Pawsitive Outreach Spay Neuter Advocates

Pawsitive Outreach Spay/Neuter Advocates is a small but very dedicated and effective non-profit group whose main mission is providing affordable spay/neuter assistance to low-income pet owners, and for strays, and ferals.  Our work constantly brings animals to our attention who are in desperate need of help.  Because of this enormous need, we have shelter buildings for rescued cats and a family of fosters who provide safe havens for cats/kittens and dogs/puppies while any medical issues are addressed and forever homes are found for them.  We throw a broad net helping animals in Pend Oreille, Spokane, and Stevens Counties in Washington, and Bonner and Kootenai Counties in Idaho.

The ultimate goal of this project is to reduce the number of unwanted pets in our service area.  This will not only be of immense benefit to the animals involved, but to the community at large since many unwanted animals end up abandoned.  They often live short, miserable lives; or if they manage to make their way to someone willing to care for them, become a burden to people already struggling to make ends meet.  All of our clients are low income, many are elderly and/or disabled, and find it very difficult to afford these much needed and wanted services at full veterinary prices.

Our main focus is to help animals in need by providing low cost spay and neuters to the community.  Pawsitive Outreach Spay Neuter Advocates (POSNA) has over a decade of experience organizing and setting up spay/neuter clinics.  We realized that without getting to the root cause of pet overpopulation there is no hope of achieving a sustainable companion animal population.  We are the only group in our area offering the level of hands-on assistance that we do.  The need for affordable spay/neuter services is vast and our many clients are simply not able to afford the prices charged by full-service veterinarians.  We assist in over 1000 spay/neuters per year.

Transportation is often a problem; many of our clients are elderly or disabled, our transportation team will go wherever needed to pick up and return animals for the clinics.   We also provide assistance with stray and feral cats, very few organizations handle these difficult problems.  They often involve a dozen and more cats.  It can start out with a stray cat shows up hungry on the doorstep of someone with a heart bigger than their pocketbook, and before they know it the situation spins out of control because they don't have the resources to pay for spay/neuter.  We often receive referrals from other rescues who do not have the expertise or resources to handle the problems we deal with on a daily basis.  We are almost always working on at least one pet hoarding situation which requires diplomacy, patience, and resources to give these animals a chance at a happy life.  Very few organizations handle feral cats as we do.  Without our assistance, if help can even be found, often the cats once trapped would be euthanized.  The trapping, altering, sheltering, and placing feral cats in barns is very difficult and time-consuming work and all part of what we offer.

In doing this work the need for a shelter and rescue became apparent.  At our shelter volunteers clean, care for, and find loving homes for our residents.  These cats come in as strays sometimes needing socializing; it is not uncommon for it to take years for these cats to learn to trust again after being neglected, abandoned, and abused.  They come from feral colonies needing to be placed in barns; they come from hoarding situations; sometimes the owners circumstances change, and they can no longer provide for their pet; they also get dropped at our gate.

Below you can see photos from our clinics, the volunteers who built outdoor enclosures for two of our shelter buildings, and the cats are Jake and Otis.

Jake, the first one pictured, was found abandoned and starving in a trailer park.  It took 4 years for him to allow anyone to touch him and after that become a volunteer favorite.  The other cat is Otis, he came to the shelter in 2014 as a one-year-old with his brother after his owner went into the hospital and could no longer care for them.  His brother was adopted but Otis sadly was not.  The problem, although both cats were wonderful and loving animals, they were also very shy and whenever a potential adopter showed up, they would disappear and hide.   But then...success!!!  Both cats were recently adopted by the same person and are now living the dream in their forever home.