• Introduction
• Adoption Figures
• Individual Donations
• Finances
• News Update
  • Farewell from Director Cat Brandellr
  • Emily Osann Named New SCAA Director and Flora Clyde, Administrative Director
  • SCAA Position on China Dog Culling
• Project Updates
  • Ad Nausea Baoshan
  • Mr. Wong 100+ Cat Project
  • New Pet Hotels to be Visited
• Upcoming Fundraising Events
  • Bachelor Auction, 10 September
  • Senses Wine Lounge Dog Day, 17 September
  • Cat & Dog Gala Ball, Oct. or Nov.
  • Christmas Party, Dec.
• Upcoming SCAA Community Events
  • 26 August: Garden Book Store Flea Market
  • 27 August: O’Malley’s Flea Market/Adoption Day
• Media/Website News
  • Thanks to Marianne Kaulima for Brochure and Calendar Design
  • Monthly Video Clip Award
• Products
  • Buy a SCAA T-shirt, please!
  • 2007 Calendar Published by End August!
• Animal Thought for the Month

Introduction:

Despite the sweltering weather, we had a fantastic turnout at our 15 August meeting with 63 people!! It was a wonderful send off for our beloved director Cat Brandell and her equally dedicated husband Jack, who will be returning home at the end of August. If you still have time to say farewell, Cat and Jack will be at their final adoption day on 20 August at O’Malley’s. Cat will continue on as our U.S. Director as well as remaining my most objective editor and SCAA adviser. At the same time, we also welcome kitten foster mother extraordinaire Emily Osann as our new SCAA Director and long-time member Flora Clyde as Administrative Director!

Profuse thanks to Matthew Ryan, owner of Senses Wine Lounge, for donating all entrance fees during last weeks’ 7 nights of freebee’s. Every night Matt offered various libations for free if people donated anywhere from 1 RMB upwards when they entered the restaurant. In total, RMB 9,640 was raised! We remain grateful to Matt and now look forward to our next great party and fundraiser at Sense’s Dog Day on 17 September. Our last one in May was extremely successful with over 40 our member’s own pets, adopted pets and fostered dogs hanging out with us as we all brunched! On the 17th, we will also include a full adoption day, including cats which we will house in a separate indoor section of the restaurant. Please do join us, especially as Matt will be donating 10% of the day’s F&B to SCAA!

We are all getting very excited about our upcoming Bachelor Party at Pier One, Monsoon on 10 September, 7-10pm! Several of the bachelors came along to our 15 August meeting for an interview with City Weekend’s Courtney Woo (who has been so generous writing about SCAA for well over a year now!). Let’s just say that the sampling looks very good, indeed! Even if you are not out looking for a single hunk (and even then, it’s dinner folks, not marriage!), come along and enjoy the party. We are also auctioning off two or three “used goods” just for intellectual and eye candy purposes plus a fantastic meal (top secret!); this includes our very own Doctor James Holder, so ladies, save up your fen!

In other respects, August has been a relatively quiet month in terms of events, and as expected a frustrating and tiring month in terms of the overwhelming numbers of kittens literally thrown our way. Our challenges are exacerbated by our foster parents that have returned to their various home countries for the summer. If any of you can foster, even for a few days, let us know…it’s the same people who take in animal after animal and we are EXHAUSTED!!!

Hopefully, with September soon upon us, many of you will be back, so please offer to foster and volunteer, and be sure to join us for our autumn kick-off meeting on 12 September!! Let’s make it a huge and joyful meeting. Additionally, I’m thrilled that we will have a speaker from the Seattle-based Snow Leopard Trust speak to us about their projects to save the highly endangered Snow Leopard….as many of you know, I support this amazing group through sales of their beautiful charity products that make great gifts. Please keep this in mind as the holidays roll around, and check out their website prior to our meeting in case you have any questions or would like to get more involved (but SCAA comes first, of course!!).

Looking forward to seeing you all at our 12 September meeting after our gala bachelor auction!!!

With warmest regards,

Carol Wolfson
Founder/Executive Director, SCAA

• Senses Wine Lounge: RMB 9,640
• Jan Burns: RMB 300

• None this month

New Sponsors

• Hair Solutions is now donating a monthly raffle gift! (www.hairsolution.com.cn)

Finances

Incoming: RMB 32,626
Expenses: RMB 23,300 including:
Baoshan food donation: RMB 6,000
PAW check-ups RMB 9,800+
July website and maintenance fee 7,500

• A Farewell Message from Director Cat Brandell:
  I had been living in Shanghai for a year in a role I was not accustomed to. I was finally someone’s wife (having finally gotten married at the ripe age of 49 only 9 months before); and also being unemployed. I must admit, it was fun at first - especially being able to leisurely hang out at an apartment where I could watch movies on DVDs that weren’t even out on HBO or Cinemax in the States yet, along with having an ayi come twice a week to clean the apartment. I even got to spend more time with my two longhaired dachshunds that Jack and I had brought with us from home; but after a while, being a tai tai really got pretty old.
  
  I recall the day as if it were only yesterday – Tuesday, September 6, 2005. I was reading the business section of the Shanghai Daily looking for something to do besides pretend I was a princess and that’s when I saw it - the ad for SCAA. It was if my prayers had been answered. So I immediately emailed Carol Wolfson and asked her where was the shelter and what could I do. Well, for any of you who have ever emailed that question to Carol, you probably got the same response I did….and it was paragraphs long…we DO NOT have a shelter…blah, blah, blah. So, when I finally got to the end of her lengthy email I responded back – please put me to work…I’ll do anything.
  
  ….And that’s how it all began.
  
  It started with an email on a Tuesday and by Thursday I was riding in the car with her to the Baoshan shelter to clean cat ears (yeah, exactly what I had in mind!) On the way I learned about SCAA and how it got started; on the way home I found out all the ways I could help. You see, somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday I told Carol that I was great with organization – she said she was too overwhelmed with operations to concentrate on the desperately needed administrative work – then she handed me a folder. And once I saw what she had, truly she had not lied. It was a folder full of scraps of paper with volunteer and foster parent names, adoption information…you name it. So I told her I would take it and put everything into a format onto the computer that was more user-friendly (and that wasn’t too hard after what she showed me) so that information could be shared. My God! What had I gotten myself into? It was a hair-raising and hair-splitting experience but once done I felt I had truly accomplished a miracle…and also found that free-time was a thing of the past.
  
  Sunday was my first trip to Baoshan and by the following Sunday I was already a Group Leader. For those of you who know Carol – she wastes no time getting things done and I was her newest task. I was now handling volunteers and foster parents and SCAA was growing and growing. By November the position of Director was created and again I was promoted. (Ah! How I wish I could have risen up the corporate ladder in my former life as fast.) So I took this opportunity to appoint another ambitious person whom I had met while walking my dogs to handle the foster parent side of things. The funny part was that Mary Sewell had seen an ad just as I had and I received the ever-so-famous Carol email “would you mind handling this?” So I wrote Mary about the organization, she wrote back, I asked for her phone information, she gave it to me and it turned out we lived just three buildings away from each other in an apartment complex in Pudong. She put two and two together and she asked me if I was the lady with the dachshunds she had met a couple of months before. It was obviously fate. And SCAA grew and grew.
  
  It’s now almost one year later and I look at what SCAA has become and I am so proud to be a part of such a wonderful organization. I have met so many fantastic people; all of us with the same beliefs – that animals truly deserve to be healthy, safe and most of all loved. I have made friends who I know will last for a lifetime, no matter how far away we are. I have worked aside extremely hardworking women whom I truly admire – Lee-Anne Armstrong, Jaycee Koo, Mary Sewell, Emily Osann and especially Carol Wolfson who gave meaning to my life in Shanghai. I can’t thank enough the steadfast volunteers and foster parents who said they wanted to make a difference and have…SCAA is all about you because without you we do not exist. And we are so lucky to have Dr. Sandra Pross and that gruff old (okay, young) Dr. James Holder who have provided us with their medical knowledge and discounted fees that allows us the opportunity to help one more and one more and one more animal. And to my husband Jack, who NEVER missed a trip to Baoshan or an Adoption Day (well, one adoption day because he felt staying close to the bathroom was more important at the time). Not once did I ever ask Jack to accompany me on these occasions; he did so because he loves what this group stands for as much as I do. I get a lot of the credit for my support of SCAA but he deserves it as much as I do.
  
  As Jack and I say farewell to Shanghai and SCAA, I can only hope that each of you continues to do your part to help this wonderful organization grow. As our ads say: Volunteer. Foster. Adopt. Donate. And these are truly words to live by!
  
  Cat Brandell
  
  
  
• Emily Osann Named New SCAA Director and Flora Clyde, Administrative Director
  We are thrilled to announce that our ever-dedicated kitten foster parent, Emily Osann, has agreed to become SCAA’s new Director. Emily, along with her husband Seth and two girls, Leah and Ava, have been committed volunteers since the first day they went to Baoshan and started fostering kittens…not one at a time, but several. It is this kind of dedication, operational skills and round-the-clock love of animals that made us quickly realize how special Emily and her family are; we are honored that they wish to become even MORE actively involved!
  
  Flora Clyde has been a supporter and SCAA volunteer since the early days, usually quiet but always active and focused. When we called out for someone to take over Cat Brandell’s administrative duties, she stepped right up to the plate! Thank you Flora…boy, do we need you!
  
  If anyone else would like to assist Emily, Flora, or our foster care director Lee-Anne Armstrong, or dog foster care director Jaycee Koo, please let us know at director@scaashanghai.org
  
  
• SCAA Position on China Dog Culling
  After the recent dog culling atrocities in Yunan and Jining provinces, we have received hundreds of emails, sms’s and phone calls asking what SCAA is doing about the culling situation and often “Why aren’t you doing more?” Other than wanting to sarcastically reply that it’s not quite so simple to get on a plane to the opposite end of China and aggressively confront the police, in reaction to these well-meaning but over-simplified inquiries led us to write an article about our position on the bigger picture of culling animals in China due to rabies , and our similar policies regarding other animal welfare and protection issues in our FAQ#3
  
  

• Ad Nausea Baoshan: Although we have terminated the project with Baoshan, we have spoken with the management again recently as we wanted to deliver the RMB 6,000 we had promised earlier to pay for dog/cat food. In return, we asked to take two final animals out of Baoshan that SCAA directors were particularly fond of: Jack the Poodle and Midnight the cat. Jack is a yappy little gray poodle but full of love and directors Jaycee Koo and Cat Brandell could not bear the thought of him remaining behind. Midnight was a pure black female cat with a strong but very gentle character. Founder Carol Wolfson always saw that she could fend for herself and chose to help over one hundred others before Midnight…but when the project was terminated, Carol couldn’t stand the thought of this gentle girl spending the rest of her life under the stress of continually growing number of cats being dumped at Baoshan. Both animals were recently taken out. Jack is in foster care. Unfortunately, although spending her last week being loved by foster care director Lee-Anne Armstrong, Midnight was diagnosed as having very serious viruses that were only likely to become more and more serious. She was soon after euthanized but at least we can take comfort that she did not die alone at Baoshan.
  
  We have heard that there are now so many dogs at Baoshan that some are being left out to fend for themselves, including Sunny, a dog that SCAA driver Xiao Zhao saved when he went to pick up Jack because the dog was being left outside the factory area to survive on its own and had lost half its body weight since we saw him three weeks earlier. The driver also counted nearly 60 cats (up from 27 one month before), so we can only predict that Baoshan will simply become yet another hoarder situation with hundreds of animals cramped into unsustainable living conditions. We hope this is not so.
  
  
• Mr Wong 100+ Cats Project: Due to scheduling conflicts Dr. James Holder and founder Carol Wolfson will now visit this project on 30 August.
  
  
• New Pet Hotels to be Visited: James and Carol will also be visiting two pet hotels on 30 August which we hope will be suitable to recommend to our members and those asking SCAA about proper boarding facilities in Shanghai.

• Bachelor Auction, 10 September: This promises to be an exciting, wild party at Pier One, Monsoon, 7-10pm. For RMB 300 presales (RMB 350 at the door), you’ll receive a delicious walking dinner and two drinks, plus the chance to bid (or watch the fun!) on 20-30 eligible bachelors (thanks guys: you are great sports!). Solid Vodka is sponsoring free vodka all night as well…do come along and support SCAA in what should be a fantastic night! For more information, call Carol Wolfson 13817811443 or email: director@scaashanghai.org
  
  See The Poster Here
  
  
• Senses Wine Lounge Dog Day, 17 September: This will be our second Dog Day at Senses Wine Lounge. The last one in May was extremely successful with over 40 of our member’s own pets, adopted pets and fostered dogs hanging out with us as we all brunched! On the 17th, we will also include a full adoption day, including cats which we will house in a separate indoor section of the restaurant. Please do join us, especially as Matt will be donating 10% of the day’s F&B to SCAA!
  
  
  
• Cat & Dog Gala Ball, October or November: We are now working on the planning for a huge gala bash in October or November with a dog/cat theme…we’ll need plenty of volunteers, so stay tuned!
  
  
• Pre-Holiday Party, December: Our amazing Pre-Holiday party will be on 12 December at Zapatas. We are working on a new menu for this special event, as well as over 100 fantastic raffle prizes. If you can provide any prizes or go after sponsors/vendors, please let us know at director@scaashanghai.org
  

• 26 August: Garden Book Store Flea Market:
  SCAA is now a featured participant to this festive event with our adoption day! On every last Saturday of the month from 2-5pm, tables will be sold for RMB 100 and you can sell anything you want! We are happy to recommend our SCAA members to buy tables, and the management of the event is donating one table free to SCAA! Come and join the fun!
  
  
  
  www.ShanghaiFleaMarket.com
  
• 27 August: O’Malley’s Flea Market/Adoption Day: This is a new community event in Shanghai, also organized by Garden Bookstore but even larger! Vendors and entertainment of all types will be at O’Malley’s from 9-12am every last Sunday of the month. SCAA will have a table at this event but will only start its adoption day at the regular time of 12-3pm! Come and join this great fun! If you would like to book a table, please contact Marianne Kaulima at mcreatives@gmail.com .

• Thanks to Marianne Kaulima for Brochure and Calendar Design: Our deepest and ongoing thanks to Marianne Kaulima, graphic designer and Garden Bookstore Maven for designing SCAA’s new brochure, calendar, business cards and for organizing the upcoming Bachelor’s Auction! This despite a very heavy work schedule of her own. We are absolutely indebted to you Marianne: thank you!
  
• Monthly Video Clip Award: This month, the hands-down (or rather Ipod-on) winner is Susie Klein for the “Ipod Cats” shots she sent in. Many people sent this to us, but Susie was the first and will be receiving a gift of Hair Solution products valued at RMB 360! Please see the links below for the video and photographs, and be sure to send in your own clips for next month’s meeting to director@scaashanghai.org . We are also including a fantastic “monitor cleaning” piece from our HK member Emy Kwok!
  
  iPOD Cats and Screen Cleaner!
  

• Buy a SCAA T-shirt, please!
  All SCAA members PROMISED to buy at least one t-shirt. Admittedly, it’s a bit hot to be wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but think about the fact that winter is coming soon, and SCAA needs the funds!! Pet me, love me, take a t-shirt home!
• 2007 Calendar Published by End of August!
  The SCAA 2007 calendar will be printed by the end of August. Be sure to think of venues we can sell the calendar at, including school projects, coffee mornings, etc. Remember to take some for your next event (no payment needed in advance).