To the editor:
Sarah Ashe, feline manager at the Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland in Westbrook, and the facility’s volunteers/employees are a huge blessing to Halfway Home Pet Rescue as we work for stray kittens in northern Maine.
Last summer, HHPR sent an urgent email to Maine shelters asking if they had space to spare because our facility was overfull and closed to new admissions. We received several calls offering help including the Animal Welfare Society in West Kennebec, the Greater Androscoggin Society of Greater Portland, the Bangor Society, and the Animal Protection League of Greater Portland all offering to take five and some up to 10 cats. We sent 60 cats south last fall which allowed HHPR to keep saving feline lives this winter.
Later, HHPR received a note from Sarah asking if HHPR still needed help and we sent another group. Since that time, we have continued to save felines basically because ARLGP has placed approximately 40 of our kittens since Jan. 1, 2014. In the month of May, we will be able to send down another 30 kittens.
With this network, we have been enabled to help more cats in dire need. In addition these cats have been placed into homes within days instead of our housing them for several months. With Portland’s population, ARLGP is able to adopt more cats in one day than HHPR can adopt out in a month. Our networking with ARLGP and the other shelters has saved HHPR over $7,000 in medical and surgical expenses as ARLGP assumes that cost for us.
HHPR also networks with PAWS in Fort Kent through our liaison Jean Cobb of St. Agatha. PAWS is much like HHPR, but works with the town of Fort Kent which furnishes a small building including electrical and heat. HHPR co-partnered with PAWS this winter for more than 20 stray and feral cats from Van Buren, Madawaska and Cross lakes just since January.
We have great community support with the Caribou Shop ‘n Save food cart and from the Hannaford Bros. monthly food support for the pet food pantry. We share greatly needed pet food with the Houlton Shelter and PAWS in Fort Kent when they had over-crowding and a shortage of food. The state humane agent works with HHPR by delivering needed food to the most needy families throughout Aroostook County who are known only by the Maine Animal Welfare Dept. — not HHPR personally. The agent reports deep appreciation from those families helped this winter. Through no fault of their own, these families would have had to give up their pets to a shelter for lack of money to buy pet food.
When the ARK Sanctuary in Houlton burned down, HHPR put out a call to our volunteers and friends to reach out with donations for the facility. Although the new building was insured the loss of 16 feline lives was devastating to the Houlton volunteers. As always HHPR was counting our own pennies, but this horrible loss to a sister organization quickly become priority one as we knew there would be an immediate need for purchasing new equipment and supplies. This HHPR initiative brought close to $2,000 to the ARK Sanctuary.
We are all family in this rescue work and we will all always be poor. Poor is the basis of most dedicated charities and even more so with the volunteer based charities and animal charities are often at the bottom of the donation ladder.
If charities want to survive today’s financial climate, we must all learn to volunteer and to share with each other. Networking is sharing what we have and what we know with our sister charities for the good of all. I have always found the more I give, the more we get back whether it is financial or of the spirit. Each time, I worry about the future of HHPR, God sends someone to us to help solve that current problem. We must be doing something right.
HHPR volunteers are super compassionate people and they have made HHPR a success.
Norma Milton
Caribou
