Since we launched our free spay/neuter program last spring we’ve often felt like we’re watching water boil. We’ve filled the pot and put it on the stove and are now painfully waiting for the burner to do its job. The burner is inertia -- that momentum that takes so long to build and apparently even longer to stop.
You see, we have the unique position of watching our Santa Fe spay/neuter program ramp up while our Washtenaw County program ramps down. Yes – almost a year after we officially discontinued our TLC spay/neuter programs we’re still getting calls and applications for spay/neuter help from Michigan. Despite the fact that our 2010 application says in bright red letters that you have to live in the Santa Fe area to participate. That’s how strong the desire to get a cat fixed is when you love your cat but live on a limited budget. And, as much as we’d like to help Michigan residents get their cats fixed, we simply can’t. All we can do is refer them to other programs.
So when we posted our spay/neuter invoices today and found we’ve completed 100 surgeries in our new community we exhaled. Half of these surgeries were done in August – twice as many as were done in July and three times as many as in June. That’s how inertia works. In the near term we’ll continue to show steady increases in applications as our program gets better known through word-of-mouth and the area cat organizations and vets start to recognize that our funding is there for the cats that need it most. Our newspaper ads and bulletin board posters will kick in too.
While inertia keeps building in Santa Fe, the opposite is happening in Michigan. So it won’t be too much longer before our Washtenaw County phone requests and applications fade out entirely being replaced by similar -- and fillable -- Santa Fe requests.
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