Western Illinois Animal Rescue (WIAR) opened a new building late last year in Monmouth. Now it hopes to upgrade the facility with stainless steel kennels for its sick room for dogs and cats.
“We’ve had wooden kennels for our animals. We are in the need of upgrading to stainless steel to cut down on infection rates. Stainless steel is much more sanitary for the animals,” said Glenda Ehlen, who is a volunteer at WIAR, which can be found on the web and on Facebook.
“With the wooden ones, we were seeing the re-occurrence of colds in some of our cats. Some of those cold spores were getting held into the wood. That’s why we have to go to stainless steel. It will help keep down veterinarian costs because then our animals are healthier and they can get adopted quicker.”
WIAR is a no-kill animal rescue and adoption organization. Ehlen said WIAR is run entirely by volunteers, receives its funding through donations, and serves communities throughout western Illinois. She said WIAR worked out of an area of Dan’s Auto Body before moving to its current location at 300 West Harlem.
Ehlen said the dogs and cats that come in to WIAR must spend seven to ten days in the kennels to ensure they are disease-free and won’t spread a health problem to other animals.
Ehlen said the kennels come in banks of 12. WIAR is seeking donations large and small to help pay for the expense. She said the kennels cost $5,500.
She said the group bought one bank this year and would like to add one more. An emergency prompted the organization to buy the first bank with the money it had on hand.
“We recently had a cat hoarding situation here in Monmouth that we had to help with. We recovered 80 cats and kittens,” said Ehlen. “And so we had to go ahead and at least get one bank of 12 ahead of time for that.”
The city said police in mid-July rescued the cats from a home in the 300 block of West Third Avenue.
Ehlen said, “We still have many of those animals here at the rescue.”
She said WIAR typically has around 40 cats and no more than 10 dogs.
