Our Story

Thousands of years ago, the god of the sun – Ra – and the goddess of healing – Isis – had a child and named her Bastet. Throughout her childhood, she was taught about her powers and she grew up to be a great warrior goddess. In time, she settled down and became the first crazy cat lady. Bastet taught her many feline children a secret: they would live 9 times 9 lives.

Now… humans, who are not as smart as cats and who are very bad about understanding comma placement, overheard and thought she said “You will live 9 times, 9 lives!” and thought “eh, what’s nine lives?” The humans moved along, relatively uninformed and disinterested.

They missed the rest of what the children were told. They would live 9 sets of 9 lives each, regenerating each time into a new physical form. For each set of 9 lives, they would remain the same species and, at the end of their 9th life, they would be able to choose the species they would spend the next 9 lives living as. Many children, across many generations, choose to live some of their lives as humans.

NO? You want a different one?!

Some people just can’t handle the truth.

All right, here ya go. As a kid in the 1970s, Anna heard about TNR from her grandmother.

Having made the horrifying discovery that innumerable stray animals were euthanized, virtually automatically, at county programs across the country, she – with the perfectly normal level of drama – cried and screamed for what might have been months or possibly an hour. She was told to go play outside. Instead, she went to her grandmother’s house and learned about TNR.

This is magical! she thought. People are saving the kitties!

Her grandmother said “Oh, no, we don’t do that anymore. That was someone on your grandfather’s side of the family, in Denmark.” NOOOOOOOOoooooo! And the topic disappeared for Anna, for decades.

As a young adult, Anna took in every stray cat who came her way, including feral cats. She posted flyers and let the cats come and go through a window, until they chose to stop going. Then she domesticated them and found them homes. If there were rescue and shelter options out there, she wasn’t aware of them and didn’t even think to look. Why bother, when they were the ones euthanizing animals?? She just took in and “adopted out” the cats. This went on for yeeeeeeeears.

After a short break from personally rescuing cats, Anna started hearing OTHER PEOPLE, who weren’t her grandmother!, talk about TNR. The chatter grew over the years and research began to be published. And, all along, Anna loved the idea of saving them… but still wanted them to have homes. With roofs and some laps.

Anna (ok, I, your typist. That whole third person thing was getting annoying) looked for gaps in all of the services provided for cats and found two that really bothered me. One is the absolute lack of a sanctuary within the city of Chicago and the dearth of them around the country. There are so few that the ones that DO exist get notoriety just for the “WOW, that’s a lot of cats!” factor.

Click for more info on this photo

The other gap is with caretakers. The cost of caretaking is much higher than you might think, if you account for surgery/chip/vaccines AND a shelter for each of them, and then feed each of them twice a day, every day. Researching the cost led me to a second caretaker-gap, too. Too many people are feeders, but not caretakers. This means that they, and the cats they feed, are not entirely legally protected.

So what I wanted to do: (1) help the caretakers with support in the way of goods and TNR-cost funding, (2) encourage more feeders to become registered colony caretakers and (3) create a sanctuary for the outdoor cats who CAN do better indoors.

My first step was to create SCAT (need link) and recruit friends (need link) to join the board of directors. I soon realized… after getting screwed by LegalZoom and being forced to take a pause… that SCAT, focused on one problem area, would never allow us to grow into anything else. We re-branded as Cuddly Do Right and kept SCAT as one of the programs for which we raise funds.

And now I’m here, typing a bunch of info into a website with just DAYS to go before Giving Tuesday kicks off the end of the year fundraising season, worried that we’ll miss our targets and not have enough to help the outdoor cats through the winter.

Admit it – the Bastet story was waaaaaay more fun!