Can you imagine having a waiting list for your adoption organization’s feral cats? At Dane County Friends of Ferals, they’d never even dreamed something like that could happen. But thanks to Maddie’s Pet Adoption Days, it did!

Guest post by Susan Krebsbach, DVM,
Founder and Board Member, Dane County Friends of Ferals

When the Dane County Friends of Ferals (DCFoF) was first started in the early 2000s, the founding members would often joke, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a waiting list for feral cat adoptions?”

After a whirlwind weekend of 153 cat adoptions as a result of Maddie’s Pet Adoption Days, we found ourselves achieving the dream that only days earlier seemed unobtainable: we had three homes on a waiting list to adopt feral cats!

Three homes waiting to adopt a subset of cats once considered “unadoptable” and who typically had been at very high risk of losing their lives in the shelter system!

The excitement that I felt about this accomplishment was enough for this 50-plus-year-old to consider running down the street doing cartwheels. But instead of causing myself guaranteed physical injury, I jumped up and down in the privacy of my own home while screaming with excitement in the ear of the bearer of such great news, Alison O’Hara, DCFoF’s vice-president.

Days later my exhilaration was rekindled when Cheryl Balazs, the current president of DCFoF and one of its founding members, shared her happiness in almost the same words I used (minus the cartwheels) when she told me the three homes waiting to adopt feral cats had expanded to six! Pinch me! Honestly, I never thought this would happen in my lifetime.

The 153 cat adoptions we did during Maddie’s Pet Adoption Days is more than double the number of adoptions that DCFoF did last year during the same event. What’s amazing about this number is that, because of the brutally cold winter Wisconsin just survived, kitten season started very late this year. This meant we had fewer kittens available for adoption (the “easy sell”) and therefore adopted more adult cats and, of course, all of our feral cats.

To add to the happy news, even that record-breaking adoption number for DCFoF represents just 1 percent of the total number of adoptions that took place nationally as part of Maddie’s Pet Adoption Days!

So you see, it is not just Disney World “where dreams come true”; it happens at Maddie’s Pet Adoption Days, too!

Photo: Ryan O’Hara