For The Love of Cats

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For The Love of CatsCare for lifelong feline companions

Zimmer Feline Foundation’s for The Love of Cats Programs promote the care and love of cats as our lifelong companions.

Cats thrive indoors and their caregiving needs are simple. Love them, feed them, and keep their litter box clean. In return, they will greet you at the door, purr while they sit on your lap, cuddle with you while you sleep, and wow you with their extraordinary ability to run, jump and chase things no one else can see. But, most importantly, they will show you unconditional love.

These special relationships enrich our lives, lower our stress and anxiety levels, improve our cardiovascular health, and reduce our feelings of loneliness. And we hope, with our free spay/neuter assistance, many more people will have the pleasure of associating with cats.

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"Time spent with a cat is never wasted."

— Colette
(1873-1954) 
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Helping Pet Cats Keep Their Indoor Homes ForeverBy Providing Free Cat Spay/Neuter Vouchers

It is easy to see how it happens. You adopt a stray cat or the kitten of a friend’s cat, and before you realize it, she is pregnant. Once her kittens are born you find homes for them but if you do not fix mom quickly, you will soon have another litter to deal with. We hear this story repeatedly from caregivers applying for spay/neuter vouchers and we wish we could have helped them sooner.

But as important as cat spay/neuter is to stem the number of kittens born annually, it is even more important for individual cats. Once sterilized, they are healthier, better companions, and more likely to keep their indoor homes forever.

The large-scale push to fix cats actually did not begin from a concern over “too many cats” but from the introduction of kitty litter in the 1950’s allowing them to move indoors as “companion pets.” Families adopted kittens, but as they matured, their yowling, spraying, and kittening became more than what even the most loving caregivers could endure. So, they appealed to their vets to find a way to stop these behaviors, and the fix they came up with was sterilization.

Shelters (who account for about 45% of cat adoptions) routinely fix kittens as young as 8 weeks old before adopting them out. But the remaining 55% of pet cats (those found outdoors or passed person-to-person) are often left intact. Not because their caregivers do not understand the importance of spay/neuter, but simply because they lack the money to pay for it.

And this is where we help. We pay the cost to fix these low-income family pet cats. And by doing so, more cats will keep their indoor homes forever. This is the best outcome for everyone. The cats, their caregivers, and the communities they live in.

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55%
of pet cats are left intact because their caregivers can't afford to fix them
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over
43,000 cats
fixed for free in
New Mexico
since 2010
over
12,000 cats
fixed for free in
Michigan
before 2010
3,240 cats
in
18 counties
in New Mexico
fixed for free
in 2022

And Expanding The Safety Net For Community CatsThrough Nonprofit Partnerships

As effective as spay/neuter vouchers are, they work best with indoor pet cats that can keep a pre-scheduled vet appointment and live near one of our participating veterinary clinics. To help other cats (barn cats, yard cats, and feral cat colonies) – or those outside our service areas – we can partner with nonprofit clinics. They simply provide the community with free cat spay/neuter services, and we reimburse them for the charges they would have billed to the caregivers.

Collage of Woman with Cats

"Thank you for making it possible for me to give Thor a warm, loving and clean home inside out of the cold and now neutered! He's with his best friend Rutherford who was neutered a little over a year ago, also thanks to Zimmer Feline Foundation."

— Tylee, Belen, NM Blue toy illustration
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4 year old Hazey went in yesterday to redeem our free spay/neuter voucher and when they did the surgery they discovered she had pyometra -- an infection in her uterus that is fatal if left untreated.  The clinic contacted us for a veterinary care voucher to cover the extra surgery cost and take-home antibiotics.  Although any unspayed female cat or kitten can have pyometra, it is more common in older cats such as Hazey.  Hope she's better soon.
Poor Sally!  His eye was infected or injured when he was a baby kitten and the caregiver could not afford to have him seen by a vet. Yesterday though she took him in to use the free spay/neuter voucher we sent them and the clinic contacted us for a veterinary care voucher so they could remove the eye while he was being neutered.  We e-mailed the voucher over so his damaged eye is no longer an issue.  For many of the cats we give spay/neuter vouchers for, the surgery visit is their first (and often only) trip to a vet.  We like when the vets consider treating other issues then to ensure they get taken care of.
Seven was found in the yard of a kindly woman who noticed he had an injured arm.  She brought him to Salazar vet clinic in Taos for treatment and they contacted us to get a voucher to fix him while they had him in the clinic.  We provided a veterinary care voucher and a free spay/neuter voucher so the good Samaritan wouldn't have to bear the cost.  She will keep him while she looks for his original caregiver and if that doesn't work, will find a new indoor home for him elsewhere.