Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS): Comfort Zone Operation Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
Since kitten season is in full bloom, the generous Comfort Zone $1,000 grant was used to purchase special Science Diet (not donated or discounted on the Shelter Program) dry and canned kitten food and bottle baby formula.
As Maryland's largest companion animal shelter and its largest open admission shelter, on any given day BARCS house 110 dogs, 110 cats and has a staggering 700 or more cats, kittens and dogs in foster care! Though BARCS is part of the Science Diet Shelter Program, there is no discount or donation on specialty foods that we use to feed all of the kittens able to eat solid food. Additionally, our fosters provide everything for our animals in their care, except for medical treatment. Since we get hundreds of kittens every month, many of our fosters cannot afford to keep up with the cost of feeding. This generous grant not only fed the kittens housed at the shelter, but also was provided to financially at-risk fosters so they can continue to feed their kittens until they can all be adopted.
How many pets did this grant help?
This grant fed over over 100 kittens at the shelter for almost a month, plus an additional 100 kittens in foster care for a month
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
The Pringles kittens (Pringles 1 through 5) were dumped at BARCS and found hiding under our events shed. We were able to trap them all, and the trapper ended up fostering all five of them. She found homes for three of them and kept two for herself!
Inky, Stinky, Winky, Pinky, Blinky and Dinky were brought in by a good Samaritan who found them under her porch, but no mom in sight. We found a foster to bottle feed all of them as they were kept together. Now that they are older than seen in the photo, they all have been adopted into loving families from several different adoption events. Blinky is the most photogenic of the litter and a young family that has a little daughter and son adopted Blinky as their first family pet!
