Certainly, if you’ve been at all involved in animal rescue, you’ve heard and seen more bad than good. I’ve rescued and fostered since the mid-1980s and for all the cats I’ve taken in, and all the cats friends and associates have taken in, and shelters and private organizations, there are still too many more cats who need our help.

I first composed Great Rescues just before I began learning and practicing TNR, and just before I learned the behaviors that form cats’ decisions about their everyday lives and using that to trap and assess cats and foster and socialize dozens of litters of feral kittens who’d never had any experience with humans in their lives.

Sometimes we focus on the cats we can’t save, on bad things people do, and on what is wrong with the system. But creating portraits saved me from becoming jaded and surrendering under the weight of it all. Most of my portraits have been of rescued cats and dogs, commissioned by people who love them passionately and did and still do go out of their way to capture, house, heal, and love as many animals as they can. And as I learned more about feline behavior, and as more people joined in rescue, I learned more and more stories and my faith in people was sustained.

Take a little time to focus on what is right and what is good, on the things that make tears well in our eyes at the simple joy of a happy ending. Great Rescues features, in addition to my little Fawn, 15 commissioned portraits of cats along with the stories of their rescues which is as much about the people who did the good work as it is about the cats who ended up in loving forever homes. If the humans had not given their hearts I would never have met them or their cats, never would have heard the stories that held my faith in the love of humans for animals, and never had the pleasure of spending hours with their images, creating a lasting work.

And finally, I would never had the pleasure of sharing their images and stories with you.

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Great Rescues Calendar and Great Rescues Day Book are published by Beauty of a Moment Publishing

Site designed by Bernadette E. Kazmarski

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