If you grew up a fan of comic books, you remember the Bat Signal.
In the mythical Batman universe, whenever Gotham City was under attack, the police would fill the night sky with a giant, bat-shaped searchlight to let Batman know his help was needed. And every time — day or night, rain or shine — he’d answer the call.
While Gail Adams-Ventzke doesn’t wear a cape or fight crime, for cat-lovers throughout the Red River Valley, she’s every bit the superhero.
“All the vets know that my phone is on 24/7, and they use it!” says Adams-Ventzke, who’s served as the executive director of Cat’s Cradle since the nonprofit’s founding in 2011.
Cat’s Cradle is a no-kill rescue shelter based in Fargo, and for the past 15 years, Adams-Ventzke and her small but mighty team have been giving area cats a second chance.
What started as an independent hobby rescue in the early 2010s became something much bigger following a trip to the Moorhead, Minnesota, pound with her friend and fellow Cat’s Cradle cofounder, Carol Stefonek.
“We were there to pick up a cat, and when we handed our crate over, the gal that was running the pound came back and I could tell she’d been crying,” recalls Adams-Ventzke. “Immediately, I thought maybe she’d been bitten, so I asked if she was okay.”
Her response would change the trajectory of Adams-Ventzke’s life.
“She said, ‘Yes. You just don’t understand how much it means to have you guys taking these animals because, for the past seven years, the last task of my job every day is to euthanize animals that are treatable,’” Adams-Ventzke continues. “And so Carol and I vowed to her that day: You’re not ever going to have to do that again.”
It’s a promise they’ve kept, as Cat’s Cradle has worked tirelessly for the past decade and a half to bring the annual feline euthanasia rate in the Fargo metro from about 700 each year down to zero.
“Cats used to be euthanized for just having a sniffly nose or an eye infection,” she explains. “They were automatically deemed unadoptable because they required medical treatment. We knew that the healthy, cute, adoptable ones would get picked by other rescues. And so ever since we started, we’ve taken the ones that have medical (or behavioral) issues. And that’s become part of our reputation is that we focus on the really hard cases.”
It was a natural fit for Adams-Ventzke, who says she’s always gravitated toward the underdog.
“My mother says I was always bringing strays home as a child,” says Adams-Ventzke, who worked as a stockbroker and a stay-at-home mom prior to her second career as a shelter director. “But it wasn’t just stray animals I brought home. It was people, too.
“In school, I remember this one girl who was getting picked on by all the other kids. One kid took her by the back of the head and put her head down in her tray at lunch. And when she got up and walked out, she was crying, and I ran into the bathroom after her. From that point on, she was my best friend. I protected her. And it’s kind of the same thing with animals.”
While traditional rescue shelters house a variety of species, the decision for Cat’s Cradle to focus on cats was intentional, Adams-Ventzke explains.
“We’re the only brick-and-mortar, cat-only rescue in the area,” she says. “When we looked at the data from local pounds, it was clear that cats were at much higher risk.
“If 1,000 dogs and 1,000 cats enter the local pounds in a year, a large percentage of dogs will be reclaimed by their owners or transferred to rescue. For cats, only about 30 percent are reclaimed or rescued, while roughly 70 percent were euthanized, historically. It became clear that cats needed a dedicated voice, and that’s what Cat’s Cradle was created to be.”
While they’ve cared for up to 225 at once, the Downtown Fargo shelter typically houses about 40-50 cats and kittens at a given time. Every cat that arrives receives comprehensive medical care, including deworming, vaccinations, FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus) and FeLV (feline leukemia virus), and spay or neuter surgery. If a cat requires additional care such as dental work, amputation, eye surgery, or treatment for illness, Cat’s Cradle ensures that those needs are met and paid for before adoption.
In some cases, they’re a cat’s last hope, as was the case in March 2012 when — just a few months after opening their doors — a cat named Corky found his way through their doors.
Corky had a condition called bilateral arthrogryposis of the tarsus, and in a world before CATS Cradle, he wouldn’t have made it.
“Basically, he had no mobility at all,” Adams-Ventzke explains. “His legs could not bend or move. The joints were just fused together, and there was no way for him to walk. I called every vet in town and in the surrounding area, and nobody would touch this cat with a 10-foot pole. They all said: ‘There’s nothing we can do for this cat.’”
As fate would have it, one of the vet techs at Dr. Dan Burchill’s clinic in Casselton came across Corky’s story on CATS Cradle’s Facebook page, and after learning more about the case, Dr. Burchill offered to help.
“After consulting with a vet in Europe, (Dr. Burchill) fashioned a surgery,” Adams-Ventzke recalls. “And what he did was disconnected his legs, turned them around, and reconnected everything. For 28 days (after the surgery), we went out to Casselton every day to make sure Corky was okay and to take him outside and do therapy with him.”
But that wasn’t the end of the story.
Corky became something of a viral sensation, racking up tens of thousands of social media followers and raising $20,000 in just 24 hours on Facebook. He won a contest to grace the inaugural issue of Modern Cat magazine, was featured in two episodes of an Australian soap opera, and was included in a deck of cards for internet-sensation cats.
“He put us on the map,” says Adams-Ventzke.
More importantly, it showed her the power that social media had to tell the stories of the shelter cats and reach people across the country.
“There’s a gal in Colorado who’s adopted several (cats) from us, and she always goes for the special-needs ones,” Adams-Ventzke says. “If I need someone, she’s my go-to. And I deliver them to her (on my own dime). We’ve done it three times for her.
“Then there’s a lady down in North Carolina who had an FIV colony in her house, and she just rescued FIV cats. Probably because of Corky, she got on our page and started seeing all the other things we would post. She reached out and said, ‘Hey, I think I can take these two.’ That one took me about three weeks to arrange transport for because part of it was done through what they call the ‘underground kitty railroad,’ where one person will take a cat, drive it 45 minutes to an hour to the next town, and then hand them off to the next person.”
Then there was the hoard rescue in North Fargo.
“I got a phone call from a lady who said they were tearing down a house, and there were like 30 cats there,” Adams-Ventzke says. “She said there were bulldozers out there and ready to go, so ‘call your people.’ I called my connections in media, told them to meet us at the house, and we went there and got them to stop the demo. They ended up giving us three days to get the trapped cats out of there.”
All of this work takes money, of course, and that’s why an event like Giving Hearts Day is so essential to a small, understaffed organization like CATS Cradle.
“If it weren’t for Giving Hearts Day, I don’t know how we would do it,” says Adams-Ventzke, who estimates that about 40-45 percent of CATS Cradle’s medical budget is funded through GHD donations. “We rely heavily on Giving Hearts Day.”
Despite steady growth for CATS Cradle since its first GHD in 2016, Adams-Ventzke says she still struggles with the same thing that a lot of nonprofit development people do.
“It’s probably the most uncomfortable thing for me to do is have to ask somebody for money. So I try to build those relationships on a personal level first, and then once you become comfortable with someone, they’ll say, ‘Hey, how’s your fundraising going?’ ‘Well, to be honest, we’re kind of struggling right now.’ And boom, here comes a check.
“My whole thing has always been: I’m going to tell the story, and then let people do what they’re going to do. I’m going to say: This is what we need. And if you can’t donate, then you can still help share our story. That’s what I do. I leave it up to them. And all they have to do is look at our history and see what we’ve done and see that it’s always a ‘the cat comes first’ mindset.”
About CATS Cradle Shelter
CATS Cradle’s mission is to create a more humane and compassionate world one cat at a time. Opening its doors in January 2012, CATS Cradle Shelter relies entirely on donations to rescue and provide for the abandoned cats and kittens that come into its care.
