Le Café des Chats: LEFT: Tabby Portland plays in the colony room at Look What The Cat Brought In’s (LWTCBI) new location, 2129 E. Boulder Street. LWTCBI will host an open Kitty Love Café at 1 p.m. on March 7. Community members can meet and play with friendly, adoptable cats like Portland. BELOW: Pear sunbathes in the LWTCBI colony room on a sunny, winter day. Want to find out how you can support our cat community? Attend Look What The Cat Brought In’s First Annual Birthday Breakfast from 7–9 a.m. at Garden of the Gods Club, 3320 Mesa Road. Come help celebrate LWTCBI’s 7th birthday and see what the shelter is up to! Colorado Springs council member Jan Martin will be the keynote speaker. Call 719-2015180 or email ariel_heart@msn.com to RSVP. Photos by Hannah Blick, PETacular
Look What The Cat Brought In invites community to Kitty Love Café BY HANNAH BLICK, PETACULAR
First Tokyo, then Paris, New York City and San Francisco — now a cat café is coming to Colorado Springs. Look What The Cat Brought In (LWTCBI), 2129 E. Boulder Street, will host the opening of its Kitty Love Café at 1 p.m. on March 7, followed by weekly events. The shelter is continuing to celebrate its new and expanded location in the Knob Hill neighborhood and hopes the cafés will help foster community for its resident cats and give community members a chance to meet and learn about adoptable felines. Jennifer Nosler, director of LWTCBI, said hosting the Kitty Love Café seemed like the next logical step in connecting with the community. “There are families that can’t take a kitty home — maybe one family member has allergies — so this is a perfect opportunity for them to come and play with our cats,” she said. “It will also help our cats develop relationships and trust, making them that much more adoptable.” There will be a small cover charge for guests. Megan Phillips, BS, ADBC, owner of and behavior consultant for Train With Trust, will help facilitate the initial café, making sure the cats are comfortable with new visitors and children and adults know how to appropriately interact with the cats. Drinks and snacks will be provided
at each Kitty Love Café; attendees are welcome to bring their own beverages and food items. “We just want everyone to have a good time,” Nosler said. “That’s what it’s really all about. It will be good for the cats and it will be good for people.” LWTCBI was founded in 2008, and takes in cats that need more long-term care and time than they would get at a typical shelter. Many of its cats come from shelters like the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region and rescues like Second Chance Animal Rescue Foundation (SCARF) in Lamar. LWTCBI also takes private surrenders and works with partners like the Denver Dumb Friends League to find homes for feline colony rescues. The shelter runs purely on volunteer power, with about 40 people giving their time each week or month to keep up operations. 2015 should prove to be a big year for the shelter, with a new Hoarding Awareness Coalition in the works and kicking off a series of feline behavior classes. Phillips will instruct the classes, starting with the topic of providing enrichment for cats at 1 p.m. on March 22. “It’s going to have workshop elements and be very hands on,” she said. Stay tuned to www.lookwhatthecatbroughtin.org or visit LWTCBI’s Facebook page for more information.
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We are a limited admission, guaranteed adoption shelter founded in 2008. Our goal is to find loving homes for cats that otherwise would not.
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2129 E. Boulder Street 719.331.6852
LookWhatTheCatBroughtIn.org PETACULAR
SPRING 2015
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