Saving Kittens Sanctuary

16/01/2025

We have gotten a few bites of food out of Marnie today! This is video footage of her eating on her own for the first time in days. Syringe feeding is stressful for cats and comes with risk of aspiration, so it is always a huge relief when they eat independently (as well as usually a sign things are improving for kitty). We have enough to buy her first vial of medication which should last her 35 days unless there is weight gain. So we will carry on with her treatment and continue running her fundraiser for the remaining amount needed.

15/01/2025

This is a hard one to swallow, but we wanted to put it out in the community to see if our followers and donors would want to donate to this case. Please keep in mind that FIP treatment for a geriatric cat has a lower success rate than a young, healthy cat, and that being geriatric means there are less years of life to enjoy post recovery. Many people come to the conclusion given this, that FIP treatment for an old mom is not worth pursuing. This is not a wrong decision. And in this case, we use the supply that we have currently until gone and then keep her comfortable for as long as possible with supportive care until it is time to euthanize. The survival rate for geriatric cats with FIP is 70% with an estimated additional 2-5 years of life post treatment.

Marnie is a geriatric cat. She is estimated to be somewhere between 6-10 years of age. She lived a life outdoors being repeatedly bred and has never known a life free of struggle. We pulled her and she was fostered through Ron and Wendy with all 9 of her last babies. Her babies all found homes through Puurrrfect Paws (big thanks to them!). Marnie was also spayed through PPR and sent to a store for store rotation. But she started acting a little off after a week or so and the store asked us to pick up.

What once was a healthy, outgoing and exhuberant biscuit maker had in a few short days been reduced to a lifeless doll. She curled up in a little ball and the jaundice set in as she persistently refused food. FIP is not something we can catch beforehand and it hits rapidly. It is a condition where they are fine and dandy one day and literally the next day, are not. We have included an invoice that Puurrrfect Paws paid for one of their FIP cats to give an idea of how much these vials cost. Marnie would need 2 or 3 of these vials to finish her treatment. After taxes and shipping, the vials are $747.74 each. Marnie will only need two vials if she does not gain a significant amount of weight, but some cats eat a bunch when they start feeling better which increases the cost of care because it is based on weight. We would like to start fundraising with a goal of $1895.48 for her to cover the currently estimated 2 vials needed, labs, and x-rays. With any luck, this will be the full cost of her care and we will not need to fundraise for the additional vial.

Marnie is also only eating wellness pate adult food (not kitten) or Royal Canin baby cat. She will eat these mixed with water, and we are also syringe feeding her throughout the day to help with the jaundice. Savory centers are also very easy to mix and more affordable, so they are good for syringe feeding. If you would like to donate this food for Marnie, we use what we have when we have it and it will make her journey a little easier. Even if we cannot raise the funds to treat her, this food will still help with her supportive care and comfort. https://www.chewy.com/g/saving-kittens-sanctuary_b105533786

14/01/2025

Please join our auction page! The kitties have this humble request of you

14/01/2025

Help us congratulate these little survivors. They won the battle against their illness! These adorkable little fluffers made a full recovery and were returned to their home rescue after a lengthy and anxiety-inducing stay with us. They came to us after two days of slight weight loss noted at their original foster home so we could keep them for observation and holding while they were waiting for clinic day to roll around at their home rescue.

It quickly became apparent they would not be able to wait until then. Over the next several days, and after several urgent care visits, at their lowest they had lost over 30% of their original body weight. That would be the equivalent of a 150 pound human losing 45 pounds over 3 days! Once it started coming out both ends with vomit, diarrhea, and zero appetite, they got set up with the full works to pull their little bodies through it.

After several days of laboring over the babies with fluid therapy, appetite stimulant, anti-diarrheal medication, anti-nausea medication, syringe feeding, probiotics, and antibiotics, they finally made a turn for the better one morning by taking their first nibbles of food on their own. It was all uphill from there and they all made a full recovery. WOO HOO!

10/01/2025

Cornflake was a distinguished guest at my work yesterday. We are now funded for January and he says THANK YOU!! From the bottom of our heart

08/01/2025

‼️We are one week into January and still $755 short of funding the rescue for the month‼️

Our four little fluffy face kittens have received a welcomed status upgrade to "stable and improving". We anticipate all four to survive! We are continuing to work on them for several more days until they rebound to pre-sickness weight, and then they will be returned to their original foster. We could not have done this without you all! We get a significant and appreciated discount from our rescue vet, but typically take on the most complex cases. Donations keep us going so we can keep our cat-lady-in-training busy with survivor snuggles!

Please note this kitten will not be adoptable through our rescue. We only take medical cases on a case by case basis of cats and kittens with rare illnesses, chronic illnesses, severe illnesses, and/or urgent life-threatening common illnesses. By focusing on critical care, we are able to allocate all of our donations to lifesaving medical care for rescue cats.

06/01/2025

Our happy tails look a little different than most. Although we LOVE to see the outcome of adoptions, most of our "Happy Tails" involve successful rehabilitation and graduation from a medical regiment, which frees them for foster transfer to other rescues. We had a very hard reckoning last year with the realization that we could not fund both intensive medical care and routine vetting (spays/neuters). After going into severe debt to try to tackle both sides, Puurrrfect Paws voluntarily stepped in and took over routine vetting and adoptions for our Sanctuary graduates, which freed A TON of time and resources for us to focus on what we are good at.

Mouse has successfully battled anemia and dehydration. There were initially concerns of sepsis due to low body temperature, which fortunately did not manifest. He moved on yesterday to his new foster home with Puurrrfect Paws. Although we were sad to see the little "fatty raccoon" as he was called (with affection) go, we are happy he will have that one on one time with an amazing PPR foster.

We are only $755 away from being funded for the month of January! After that, we can focus more on our happy stories and less on pitiful pleas for help. Every bit counts; help us reach our goal!

05/01/2025

Cases like this almost universally die without specialist intervention, like what we provide here at the rescue. Some deaths are quick and painless, and some are drawn out and excrutiating. Regardless of the type of death they face, we obviously cannot condone preventable deaths in any capacity.

This little smooshy face peanut may die. He is here at the rescue with three siblings. They are fighting for their lives against diarrhea of unknown origin. We will need an expensive f***l PCR on them to get to the root of the problem. We need funding to do this and to get them better. Until then, they are receiving supportive care to include hydration, nutritional supplementation, probiotics, which we fortunately have in stock at the rescue, and of course ICU care 24/7. We are also completely out of specialty foods that stimulate appetite, so are having to syringe feed instead (which comes at risk of aspiration). We have been laboring over them for days now.

We have reduced our operating costs to only 20% of what they were last year by taking only the most critical cases, and turning down everything else. We cannot, in our heart, also turn down these kinds of critical cases. But without funding, we will have to. Please share. We have no problem begging for help and donations. Begging is not beneath us. When it comes to little lives like this, we will do whatever it takes to secure extra years and life for them. It is most important to us that they be given the chance and opportunity to live. 💕

Please note this baby is obviously not adoptable due to his critical condition. When he and his siblings are adoptable, they'll be transferred to another rescue that deals with adoptions at that time.

https://savingthekittens.org/donate/

04/01/2025

Run don’t walk. This precious duo (mama and baby) is at Petsmart and ready for their perfect human to scoop them up!!! They are often quiet and uninterested in social interactions while in a kennels but I can promise you these cutie pies will keep you smiling with their antics!!

Both fully vetted and ready to go to their furever home.

Pearl Ann aka mama calico is approx 1.5 years old

Baby Tia Tia is approx 5.5 months old now.

03/01/2025

You might be wondering what the heck this is a picture of. This, my friends, is what we call an "origin story". A lot of people in the face of a person brimming with passion can't help but ask the question "What made you decide to do what you do today? What made you take the big leap to open a rescue?" If it was a decision that was easy, or made a lot of money, everyone would run a rescue. We would have 10 rescues on every major intersection. Wouldn't that be a sight! But what does motivate people to take these big steps, at major risk and with little to no reward.

This is a picture of my bathroom counter last night. One day, twenty years down the road, my daughter will be asked the same question. How do I know she will be? Because of this. Every year we get a handful of ladybugs who live up in the corners of our bathroom. Drawn to the heat and moisture, and craving an escape from the cold, they find themselves inside where heat is abundant but food is scarce. Since we do not typically keep aphids stocked in the pantry.

We watched these ladybugs over several days. They all have little names and my seven year old does a headcount on them each night. One day we were missing Mrs. Speck and found she had passed away, her shell tucked in the most hidden corner of the room. My daughter asked what happened to her, so we did a little research about how long ladybugs live, etc, and came to the conclusion that she was not an old ladybug and probably passed away from not being able to find bugs to eat. We buried Mrs. Specks and went on with our day.

That night, my daughter asked me for some honey. I brought her the honey bottle and a piece of toast thinking she wanted some honey toast. When it was time for showers, I found a little honey splatter on the counter. Before the photo, there were 3 of them there, having a small honey feast. My daughter had done some independent research and discovered that ladybugs can eat honey. Not wanting the rest of them to meet the same fate as Mrs. Specks, we now have a ladybug honey feeding station in our bathroom.

See, some people can't help but want to help. Nothing "makes us" want to do these things, to start a rescue or save animals, or be compassionate. It is a culmination of who we are and the way we are raised. We do what we do becaue we care so much. We care about life and happiness and joy, we care about sharing our wins with others so they can also have peace and joy, we care about minimizing suffering where we can. We just really care. So when I'm asked why I started a rescue, or if our followers are ever asked why they support us in our mission without getting anything in return, there really only is one answer to that. And the answer is, "Because I care."

02/01/2025

$222/$2000 fundraised!

Mouse was recently turned into Animal Control by a Good Samaritan. We imagine he was found due to his very loud vocals and protests of being alone! It did not take long to see Mouse needed a little TLC so we were happy to pull him. When we got Mouse home, we found his body temperature was quite low despite being in a warm room with plenty of blankets, and despite being an appropriate age to self-regulate body temperature. This was indicative of more nefarious things going on in the little guy's body than what we could see on the outside.

We needed bloodwork and needed it fast, so Mouse was seen as an urgent case where we discovered he has an infection in his body and anemia. He was hiding a pretty severe flea infestation in his raccoon thick fur, so we got to work with a flea treatment, grooming, nutrition supplementation, fluids for dehydration, antibiotics for the infection and heat bags to boost body temperature. He is currently curled up napping with a stuffy after eating our last can of Wellness canned kitten food with vigor. We would like to request donation of this food because although it is expensive, it is often the only type of food (or Royal Canin) that these extremely sick babies will eat. In the meantime, we will give him a hodge podge of anything else we have available to see if anything strikes his fancy.

We must fundraise $2,000 for January to fund the rescue for the month

01/01/2025

HAPPY NEW YEARS from the kitties and volunteers at Saving Kittens Sanctuary!

This past year we saw a lot of BIG wins. Many months we pulled literally hundreds of cats and kittens between four Animal Controls (each month). We almost lost the rescue not once- but twice. But thanks to our selfless and compassionate donors, our AMAZING rescue vet, our awesome volunteers pushing auctions and events hard, and a partnership with Puurrrfect Paws who absorbed the majority of our spay/neuter costs and accepted hundreds of transfers of cats post treatment at the Sanctuary, we were able to bounce back by the skin of our teeth to keep going.

We stand here today proud of what we have accomplished. Through blood, sweat, and tears, lives were saved. So many lives! We saw babies through surgeries that added decades of time for experiences. Our rescue vet was on the forefront of pioneering and tweaking treatments for new ailments we had never seen before. We had to lean on people in ways we have never leaned on people before. We had to place trust beyond a level of comfort to pull off what we did. We had quite a few serious let downs, but overall, the trust was always well placed and we saw the rescue to new heights.

We lost a lot, too. Through the year we lost friends, lost time with family, lost many of our original "founding crew", we lost some lives who came in too sickly to be saved. We take our losses with grace and try to learn from them; but most importantly we look to the future and continue to bring ourselves to the table despite the losses. With your help, love, and support, we will continue to bring ourselves to the table to do what we were destined to do. Here's to another year of saving kittens; and saving lives!

31/12/2024

We would like to ring in the New Year getting back into doing what we do best; saving babies! Even though there was personal disruption this year that slowed us down to a halt on social media these past few months, we have never gone away. We are still here quietly saving kittens. As we have meticulously and methoidcally hammered out the holdups, we are ready to jump back into the normal swing of things!

Nani (black kitten), came to our rescue with 2 brothers. 2 out of the 3 had FIP, with her brother having the most severe case we've ever seen. Unfortunately after a week of intensive care and medication, the brother passed in his sleep. We cared for Nani and her siblings for several weeks at the rescue and then once stable, transferred them to a new rescue that will take over their care. We used a bunch of specialty foods and canned food to help Nani's litter through the worst of their illness, and bestowed a large gift of food to the foster so they could continue to thrive after departure. We are hoping to fundraise for Nani's vet bills, and the vet bills incurred for both her brothers. They all received fluids, x-rays, antibiotics, dewormer, flea topical, and examinations.

We are currently very low on non clumping litter, Wellness canned food, savory centers, and friskies fillets. We have a few bags left of Purina Naturals and Purina Healthy One kitten but could always use more. We also have a big need for 1mL syringes which we go through a lot of! Nani's intaking rescue, Puurrrfect Paws Rescue, will also need monetary donations to cover the rest of the FIP treatment that Nani will need now that she has shown promise and responded to the medication.

The second duo is Yogi and Lani. They were transferred to our rescue to check them for ringworm and treat giardia. They have been long cleared of their ailments, but the adopting family recently opted to relinquish to rescue instead of reclaim them following their well check. They've now been at the rescue for several weeks consuming supplies. They are being returned to their original rescue for adoption and we hope they'll have better luck this time finding a family to love them for life! Although the other rescue offered to replenish used supplies, they have several medical cases they are working through so we like to provide our own supplies without charge to the other rescues who also already have a full plate. It is our way of supporting each other through thick and thin

26/12/2024

We hope everyone had a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!! Our rescue kitties here got to indugle in an extra large serving of their favorite wet food. Some even picked the extra fancy cans and we could tell they were savoring every bite

23/12/2024

Baby Tia Tia and her mama, pearl anne are still patiently waiting for their furever human to come and pick them! This bonded and fully vetted duo is sweet, playful, and cuddly. Best thing is that they entertain themselves playing chase, hide n seek and doing parkour, but they are also accepting of their human dangling wand toys and throwing balls and mice for them to chase. Please won’t someone make their Christmas wish come true?

Both girls are also dog friendly with proper introductions.

Mama is approx 12-18 months
Baby Tia is approx 5.5 months old.

21/12/2024

A big thank you to New Leash On Life - Home of The JOY Clinic 😻 We are full of gratitude for them and hope you will consider donating to their cause while donations are being matched for the next 10 days. One of our kitties who was adopted last year was found in a neighborhood, getting under people's feet and begging to get into homes for months. He was cold and hungry and alone. A Good Samaritan took him to the Joy Clinic and asked for help in relocating him to a barn home since he would intercept people trying to walk while begging for attention, and he was becoming a neighborhood trip hazard.

The Joy Clinic noticed he was way too sweet to be a barn cat, and took him into their modest cat adoption program. When getting him ready for neuter, they scanned for a chip and discovered not only was he already neutered, but he was an SKS kitty who had been found. One of our awesome volunteers made the 1.5 hour trek to grab our sweet bean Rob and bring him back home.

The Joy Clinic kept him warm and comfy and happy, and they also updated his vaccines and flea topical for our rescue completely free of charge. It was such a thoughtful thing to do, and with Christmas around the corner, it really shed some compassion and light on a terrible situation for us and for Rob. https://www.newleashonline.org/the-joy-clinic is their website if you would like to gift these lovely people with a donation for the holiday season!

15/12/2024

Pearl Anne aka mama calico and her sweet baby Tia Tia only want one thing for Christmas and that is to find their purrfect hoomans! Mama and baby are a bonded pair. They are both females and fully vetted and ready for a home of their own. Mama calico is a young adult and plays as rough and tumble as any kitten. In their foster home they are known to play together and exclude any other cats that are with them. Both are also dog friendly with proper introductions. This pair is playful and can be found chasing each other in tunnels, playing in their donut hole cave, and chasing balls and mice! Mama calico loves attention and enjoys being held, even like a baby. Baby Tia is always in motion. She is a little shy at first but mama is always there to help boost her confidence. If you can find it in your heart to make their Christmas wish come true; please let us know.

Mama is approx 12-18 months
Baby Tia is approx 5.5 months old.

06/12/2024

We are so grateful for our wonderful team of volunteers who always make events like this so much fun and help raise awareness about the sanctuary while helping to raise much needed funds for the kitties! What a fun time collaborating with Mikaela's Mutt Motel, another local rescue in our area and much thanks to Three Rifles Distilling Co. for providing such a fabulous location for our crews to set up!!

Clarksville, TN - Sean and Candace Ruth, owners of Three Rifles Distillery, welcomed a different type of party animal to the Riverside District when they