End of an Era----KATA Calls it Quits

 It was day before yesterday I heard the news.  KATA (Kitty Angel Team Adoption) has called it quits.  They're dissolving.  Vicki and Doris started KATA way back when, 25 or so years ago.  Vicki was a rural route postal carrier, finding cats everywhere she delivered mail, tons of them, around all these rural places.  It was driving her nuts.

She and Doris began using the mobile FCCO (Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon) clinics to get them fixed, by the dozen.  They'd host clinics in Sweet Home, something that was not easy at all, as coordinators had to find 8 local willing vets to volunteer and that was very very difficult.   The rest of us eager beaver volunteers were not so hard to come up with.  Many of us had already become hopeless diehards in the fight against feline overpopulation.

We'd travel to all the closest FCCO clinics, with carloads of cats from our areas, like groupies only groupies with a feverish cause, that helped not only the cats but their caregivers and their communities and the environment.  People who help cats are not honored the way other volunteers are honored.  More like dishonored, made fun of,  and often abused by the very people helped.  Helping cats, at least in Oregon, is a very very difficult path to follow.  Vicki and Doris did it.  I did it too, while poor as can be, living in Corvallis, and without a car when I started.   Helping cats led me from despair to purpose.

We didn't have the traps then.  We often had just one trap.  We'd catch a cat and transfer the cat from the trap to a carrier in our cars and go set the trap again.  Vicki and Doris were known for bringing forty to sixty cats to mobile FCCO clinics to be fixed. Before those clinics, there was no chance in hell to get cats fixed, really, in volume, as prices at private clinics were generally way too high to get that done.  There were a few exceptions, clincs with vets who believed in the mission.  Nowadays, you can't find those private clinics where prices are low enough or there are enough appointments open to get cats in volume fixed.  The good old days are long gone.  Now, we rely on a tiny few nonprofit clinics.  And drive terrible distances to get them done.  Volunteers burn out from the effort.  The state even taxes all adoption rescues and shelters to make it even harder on one and two person efforts in the far reaches of the state.  The state is backwards in that manner.  

Leaving us again in the dark ages.   

Vicki died two years ago.   Since then, another person stepped in to run KATA but Covid hit and the passion was gone and now KATA too is gone.  They will work to adopt out those left in their foster care and KATA, the kitty angels, will become a part of history.  Feels like Vicki dying all over again to me.  And it leaves a terrible hole in this god forsaken county for the unwanted unfixed cats and kittens.

When I told my brother this he asked why that would matter and said he didn't think anyone cared about animals anymore anyhow, that was something that happened in the past.  I said "What?"   My brother is not an animal person.  Sometimes I wonder though, is caring about anything part of the past?

Did KATA throw in the towel because of the states hardline against rescues, taxing those that take in cats to adopt out along with severe micromanagement?  Or because people don't help anymore, like they used to, want everything easy and there's nothing easy about helping cats.  Or was it the difficulty involved of finding spay neuter appointments?  And that's a big one.  Or just the lack of passion in the new leaders?  I don't know.  Maybe a combination.  

Its hard for me not to care.    So last night, with my car back to me and working again, after $450 worth of repairs, I went to the park and trapped the first of the four kittens.   It's a boy and very very darling little boy too.

That was after I went to the lake probably for the last time.  The weather is changing today and we may get a full inch of rain in a storm moving in Friday and over the weekend.  I couldn't help going to the lake.  I had my car back and was ecstatic.  It was running again!   And it was 80 degrees.  I was not going to waste such a day.

Those two boats out there are outrigger canoes, the modern version, plastic or metal, I couldn't tell--ultra modern.  I'd never seen one before outside of photos and videos.

So long KATA.   The valley cats and kittens in need will certainly cry for help from someone who is like your former volunteers, like Vicki.   Thousands upon thousands of others lived long happy lives because of Vicki Lindley and KATA.