IN FOCUS: News from Sutton Studios

Issue No. 23

May 2009

SPOTLIGHT

Lola
(click to enlarge)

A hundred pounds of personality

Jan Lindell recently visited Sutton Studios with her two-and-a-half-year-old Pomeranian, Lola. Lola quickly introduced herself to the staff and made herself at home. She may weigh only five pounds, but Lola has a hundred pounds of personality.

When asked what inspired Jan to have Lola's portrait done she explained, "I saw David Sutton's work at Gold Coast Animal Hospital and loved the creativity. I was amazed. He beautifully captured the personality of the dogs in 'the' moment. I really wanted the same experience."

After introductions, Lola, Jan and David moved on to the camera room. Jan reports being pleased to see that "David does not confine the dogs in the studio or expect poses. He allows them to move about freely and become comfortable. It didn't take Lola long to smile for David." Jan said she had a good time, but she thinks Lola had a better time. "Lola loved having her picture taken and turned out to be quite a ham."

When she returned to Sutton Studios for her print ordering consultation, Jan was amazed. "David captured 'the' moment over and over again!"

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REFLECTION & REFRACTION

Animal Rescue: Pilsen's Dynamic Duo (Part 2)

In April's newsletter we met Yvette and Francisco Piña, a Chicago couple with a passion for animals. By the end of my April column we had met four of the couple's six pets. We also learned how an experience with a mangy puppy in San Juan, Puerto Rico, haunted them after their return home.

The memory of their experience in San Juan, of not knowing how to help a stray dog they'd encountered there, spurred Yvette and Francisco to learn more about homeless animals. Initially Yvette and Francisco took part in "armchair activism." They started supporting local rescue organizations like Tree House and PAWS Chicago. They became supporting members of Best Friends Animal Sancturary in Kanab Utah, one of this country's largest and most diverse sanctuaries for homeless pets.

"We were the type of volunteers that would write a check," says Yvette. "We never got our hands dirty. We'd receive the flyers/newsletters from these organizations and read a sad story about an animal and pull out a checkbook...We'd attend events/fundraisers, 'Take your dog to dinner' type events, do the walks...and stuff like that."

"I had become a member of Best Friends, donating money, getting their magazine and reading online," says Yvette. Best Friends' magazine and newsletter stirred their interest in that organization, and led to a decision to take a service vacation there in May of 2006. "Going to Best Friends really had an animal welfare snowball effect on our lives," says Francisco.

Before leaving, Francisco and Yvette promised each other one thing: no more pets. Their condo in Evanston was already over the limit.

"Before we went there he made me hand-shake, kiss on it, no more pets," says Yvette. "So then we get there and they have this 'scam' as I call it, because you get to take a dog overnight to your hotel or your cottage."

Just a sleepover, you see.

The Piñas did opt for canine company while they were at Best Friends, but they wanted to make sure they took "the neediest dog." One of the care-takers, a retired tennis instructor, offered them Dundee Boy, who had not been out on a sleepover in three years.

As they arranged to take Dundee Boy, a more experienced caretaker told them that the dog had actually been banned from sleepovers. "We'd already put in the request, so we ended up talking to the manager of Dogtown about it." They were told Dundee had issues - in particular, food aggression. "We told him we'd done training - at that point Scruffy had earned his CGC (canine good citizen)."

The manager acquiesced, but gave Francisco and Yvette some strict guidelines. They were not to give Dundee any treats or toys. Their activities were limited to walking and brushing the dog.

"So we brought him back to the room and gave him treats and toys and everything and he was great," confesses Yvette. "We ended up taking Dundee every night," says Francisco.

"Let me tell you about Dundee though," Francisco goes on. "He changes our lives really fast. Suddenly Yvette and I are justified to go on these two-, three-hour hikes."

"He'd been in this dog run for six years, and he'd been banned from sleepovers for three years." So they hiked in Bryce Canyon with Dundee, they hiked in the sand dunes. "We took him on field trips everywhere."

Dundee obviously enjoyed the attention. He would wait for them in his dog run while they did their volunteer work. He'd get excited when he saw them pull up in their rental car.

When their week-long service vacation ended, they had to tell Dundee Boy goodbye. Dundee, they knew, would go back to serving time in his dog run. No more sleepovers, no more hikes. "Basically we spoiled the bejeeeezus out of him for a week, and then we gave him back.

"We were both pretty upset."

Francisco, Yvette, Dundee Boy
and Scruffy Doo (click to enlarge)

The parting was hard on Dundee, too. The dejected dog developed stress-related behavior problems. "In the month after we left he was still waiting for us every day." Dundee got into fights with other dogs, he broke a tooth, and he sent another dog to the hospital.

In their hearts, Dundee already belonged to them, but their condo in Evanston had rules, and their household already stretched those rules.

Before their service vacation, the Piñas had talked about buying a house. With images of Dundee Boy back in his dog run, Yvette and Francisco "expedited the process." They also acted quickly to begin the process of adopting the seven-year-old Dundee.

Francisco had taken a job at UIC, so they decided to sell their condo in Evanston and buy a house in nearby Pilsen. "We found this house and five days after we moved here we had them ship Dundee over to us." Their choice of neighborhood would prove fortuitous.

Yvette Started a blog, Dundee Boy Comes Home, through the Best Friends Network, so their friends (and Dundee's fans at Best Friends in Utah) could follow Dundee's new life.

But the Piña's new home had a few surprises in store for them. "The first evening there we looked out the window and there were cats looking back at us. We wondered, 'who are all these cats?'" They quickly discovered that the yard they'd sought for their dogs already had occupants, as did the "empty" house next door.

Yvette searched the internet for answers. She started posting questions on Dundee's Best Friends blog, looking for advice about these cats. Soon, Dundee's blog, like his yard, was completely overrun by feral cats.

Feral tabby in the empty house next door
(click to enlarge)

They'd hear cats meowing/fighting in the yard. When they went outside, the cats all scattered. "We put out food regularly but the cats would always run from us. 'Were these feral cats?' I wondered."

Yvette tells us, "I first learned about feral cats at Best Friends - the very first day we volunteered we were assigned to clean the feral cat area. Frank and I were clueless as to why these cats didn't want to be petted. We had never even heard of feral cats before - much less seen one."

Susan Robinson, the community outreach manager for PAWS Chicago, happened upon Yvette's blog. "I realized she was in the neighborhood," says Susan - PAWS operates the Lurie Spay/Neuter Clinic in Little Village - so she contacted Yvette and invited her to PAWS for an informational chat.

Susan knows a great deal about feral cats - she's in charge of PAWS Chicago's Trap/Neuter/Release (TNR) program.

"Susan told me about TNR, this is October of 2006," says Yvette. TNR's a simple concept. "You use humane traps, with tuna or cat food as bait, to trap feral cats. You take the cats to PAWS Spay/Neuter clinic in Pilsen. They neuter the cat, examine it and vaccinate it. The whole thing costs $20."

You retrieve the cat and, 48 hours after the surgery, you return the cat to the same spot where you picked it up. To help with identification, the vets clip the tip off each fixed cat's left ear so they don't get picked up a second time.

The idea is to stabilize the population of feral cats, to prevent them from multiplying but to allow them to live out their lives outside in relative health.

Yvette was hesitant at first. "I had the traps for a month and read all about it and I was looking on Alley Cat Allies, this national organization, reading all about it, trying to make sure I knew what I was doing.

"It took me a month to do the first cat, and I did - it ended up he was the neighbor's cat!" Yvette laughs, "He wasn't a feral!"

It may have taken Yvette a month to do the first cat, but once they started doing TNR, the Piñas found their groove. They began by trapping the cats that came into their yard. Twenty cats, thirty cats. When that subsided, they focused on another area. Later, when road construction forced Yvette to change her route to work she discovered another cat colony in a vacant lot. She and Francisco TNR-ed all of those cats, too.

Soon she was doing all the cats in a three-block area. Then that area expanded. They next discovered what they refer to as "Tamale Alley" - an alley popular with feral cats because of the abundance of leftover food in the dumpsters and trash cans.

Less than three years after first learning about feral cats and TNR, Yvette has become an animal welfare force to be reckoned with. Both Piñas have moved well out of the armchair and into the animal welfare trenches. Their hands not only get dirty, but also bitten, scratched and scarred. As of mid-March 2009, they had trapped, neutered and returned 213 cats through the PAWS clinic alone.

In November of 2007, Yvette became a registered colony caretaker for her entire zip code, with PAWS Chicago as her sponsoring organization. Colony Caretakers agree to spay/neuter the cats they're feeding, look after their health, find homes for "friendlies" (socialized cats) and rescue (and if possible find homes for) kittens.

Yvette making the rounds
(click to enlarge)

"Yvette is a superhuman in terms of the time she invests in this," says PAWS' Susan Robinson. "She's an amazing marketer and very skilled at placing cats.

"She does two workshops a month for PAWS. She helps us with Spanish-speaking clients, and she comes in and talks at PAWS presentations on TNR."

In addition, Yvette has also appeared on several Cable and network TV shows - "She's so well informed and so enthusiastic", says Robinson - and articles about the Piñas have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Time Out Chicago, among other publications.

Estimates place the number of feral cats in Chicago at between 300,000 and a half-million. Of all these cats, and of the hundreds of cats Yvette and Francisco have met and worked with personally, one in particular made it as a permanent resident of the Piña's house in Pilsen.

The story of their newest family member, pet number six, for those keeping count, starts in January 2007 with a feral cat they trapped and nicknamed Pedro.

While Pedro was recovering from his neutering in a humane trap on the Piña's porch, another cat kept trying to rescue him, howling to his friend, scratching at the door, scent-marking around the entryway. His devoted friendship earned him the name Amigo. It also earned him a place in Yvette's heart. "Amigo was CRAZY feral," says Yvette. "But I fell in love with him when he was trying to rescue Pedro." Over the course of nine months Francisco and Yvette managed to tame Amigo's wild heart. "We have enough scars from Amigo from when we were trying to socialize him, we deserved to keep him."

What made this one cat special? "He was so feral and he let me in, he trusted me. He melted my heart - I felt so honored.

"I don't think there are enough services for animals." Says Yvette. "There are services for people. Animals can't speak up for themselves. For some of us it's a gift that we're so empathetic toward them and we want to help them and so we should."

She plans to keep at it. "We hope Chicago can become a no-kill city.

"We hope more people will spay/neuter their pets, and not let their cats roam free - hence decreasing the numbers of feral cats and stray cats/dogs on the streets.

"We also hope to go back to Puerto Rico again one day and bring back a sato or two (sato = stray dog). Now that we know so much and actually have contacts in Puerto Rico, we think we can pull it off."

(If you'd like to know more about TNR, please contact Susan Robinson at PAWS Chicago)

David Sutton
Write to David

COMMUNITY FOCUS

Flower Exhibition
Welcome spring at the Avram Eisen Gallery's 3rd Annual May Flower Exhibition. The exhibition features work by many of Chicago's finest artists, including selections from David Sutton's Blossoms in Decline series. Here's a glimpse of the exhibiting artists and an introduction to the Avram Eisen Gallery. The May Flower Exhibition will be on display throughout the month of May. Avram Eisen Gallery, 5202-04 N. Damen Avenue, Chicago. 773-271-3008

Sponsor Dog Days 2010!
Sutton Studios is looking for sponsors for the 2010 Dog Days Calendar. We need your help! Sutton Studios will provide ten thousand Dog Days Calendars at no cost to animal welfare organizations, humane societies and animal shelters, who sell them to raise money for their tireless work. In this economy even more pets are at risk, as the number of homeless animals rises and charitable donations fall. Every one of your sponsorship dollars will generate roughly ten dollars for shelter and agency support.

Sponsor a month in the 2010 Dog Days Calendar for $675 (or co-sponsor with someone else for $350) and you will have space to promote your business, offer a personal message or show support for your favorite animal shelter. Call 847-679-8090 with any questions. We appreciate your help!