there are lots of volunteer opportunities as well as funds for donating money funds for donating money for spay/neuter, medical care, shelter improvement and ACS’s great Youth Explorers program.
Twelve ways—hope you found at least one you deem worthy. After I’m done writing this, I’m headed out to pick up a couple of multi-packs of those little felt mice that cats love to chew the tails from, to donate to Operation Santa Paws. And while I’m out, I really need to pick up a couple of chew bones for my friend’s chocolate lab and my other friend’s Chihuahuas—maybe a few holiday treats for the cats. Oh yeah, a scratching pad to throw across the back of the futon for Old Scratch; then there was that hysterical little catnip toy shaped like a certain political candidate—maybe I’ll get a few of those….
Felix Navidad
Photo of Chet the Chocolate Moose courtesy of Willa Heart.