Kitten Season is a very cute but also very taxing time for animal shelters and rescues everywhere. Kittens are born unable to see, hear or regulate their own body temperature, and they are incredibly vulnerable to illness. Yes, caring for newborn kittens is no easy task, but right in the middle of it every season is Elly Conley, this month’s featured foster parent!
Elly often takes on bottle babies and kittens needing intensive medical care, providing them with the care and round-the-clock attention they need to beat the odds on their long journeys home! A friend at the Humane Society of Boulder Valley in Colorado got her into fostering, and she signed up with Seattle Humane shortly after relocating to the Pacific Northwest.
“It’s not an overstatement to say that cats are pretty much my life,” Elly says. “My parents have told me a story of 1-year-old me chasing a neighborhood cat around my house in diapers going, ‘kittle, kittle, kittle’ I think it probably started before that. My past life perhaps?”
As a child, Elly wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up. While she went in another direction for her career, she says fostering vulnerable kittens means she’s always brushing up on veterinary medicine.
“I feel I would have been a good vet, but I have to be the best foster parent I can be instead,” she says.
One of her favorite fosters was a kitten named Mole, who was what some might call a hot mess, and it was the dedicated care she received from Elly that resulted in her surviving and thriving.
“She had trouble staying warm, and, ultimately, she’s the one who taught me that sometimes the issue is hydration,” Elly says. “Once we figured out that she was chronically dehydrated and got her treated with fluids, she bounced back and recovered! By her graduation we were calling her Holy Moley.”
Elly loves seeing the transformation her fosters undergo in her care, followed by their return to Seattle Humane to find their families.
“It’s seeing them go from little grubs to little mini cats who have their own unique personalities and quirks,” she says, “and knowing that their new best friend will adopt them and they will love each other their whole lives the way I did with each of my cats.”
Out of all the cats Elly has fostered, she has exercised great restraint and only adopted three. She admits it can be hard letting go, but that people considering fostering pets shouldn’t let that stop them. “It is hard, but it gets easier, and I think there are few things more rewarding than the grow-a-cat program, wherein you have a continuous kitten subscription,” she says, “and you get to know that your hard work is going out into the world and paying your love forward.”
