Car service turns into animal haven, helps sterilize feral #cats

By Rebecca Harshbarger

February 25, 2015 

A cat at the facility.Photo: Ferals in Peril

A Brooklyn car service owner is using her spare space to help control the pet population — with on-site vets that have spayed and neutered thousands of cats.

Big Apple Car in Bath Beach, which dispatches 225 luxury car drivers to jobs around the city, has a surgery room on its first floor where the doctors sterilize kitties for free on Sundays and Mondays.
The operation would normally run several hundred dollars at a veterinarian. The vets are paid by the nonprofit The Toby project.

The base also has about 20 frisky cats up for adoption in a sanctuary created in its basement by the nonprofit Ferals in Peril.
The group rescues the cats largely in the Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, and Bay Ridge sections of Brooklyn.
It doesn’t run an animal shelter, but uses the car base space as a temporary home for kitties that are neutered or spayed while it finds homes for them.

Big Apple Car’s president Diana Clemente adores cats and offered the animal rescue group the space to spay and neuter cats in 2011, as well as to provide sanctuary for them.
The animal lover began working in the black car industry as a teenager, working first as a telephone operator when she was sixteen.

She is a volunteer with the Hampton’s Animal Rescue Fund.
“I go down there on my break and play with them,” said Big Apple manager Marie Franc.
“It is unusual, but I think of it like this– anyone who can help an animal should have a special place in Heaven.”
Since the car service turned into an animal haven, over 9,000 cats have been spayed and neutered at the base.

Some of their staff have fallen in love with the cats and adopted them as well.
“I commend Ms. Clemente for her compassionate work on this very necessary cause,” said Nora Constance Marino, who serves on the TLC’s board of commissioners. “As a longtime animal rights advocate, and a former volunteer in the City’s animal shelter, I’ve seen firsthand the unnecessary euthanasia of cats. We need more in our communities to do what Ms. Clemente so selflessly is doing.”

The head of the TLC also gave the base accolades.
“Our licensees are an integral part of the communities they serve,” said Commissioner Meera Joshi. “And Big Apple’s commitment to this compassionate work really shows the depth of their caring and professionalism.”

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