Ben Madilynn
HEDGESVILLE — A group of cat-lovers and animal health professionals are coming together to be the Eastern Panhandle’s newest cat rescue, calling themselves WV Meowtaineers.
The group has more than 40 years of pet retail, veterinary and rescue experience between them, and has decided to branch out and start their own venture for which they saw a need in their community.
“The shelters remain full,” said WV Meowtaineers Treasurer, Lindsay Clopper. “We saw so many people saying, ‘we found these cats,’ or, ‘I’ve been feeding these cats, but I can’t afford to get them fixed.’”
Clopper says she’s always been an animal person and started rescuing cats 12-13 years ago when she took in and bottle-fed a kitten one Halloween. Since then, she’s worked for PetSmart, like many of the other members of WV Meowtaineers. For the past three years, she’s fostered cats for a local rescue.
She says WV Meowtaineers is planning on opening for intake and operations in mid-September once their paperwork is completed and they’re established as a 501c3. They have already raised funds to file as a 501c3 and are in the process of submitting paperwork to become one. They’ve already filed paperwork for a business license and registered as a business in the state.
“It’s just a matter of getting that so we can get more donations and all the different tax-exempt benefits of that, and then we can start intaking and building a medical fund for medical cases,” Clopper said.
Their plan is to build a network of foster homes from which they can go out, trap, neuter and release cats, while looking for homes for some. The goal of a Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) program is to prevent colonies of stray cats from growing, eventually removing the population naturally.
“When you trap a cat and remove it from the location, what tends to happen is another cat will move into the area,” Clopper explained. “It’s like a perpetual cycle, as opposed to if you return the cat back to where it was, it holds that place, but that particular cat is not going to continue breeding.”
She says that eventually, the colony will get to a point where no more breeding is occurring, and then the colonies will disappear naturally.
More information about WV Meowtainears is available online on their Facebook page, WV Meowtainears Cat Rescue.
