Before he was rescued by the Oxford Catty Shack, Saffron was practically dead.
Five months, 160 cats
Five months ago, Angela DelVecchio helped local veterinarians and other residents trap 20 stray cats in a local colony to neuter them. The day was planned as a trap neuter release (TNR), a method of managing stray cat colonies by preventing the adult cats from breeding but not adopting them out of the wild altogether. When 14 cats that day needed continuing medical care, DelVecchio opened her barn to them while they got the attention they needed.
She describes that day, July 15, as the founding of Oxford Catty Shack. They helped 20 cats that day, but there was more to be done. In the time since, she and her partners, Jessica Hallberg and Cindi Byrge, estimate that they’ve helped 160 cats between the three of them.
DelVecchio said they filed for 501(c)3 status in late July and received it in early October, but they didn’t wait to get started. The cats that need help haven’t waited, either.
“We’re all kind of building this plane as we’re flying it,” DelVecchio said. “We haven’t had time to really sit down and come up with ‘What’s an intake protocol and what kinds of things are we going to do for every cat and what kind of records are we going to keep,’ because it’s just been such an influx of cats all the time.”
Hallberg, who has been friends with DelVecchio for years, said a major part of building the Catty Shack has been forging and maintaining relationships with other shelters and property owners in the area. They often get calls from the community asking them to come help strays, and she said it’s impossible not to answer.
“The reality is, there are too many cats,” Hallberg said. “We’re three people, plus a handful of volunteers. Don’t get me wrong, people have volunteered through the roof … but fostering is the only way that we can continue.”
More than a full-time job
For DelVecchio, Hallberg and Byrge, the Catty Shack goes beyond a full-time job. Byrge recently retired and can devote her time to it, but Hallberg and DelVecchio agree it’s where most of their days go, even though each of them is still managing a job.
“There’s no nine-to-five,” Byrge said. “Once we do get home, then you’re taking care of the rescues you have at home, which is another whole ordeal.”
The trio fills their days trapping cats, talking to community members, taking older cats to clinics to get spayed and neutered up to an hour away, coming home to take care of sick kittens, managing visits to the vet, setting up adoptions and handling any crises that may arise in what little time remains.
Beyond the physical stress of running the nonprofit, it takes an emotional toll, too. DelVecchio says they’ve lost five cats so far.
Hallberg says each of them takes different losses harder than the others. Recently, a kitten they had successfully placed in a home died suddenly, and Hallberg took it especially hard.
“I was shook. I haven’t been shook like that with a kitten loss (before) because he was happy and healthy, and then he was not,” Hallberg said. “We did everything we can, but you can’t save them all.”
While Byrge said the simple reaction any time something goes wrong is to quit, the three of them are in this long-term, losses and all. And there’s no one better to be taking care of these cats in their hours of need.
“Even the ones that died, when they died, they were loved,” DelVecchio said. “They were warm. They were fed. They were cared for. They didn’t die alone out on the street … so even though they didn’t survive, we did what we could.”
Saffron’s story
Saffron, the little black cat with one eye and a bowtie, is sitting on DelVecchio’s table, but he belongs to Byrge. She couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him alone at home, Byrge says.
Each of the three women has a specialty within the Catty Shack, they say. DelVecchio is in charge of organization, and Hallberg is the front-facing people person.
Byrge is the heart. And when she met Saffron, it didn’t take long for her to adopt him.
The three had been getting tips about Saffron from the community for days, but it was a struggle to catch him. It took until he got too sick to put up a fight that they managed to trick him and take him in, but his condition was critical. One of his eyes was falling out of its socket, and he had upper respiratory issues.
Hallberg says they didn’t know what to do at first. They estimated his care would cost $2,500, and the three of them had to weigh that cost against how many other cats they could spay and neuter with that money.
“DelVecchio is the one that was sitting there physically making this decision,” Hallberg says. “I said, ‘How do you say no?’ And another person said, ‘I’m sending you money right now.’”
The women of the Catty Shack rallied their social media following to fundraise for Saffron, and they got him his surgery. It ended up costing $1,000, and Byrge took Saffron home. Now, he’s a happy, social cat in a loving home, and Byrge sometimes tips her plants over and lays with him on the ground to give him a feeling of the outdoors.
“We think he may have a little bit of Maine Coon in him,” Byrge said. “He’s big.”
Preparing for the future
Winter isn’t the standard cat breeding season, but DelVecchio says the Catty Shack has already started booking spaying and neutering appointments through February. If the team takes any sort of break, they worry that Oxford’s stray cat population will boom again.
DelVecchio’s dream is to have a facility to manage the Catty Shack from, but it’s a long-term goal that would require even more time and money than she’s giving right now. It all comes at a personal cost, too.
“It leaves so little room for family and freedom and leisure. It’s insane, really,” DelVecchio said. “Our families could tell you that it takes over everything.”
Still, the work is worth it. According to the North Shore Animal League America, one breeding pair of cats and their offspring can produce more than 2 million cats in eight years, and that’s if only 2.8 cats per litter survive. If the cats the Catty Shack has rescued amount to 80 breeding pairs, they’ve prevented 165 million cats from being born on the streets.
It’s hard to feel like you’re making an impact when you see so many animals still struggling, though, DelVecchio says.
“It doesn’t always feel huge when it’s like, ‘OK, but look, there’s 50 more,” DelVecchio said. “It just feels like your’re a drop in the bucket.”
DelVecchio is a therapist by profession, and she says her philosophy for that job has helped her manage her expectations for the Catty Shack. There will always be another problem to fix, she says, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.
“If your mentality is, ‘I’m not going to do anything unless I can make it all perfect,’ we’d never do anything,” DelVecchio says. “To me, I’m going to focus on the good that I can do for this one person, for this one cat, for this one day, for this one family, and let that be its own thing.”
The Oxford Catty Shack is on Instagram @oxford_cattyshack and on Facebook at The Oxford Catty Shack.
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