Armington Mail

Piper Evelsizer

Numbers are hard to come by, but there are an estimated 70 million stray cats in America. The Chicagoland area, alone, is estimated to have 200,000 strays. As one could guess, very few of these cats are spayed/neutered. The good news is that there is a local group working to bring those local numbers down by housing these strays until they can find their “forever homes”. This week, I sat down with a member of that group, TLC Fosters, to get the full scoop.

If you meet Piper Evelsizer, it probably won’t take long until she mentions her cats and she can really talk at length about them. As luck would have it, Piper happened to live near the founder of TLC Fosters and a relationship was formed in November 2020. After completing the application process, Piper was able to start housing cats. Explaining her own process to me, Piper stressed that this depends on the condition the cats are in when she receives them. However, her end goal is to be able to fully socialize cats with the dogs and other cats that live at her home, before finding a forever home for the foster. She says that in the almost year she has been homing cats, only one out of about 25 wasn’t able to be fully socialized.

Piper is careful to point out that the age of the cats she homes determines how much work is needed. Bottle babies, she says, are a full-time job. However, she has also housed older cats that require very little work. “I’m really just a hotel,” says Piper. “What we are really doing here is freeing up space at the shelter. Or there was no space at the shelter to begin with, which essentially means we are the last option for a lot of these cats.” TLC Fosters host Adoption Events, where the cats can be seen and, hopefully, adopted. If an adoption doesn’t take place, they’ll go back to their foster homes.

If you would like to help out, you can donate to TLC Fosters directly via their website at www.tlcfosters.com. If you’re looking for a new friend, please consider fostering or even adopting. Anything helps and, as Piper says, “It’s very rewarding.” She also laughed and thanked her husband, Todd, for putting up with all the cats.