All About Cats: Kia Pet Adoption Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
Our grant from the Petfinder Foundation and Kia allowed us to encourage more pair adoptions, ensuring our kittens and cats were able to go to loving homes with a littermate or companion cat. Many of our adopters would have only adopted one pet if it weren't for the funds provided by Kia.
How many pets did this grant help?
So far, 36 cats and kittens have found homes with the aid of the grant from Kia. We still have enough left from the grant to help seven more pairs find loving homes for the holidays.
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
Every adoption is a happy ending, but several of our adoptions aided by the funds from Kia and the Petfinder Foundation stand out.
We were contacted by a single mom whose young son has been battling stage-4 cancer for two years. She had been guided to seek out a panther as her spirit animal, and when she happened to stop by our PetSmart location, she was drawn to a black kitten named Cedric who was described as a mini panther on his bio card.
At the same time, her son was drawn to a young black kitten named Minx. When she told her son that Cedric was meant to be their cat, he said, “No, Mom — Cedric is your cat; Minx is mine.” Cedric and Minx are now providing entertainment, purrs, and comfort to this young family (first photo).
Another standout pair were also a pair of black kittens. Skeeter and Grizzly (second photo) were a bonded pair who had been waiting patiently for the purrfect home. A teenage girl came in with her adoptive mom to show her two kittens whom she had been visiting regularly at our PetSmart location.
Her cat, whom her family had adopted the same day she was adopted, had recently passed away, as had another family pet within the past few months. The vet bills had been thousands of dollars and the family wasn’t sure if they were ready for another cat, much less two.
When they learned about the grant and the reduced adoption fee, they knew they needed to take these two kittens home, almost three months to the day after they had first been put up for adoption.
A mom with two daughters came in to adopt a kitten. They had seen Little Tux on Petfinder and put in an application to adopt. While they were visiting with Little Tux, the youngest daughter also fell in love with her sister Thea.
We told the mom about the reduced adoption fee for a pair adoption, but she was unsure since they already had a cat at home. We decided to take their adoption photo before processing the adoption; thinking they were only going to adopt Little Tux, Thea was returned to her cage. The youngest daughter burst into tears and her mom asked her what was wrong. It was then that we learned that they were going to adopt both kittens and those tears quickly turned into a big smile (third photo).
Brownie Sundae and Cheesecake (fourth photo) were adopted to a woman who had lost her senior cats to cancer within a month of each other. After one day without a cat, she knew she needed to adopt another cat; she couldn’t spend another night without kitties in the house.
It had been a long time since she’d had a kitten, but she fell in love with Cheesecake when she saw her on Petfinder. We arranged for a meeting and she came in to meet all of Cheesecake’s siblings; Brownie Sundae was the lucky kitten who got to go home with her. The fifth photo shows them in their new home.
Our last happy ending came about quite by accident. A young couple stopped by towards the end of our Saturday adoption event and showed us a picture of a cat a friend of theirs had texted to them. It turned out that it was from a different PetSmart location, but they decided to look at our available cats while they were there.
Mike and Ike (sixth photo) caught their eye and they fell in love; even though they’d been thinking only about adopting one cat, they knew they couldn’t separate these brothers. When they learned about the reduced adoption fee offered as part of our grant from Kia, it was an easy decision.
