Stray Cat Blues celebrates partnership
UPPER PROVIDENCE >> As Stray Cat Blues celebrates a decade of adoption success at PetSmart in Collegeville, it’s clear to longtime Stray Cat Blues foster coordinator Linda Palmarozza that the partnership has been fruitful for both organizations.
“It’s been 10 years and we’re still cranking along in that store,” Palmarozza said, adding that store manager, Dave Stolnacker, who had been on hand to usher in the rescue group in 2009, had left for a while but has now returned
“So it’s like we’re back to square one, how we started out there.”
The group’s relationship with PetSmart dates back much further than the Collegeville opening, Palmarozza recalled.
“We started out in this little pet store in Lansdale called Lansdale Feed, with only two adoption cages. In the early days we were doing maybe 50 adoptions a year. Then one of the board members got wind that a big pet store was coming to Lansdale, and that was Petsmart, and they were looking for rescues for their adoption center. So when the PetSmart opened in Montgomeryville we went there and have been there for about 20 years. That’s considered our flagship store and what really put us on the map,” Palmarozza said.
Stray Cat Blues began as a grassroots organization founded by Linda Weber in 1999 and now operates a prolific network of foster homes where kittens are cared for and socialized to help them become compatible house pets.
“It’s kind of grown away from being grassroots. We now we have board of directors,” Palmarozza said. “In 2009, when PetSmart opened that October at Providence Town Center, during the height of the recession, the shopping center was really a ghost town for a long time, with only Wegmans and Staples. We really struggled for a while. Now we’re celebrating the 10th year of our relationship with that Petsmart in October.”
On Saturday, Oct. 19, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Stray Cat Blues Inc. and PetSmart Collegeville will celebrate their 10-year partnership with an Anniversary Celebration. The event will include free music and family fun activities in the Petsmart store on Water Loop Drive in the Providence Town Center shopping complex.
Musicians will entertain, a professional photographer will take free portraits of customer kitties, Stray Cat Blues volunteers will offer free nail clippings for customer kitties, kids can get a kitty cat face painting, and the first 10 people to adopt a Stray Cat Blues kitten or cat will receive a free cat bed.
Palmarozza explained that 30 pet beds had been fashioned by Sophie Lyczak of Collegeville, a 9th grader from Delaware Valley Friends School who earned her Silver Award with Girl Scout Troop 72000 by devoting 50 hours of time to the charitable project
“We have to do a certain number of adoptions every week at Petsmart. Part of our agreement is that we have cage cleaners morning and night and we’ve been able to do that with a great team of volunteers,” said Palmarozza, who regularly fosters kittens and cats in her own home.
“We’ve adopted about 3,000 cats out of the Collegeville store in those 10 years, which is a ballpark figure. And we average about 850 adoptions a year there.”
Jerry Kalick, vice president of Stray Cat Blues, Inc. noted in the organization’s newsletter: “It’s been a very productive 10 years and we want to express our appreciation for Petsmart’s generosity towards our rescue.”
Stray Cat Blues has, in turn, helped increase the store’s business, noted Palmarozza, who explained that the group relies on donations and fundraising to subsidize rising vet costs.
“We have to scrape and grovel for every penny. We’re very much like any other 501c3. We have to fundraise to supplement our income because our vet bills can run anywhere from $85,000 to $90,000 a year. We don’t send anything out the door until it is fully vetted, and that means the cats are tested for FIV and feline leukemia, neutered, vaccinated, treated for fleas, wormed about three times and microchipped.”
The adoption fee for kittens under six months old is $105. For cats more than six months old the fee is $95.
Stray Cat Blues Inc. has also been helping Montgomery County communities with “trap, neuter, release” since it was founded 20 years ago. Volunteers respond to scores of calls and emails during each kitten season from residents needing help to humanely trap and neuter feral cats and kittens.
Palmarozza noted that the success of Stray Cat Blues has paralleled the success of the area’s PetSmart stores.
“PetSmart has been so valuable to us because the store gives us the external visibility that our cats need. We can put them on the website but if the cats are stuck in somebody’s house the public isn’t going to see them. But once they go into the adoption center in a store that has traffic you know you have a targeted audience because people going into PetSmart love animals.”
To learn more about Stray Cat Blues Inc. and to complete an adoption application, visit www.straycatblues.org.