Unsung heroes

Everybody has their own personal heroes, people who go largely unsung by the rest of the world. Mine is Newport's Kathy MacPherson, a neighbor & former co-worker at NYYC who, in her non-existant spare time, founded Pawswatch, now the largest volunteer cat rescue organization in the state.

It started like this...

Fifteen years ago, Kathy heard about a large colony of feral cats living out in the wild over at Newport Shipyard on Washington Street. There were dozens of them. They were frightened, hungry, sick & totally on their own - no reliable food source, no medical care, no shelter from the raw New England winters. Some had been born into the wild, while others were strays or had been abandonded. Some had missing limbs, broken bones, feline AIDS, leukemia. Some were covered with open sores. Others were blind or deaf. Most were riddled with parasites. All were living the most miserable existance imaginable. Kathy took it upon herself to feed, trap, spay/neuter, vaccinate & treat as many of those cats as she could, then got to work finding homes for as many of them as possible, mainly by dint of making a total nuisance of herself to anyone who would listen.

Since then Kathy has been responsible for rescuing THOUSANDS of abandoned & feral cats from the wild here in RI. She tames & finds homes for the kittens and more socialized cats, and she spays/neuters & vaccinates the rest before returning them to controlled, volunteer-supervised colonies, where they are fed and monitered on a regular basis. This effort has taken over her life - and in fact, has become her life. What started 15 years ago as a one-woman crusade has morphed into a statewide tax-exempt animal rescue organization, with hundreds of volunteers and chapters all over the state. So - next time you're confronted with an apparently hopeless situation and you think to yourself, "oh, what can I do about it?", do what I do. Think of Kathy MacPherson.