The second thing you should know is that they care for more than 50 of them.
It's not as silly as it sounds. Only 17 of the cats, you see, actually belong to Thorpe and Winter.
TRACS has come a long way since Thorpe and Winter helped to found it just over a year ago - hurried along, in part, by a much-publicized case last year. While organizers were planning their first fundraiser in an effort to get the shelter off the ground, Sanders County authorities called on the fledgling group to rescue 64 dogs that had been discovered living in a sea of their own feces and urine inside trailer houses outside Thompson Falls.
It would have been a lot for any animal shelter to take on.
But this animal shelter didn't even have a shelter for animals yet.
They're making progress on that. TRACS has an office and cattery up and running, and a facility for dogs under construction, on five acres of leased land outside Thompson Falls.
So while the cats they are allergic to have separate quarters now, the dogs they take in - 21 were there last week - are still housed on Thorpe and Winter's property overlooking Steamboat Island on the Clark Fork River outside Thompson Falls.
Those 21 are in addition to Sophey, Scruffy and Petey, the three dogs that belong to Thorpe and Winter.
Let's see - that's one home, 24 dogs and 17 cats ... not a zoo, exactly.
But caring for them - and cleaning up after them - is pretty close to a full-time, seven-day-a-week, job. Who takes on such an endeavor?
Well, people who are allergic to cats, but still own 17 of them.
In 2000, Thorpe and Winter - who were living in Spokane at the time - bought their property on the Clark Fork River as a weekend getaway.
“We loved it so much, and we hated having to drive back to Spokane every week, that we finally thought, ‘Why not just move here?' ” Thorpe says.
She works for a pharmaceutical company, and switching to a regional job - that takes her out of town three days a week, but lets her to work from home the other two - allowed her to make the move.
Winter, however, was involved in factory automation.
“And there's not a lot of that around here,” he admits. So his job became building their new home.
Meantime, Thorpe says, the only organization in Sanders County that could take in unwanted, abused or abandoned pets - “A small group,” she says, “that could care for about four dogs at a time” - announced they were “resigning” from sheltering animals.“Somebody had to do it,” Thorpe says. “I figured it might as well be me.”
She joined forces with her husband and another woman, Erika Jaegers, to establish TRACS. They attained nonprofit status on Dec. 15, 2006, began accepting animals - to be kept in volunteers' homes until they could be adopted out - in January of 2007, and were gearing up for their first fundraiser and dreaming of the day when they'd have an actual place to house animals, when the Sanders County Sheriff's Office called.
To say TRACS was not anywhere near ready to take in 64 dogs is an understatement.
“There was not much notice,” Thorpe says. “We had a day to set up for it, and I was out of town for my job.”
Making matters worse, the dogs - mostly smaller breeds that had been supplied food and water by their owner - were otherwise a mess, caked in their own feces, unaccustomed to humans, and most all of them had not been spayed or neutered, which led to the problem in the first place.
It would be wrong to call the situation a blessing in disguise, but there is no denying publicity surrounding the incident helped the Thompson River Animal Care Shelter get off the ground.
“After the initial news coverage, a lot of people stepped up - people who offered support for the shelter, and people who offered support for the dogs,” Winter says. “We had people coming from as far away as Columbia Falls and the Bitterroot to look at the dogs, and a lot of people from Missoula.”
At that point, Winter says, “Financial support was necessary, but adoption support was very necessary.”
A dozen of the dogs had to be put down because of behavioral or medical reasons. The Humane Society of Western Montana, located in Missoula, helped by taking in 10 of the animals.
The rest came home with Thorpe and Winter.
Meet Petey, an impossible concoction of poodle, schnauzer, dachshund, terrier and who knows what else, who was 5 weeks old when TRACS volunteers rescued him from one of the trailers.
“Of the five puppies in his batch, we thought he was the least adoptable,” Winter says. “He has this black, funky fur. Every day is a bad-hair day for Petey.”
They figured if they were going to ask people to step up to the plate and give these dogs a home, they'd better, too. So Thorpe and Winter adopted Petey.
Every dog taken in from the big rescue has found a new home, save for two.
Scotty is a very adoptable dog. Silkie is not - a terrified little thing who doesn't trust humans and bites unfamiliar people.
“They're best friends, inseparable,” Winter says. “We've chosen to keep them both as shelter animals, kind of our mascots, really, so that they can stay together.”
Petey, meantime, joined 12-year-old Sophey, a cockapoo, and 5-year-old Scruffy, an American Eskimo-Pekingese mix, as the only dogs in the menagerie who live inside Thorpe and Winter's home. They are part of the family, all adopted from shelters, and kept separate from the other animals.
The 17 cats the couple own but are allergic to actually have their own separate house, a two-room affair (one heated) with a large caged outdoor play area containing, evidently, every cat toy known to man. Thorpe and Winter stop in often to say hi, and clean the “cat house” once a day.
“We're not terribly allergic,” Thorpe says. “If we wash our hands after we've been with the cats, we're fine. If we don't and put a finger to an eye, it'll swell up, turn red and itch.”
The sheltered dogs, who are all taken on walks twice a day, are divided among four outdoor kennels - all containing dog houses furnished with straw - and several indoor kennels in the detached garage.
There, last week, you'd find seven adult dogs and two litters of five puppies apiece.
The puppies are Thorpe's favorites and Winter's nemesis. Even though he scrubs down the garage twice a day, there's always a stench when puppies are in the shelter. They poop all over, wade through it, paw and play with each other, and even if the floor is cleaned twice a day, they still manage to get enough of their messes on themselves and each other to keep the odor ever-present.
So not only must the garage be cleaned - so too must the puppies, and bath day is quite the sight. On cold days it's done inside in a bathtub, but on nice days like the one last week it's an outdoor affair.
The little ones scamper out of their kennels and follow Thorpe or volunteer Barb Mendenhall across the driveway until, invariably, one or two or all of them are distracted by virtually anything and wander off to explore.
There's an attempt to get them to “do their business” in the yard before the pups take their turns in the two-tub wash-and-rinse cycle. Some stand quietly and wide-eyed in the water as Winter soaps the crud out of their coats; others do their best to try to escape.
All eventually are freed, scooped up into towels, and taken inside the house to dry off.
Thorpe and Winter look forward to the day this will all be done at TRACS' new home, about a five-minute drive from their house. Not because they mind housing the dogs in their yard and garage, but because the new facility will be so much nicer for the animals.Rangitsch Brothers of Missoula gave TRACS a great deal on an older double-wide trailer that serves as the office and cattery. The $3,000 price tag included not just the trailer, but the cost of hauling it from Missoula and setting it up.
An old single-wide that Winter found in Plains came even cheaper - move it and it's yours, the owner said, and $500 took care of that.
The single-wide is being turned into several indoor kennels; doggy doors will let the inhabitants all escape into their own enclosed area outdoors, and those will open up into a large fenced area where the dogs can run to their hearts' content.
Not yet ready for the dogs, the single-wide came in handy two weeks ago when TRACS got another call.
A woman in the Dixon area who had long taken in stray cats herself had come upon some unfortunate circumstances, and was no longer in a position to care for the 40 cats who called her place home.
Could TRACS help?
The Thompson River Animal Care Shelter took in 27 of them.
Not wanting to mix the 27 new ones with the half-dozen or so already in the cattery and ready for adoption, the newcomers were released into the facility that wasn't ready for dogs, but could certainly house cats.
Now the push is on to find new homes for all the cats. TRACS, an all-volunteer, no-kill facility, took in 289 cats and dogs in its first year of operation and adopted out 252.
The organization does charge for adoptions - $40 for a cat, $60 for two cats, $95 for a dog - to help cover the cost of caring for the animals.
While the dog and cat food comes free - stores such as Wal-Mart and PetSmart in Missoula, and Petco in Kalispell, donate food to TRACS and other animal shelters - there are lots of other costs, such as $17,000 in veterinary bills last year alone (every animal up for adoption comes spayed or neutered, and with all its shots).
“Plus,” Thorpe explains, “if they're willing to put up $95 to get a dog, it's a good sign they're committed to having a pet.”
Thorpe, Winter and the other dozen or so volunteers who make up TRACS, meantime, are just as committed to finding the pets good homes. Somebody had to.
And so they did.
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