Bob Gould has been rescuing stray cats in Saint John for over a decade. (Facebook)
A Saint John man has raised almost $18,000 for a cat rescue group.
Bob Gould says over the past couple of years he’s been raising money for Rescue Meow solely by collecting bottles and cans.
Gould says the money helps pay for costly vet bills for strays and injured cats, including spays and neuter surgeries.
“It covers all the vetting bills of the strays and injured cats and stuff like that. It’s really helped to keep the vet bills down,” he said.
Gould says the stray cat population in Saint John is at an all-time high, largely due to negligent owners.
“The cruelty, and the people that move and leave their cats in the apartment, we’ve run into that an awful lot, or just letting them go out without being neutered, of course, they end up pregnant,” he said.
Gould says Rescue Meow is entirely volunteer-driven and needs all the help they can get.
“They’re a very, very small group. There’s only Trich Collins who runs it and four or five more (volunteers),” he said.
All of Rescue Meow’s cats are vetted, and their $160 adoption fee covers shots, spays and neuters. They also have a foster program that is always in need of more volunteers.
“That’s the good part, the people coming together and rallying with the bottles to give our group a hand,” Gould said.
Life-long Cat Person
Gould admits he’s always been a cat person and has 11 or 12 of his own. He started rescuing cats around 17 years ago and has been hooked ever since.
“We were going by one day on Waterloo (Street) and there were kittens trying to get into a garbage bin, and I went and bought them some food,” he said.
Gould lives out near the racetrack in east Saint John. He started to see stray cats get hit by cars, and was driven to help them too.
Over the years, he’s become an expert trapper, and his love for cats has only grown exponentially.
He shares a story of a recent cat he trapped on Cedar Street whose owner had died and was living on the streets.
“They could never catch it. I went down, and had it caught in minutes,” he said.
Gould says he got involved with Rescue Meow around four years ago and started raising funds however he could.
In the summer, Gould says they had raised $12,000 through their bottle collecting efforts. Now, just half a year later, they’ve raised $6,000 more, bringing their total up to just under $18,000.
He expects that number to just continue growing.
“It’s funny, as we’re talking my car is full of bottles to take to the depot in the morning,” he joked.
If you have bottles or cans you’d like to donate to the cause, Gould says you can shoot him a message on Facebook and he’ll come pick them up.
He says people can also drop their bottles and cans off at his house.
