“Kitten Steps” Towards Whiskers’
New Cat Shelter Renovation
Whiskers Animal Benevolent League, of Albany, purchased a building last year as the first step in making a new home for all of their shelter cats. The building will comply with the new 2025 shelter law, known as the Companion Animal Care Standards Act. I covered some basic information about the law and its impacts on animal rescues in New York State in Capital Purrspective Issue #1.
Welcome to the new Whiskers cat shelter!
Whiskers does currently have a different building in use, which does not meet the new legal standards, and cannot be renovated to meet the requirements and house all of the cats that are currently in residence. The new law requires for there to be no more than 12 cats per room, no matter how big the room is, with a minimum of 18 square feet per cat. That is not possible with the current shelter building and its current feline residents.
You can find a great summary of the journey to find a new cat shelter home in Whiskers 2025 Annual Report. I encourage you to check out the report. You can also link to the organization’s web site to read earlier annual reports (look in the About section). I might be biased, but I think the reports look great, are easy to read, and are not like the “boring” annual reports you might be thinking of, from corporations.
What I want to do, in this newsletter over time, is follow the story of how Whiskers makes the office building it purchased into a new, amazing cat shelter for the Albany area! As you can imagine, former legal offices do not translate directly into a cat shelter.
Whiskers volunteers have never done a project like this. There are certainly other groups in New York doing the same thing. I like to think of this story as an example of what is happening (we hope) across the state. The nearest group I can think of that is doing this is AnimalKind, in Hudson, NY. (And keep in mind, AnimalKind does have paid staff, while Whiskers is 100% volunteer-run.)
So, this story begins with the “simple” task of getting a certificate of occupancy for the new Whiskers shelter, which is a 13,218-square-foot building. The building did not pass the first inspection. The results weren’t horrible, but it needed a few things fixed, like emergency exit lights, and it turns out that any fire Exit doors had to be painted a different color from the surrounding walls. Who knew?
The volunteer in charge of handling the inspection asked if I could come over and help her paint some doors. I had been waiting to go over there and do some work! I recruited my husband, and the job went pretty quickly!
One door done!
Painting very carefully!
Memorial Day weekend will see many more volunteers onsite. Whiskers is renting a dumpster and we will be removing carpeting (every square inch of floor is covered in wall-to-wall carpet!), removing signs, getting rid of stuff leftover by the previous tenants, and more.
I’m not sure what comes after that, but I’ll let you know as this exciting project takes shape!
Hidden Value Revealed in Local Pet Sitter Networking
Some people assume that when they start a small business that everything needs to be competitive with others in their profession. Those that join up with like-minded business owners find out that their cohorts can refer business to them and that they can send people to those other owners when they can’t fit potential clients into their schedules, don’t cover a service area, or don’t offer exactly what the client is looking for.
Capital Area Professional Pet Sitters (CAPPS) is a group of insured and sales-tax-compliant business owners, meaning that members are 100% legitimate New York State pet sitters. I have been a member of this group for about 20 years! We get together very casually, meaning we meet at a restaurant and eat while chatting. No Robert’s Rules of Order at our meetings!
Membership has waxed and waned over the years. We are always looking for new members, which can include people who are:
Interested in starting up their own business.
Established pet sitters who would like to grow their business and want to hear other sitters’ experiences hiring and working with employees vs independent contractors, or working solo.
Established pet sitters who would like to learn how others run their businesses.
Sitters who are interested in learning about how others handle various aspects of their business such as working with service issues, increasing rates, and working with challenging pets.
Looking to possibly sell all or part of their territories to other sitters in the future — possibly retiring from pet sitting.
CAPPS has a low annual membership fee of $50.00. The group has done advertisements, such as this TV commercial from 14 years ago! Check it out:
CAPPS benefits anyone looking for a pet sitter as well. Take a look at localpetsitters.com to see what CAPPS requires of its members. If your petsitter is a CAPPS member and refers another CAPPS member to you, as a back-up petsitter, you know that the two sitters have met in person and gotten to know each other.
If your pet sitter is not a CAPPS member, encourage them to take a look at the CAPPS web site and consider joining! We really want to add sitters who serve Albany, Schenectady, Troy, and Clifton Park. We do sometimes get customer requests for service in Washington County, Columbia County, and parts of Saratoga County. The more sitters that join CAPPS, the better!
Tails From the Feeding Station
Last issue I covered the successful capture of the Compost Pile Kittens. This week I’ll cover the Curse of the Trail Camera.
The “curse” occurs when you set up a trail camera to see when outside cats are coming to eat, so that you can plan what time of night (usually) you will try to catch them. Usually you start off with one or two cats or kittens in mind, as I did on this project. What happens, though, is that you start to see all the other cats who are coming to eat the food!What starts as a kind gesture to catch a couple of kittens can turn into a years-long project, thanks to the “curse.”
Before and after catching the kittens, the following cats showed up (photos below)! The only one I saw in person was “Bob.” Bob is the cat at the beginning of the story who was being housed and fed on the porch of the neighbor who alerted me to the kitten situation. Bob is the cat that the neighbor tried to get me to help with months earlier.
Yaffa
Cahaba
Cetan
Bennu
Bob
I had to catch Bob first, because he was such a pest! He got to know my schedule and my car. He knew that if I didn’t catch any cats after I set the traps, that I’d put the food from the traps outside and close the traps down until next time. It got to the point where he seemed to be waiting for me, and then I trapped him twice — I didn’t want him right away because he had a place to stay with a heating pad in a tote and he had food and water. But, in the end, he’d just hang out by the traps when I set them, so he was the first cat I caught and took in, from this current group.
I believe that Yaffa was the mother of the Compost Kittens. Once I caught her, she went to a Whiskers foster in Ballston Spa. That person’s naming system is to come up with names going from A to Z! So, Yaffa was at least the 23rd cat she has fostered, if not the 46th! Whiskers policy is to hold potentially pregnant cats for 60 days to see if they give birth. If not, they are spayed after 60 days. Yaffa is completely feral, and as I mentioned last week, she was incredibly fortunate to land a permanent home in Whiskers’ shelter. (She did not have kittens after capture.)
Cahaba went to a foster home. That person names the cats after lakes in Alabama. Cahaba was a bit shy to begin with, and he broke out of the room she had him contained in. But, she broke the ice with Cahaba and he was adopted after not too long!
Bob went to a foster home. He was friendly and was quickly adopted out. Believe or not, the name Bob was NOT in the “Names to not use” list, and his adopters decided it was a good name for him, so he is still named Bob!
Oftentimes, I cannot tell the difference right away between similar-looking cats. I’ll catch what I think is one cat, and then the similar-looking cat will continue to show up the camera, and I say, “Oh geez, that cat has been two cats all along!”
That’s what happened with Bennu and Cetan. They both have longer stories to tell, in a future newsletter issue.
Because of the extreme winter weather, I wanted to round up all of these cats as fast as I could. This required setting up cages in my old, unheated garage, using space heaters (the power company loves us). I put a tarp on the floor, covered that tarp with blankets, covered the cages with flannel sheets and blankets. Each cat had a cat carrier inside of the cage, so I covered those as well. The cat waters inside the cages were not frozen in the morning, so I feel that they were warm enough, compared to how they had been, living outside in the winter.
Cages covered in my garage in winter
Cats in traps, ready to head to surgery
When I catch cats, if they have been elusive, I don’t know if they are feral, like a wild animal, or just a scared cat that had a home or human contact. I have learned from my cat-expert friends that it is a great idea to put a cat carrier inside a cage, and secure the door of the cat carrier open by tying it to the cage. Ultimately, I have to transfer the cat from the cage back into a humane trap to bring it to a spay-neuter appointment, if the cat seems feral. This way the cat carrier door can be untied and closed 99% of the way from outside the cage (using a stick or something like that); then I can open the cage, reach in and latch the cat carrier. (More on the trap-transport for spay-neuter another week.)
It’s a little awkward and can take a few minutes, but I can place both the trap and the cat carrier on the floor, open the trap, line up the cat carrier as closely as possible, open the carrier door and keep the openings as close together as I can. The trap is covered beforehand. Nine times out of 10, the cat will move into the trap by itself … they just want to get away! Once in a while I need to lift and tip both enclosures to encourage the cat to move.
The cats stayed over two nights before their appointments at the veterinarian for their surgery. I buy Capstar (about $43.00 for six pills) to kill off their fleas each day … it’s safe to give it to them daily, before they can get true flea treatment. I have never had trouble with outside cats just eating the pills in their canned food. They are still in the “immediately eat everything in sight” mode from scavenging for food outside!
Cetan seemed to be 100% feral, my plan was to TNR (trap-neuter-return) him back outside. Bennu didn’t even hide in the cat carrier at all and I was able to just get her into the cat carrier, so I found a foster home for her, thinking she would become friendly quickly. (Not so; a story for another issue!)
Things went sideways with Cetan as well! I’ll fill you in on his story in the future, but rest assured, 15 months later they are both at my house and doing well. Cetan is even on petfinder.com now and is available to adopt!
More on Cetan and Bennu in the next story installment!
To Blink or Not to Blink?
That is the question, but now you can find the answer through the ASPCA Pro Learns web site.
In the Capital Purrspective,Week of May 4 issue, I described my experience using the ASPCA Pro Learns web site to meet the requirements of the new New York State shelter law, as a shelter volunteer. One reader asked me later if anyone could take the training, as he was very interested in learning more about cat and dog behavior. I didn’t know, and I promised that I would look into it.
I was able to create a new account, with no rescue group affiliations, and access the training, as well as a full suite of other ASPCA lessons. The training is free.
In your web browser, go to the ASPCA Pro Learns web site.
(Note, if you want to do the coursework on your phone, download the app. It is called “Litmos,” which is the name of the vendor that hosts ASPCA Learns.)
Click on “Sign Up,” and fill out the form. There is a field that asks for a code. The code you can use is 1866Learn. (Or use the default code listed on the screen, in case it has changed by the time you read this article.)
You will receive email at the address you supplied. Click on the link in the email to create a password. Follow the prompts, and then you can enter New York Companion Animal Care Standards Act in the Search field to find the course.
There appear to be many other courses that you can take for free. If you find an interesting one about cats, let me know!