Assistant professor reaches out to fellow animal lovers

UTM animal lovers:
I teach at UTM, but I’m writing as a Martin community member.  We really need your help.  A handful of us feed three of Martin’s stray/feral cat colonies daily.  The lack of long-term volunteers and funding keeps us from making serious progress in reducing Martin’s unwanted cat population.

Caring for these cats is constant for each of us, with no one to lighten the load.  Unfortunately, we lose one of our committed volunteers the first of March, after which there’ll be just two older women and one UTM student caring for these three sites every day.  It’s overwhelming to imagine the three of us carrying on this work alone. So we’re eager for committed individuals to join us.

We invite interested faculty, staff, or students to join our effort.  What would also be wonderful is to become an ongoing, long-term service project for a student organization, sorority or fraternity.  In addition to needing people to feed on assigned days, we’d love to start a food bank, we consistently have cats to spay/neuter, we need foster and permanent homes for kittens, and we’d love to begin education and advocacy. We’d love to hear your ideas!
Many of you are involved in service or advocacy in diverse ways, with multiple demands on your time.  We know you can’t imagine taking on one more task on your to-do list on a long-term basis.  Even though it takes only around 25 minutes to feed all three colonies, we also know feeding every assigned night, rain or shine, convenient or not, can be time-consuming and frustrating, and buying cat food gets costly. But if we increase our numbers with long-term volunteers, that responsibility gets shared across a wider base benefitting all involved.

Please contact me at 731-819-3248, on Facebook, or at hhuse@utm.edu if you can join us. Thank you.