The theme for this year’s University Press Week is “Celebrate Community,” which is meant to include not only academic or campus communities, but also communities of readers across North America, to the very geographically-based communities in which university presses are based.
With that in mind, we’ve decided to spotlight the community involvement of UPM project editor Valerie Jones. Below read about her extensive volunteer work as a spay/neuter advocate in the Jackson community.
Find more great staff spotlight reads today from our partner presses: Seminary Co-Op Bookstores, Wayne State University Press, University of Washington Press, University of Wisconsin Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, University of Chicago Press, and Purdue University Press,
Editing books is my day job, but most weeks I also moonlight
as a cat trapper, aka a TNR practitioner. Trap-neuter-return involves catching
feral/community cats, transporting them to a spay/neuter clinic, keeping them
for recovery after surgery, and then returning them to their original colony (or
socializing and adopting them out in the case of young kittens).
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| Valerie Jones |
I embarked upon this second vocation reluctantly, as I dislike
creating stress for any animal, and feral cats are more than a little grumpy
when they realize they are confined to a trap. But by reminding myself that spay
and neuter is crucial for feline welfare, both to reduce the overpopulation of
street cats in general and to improve the lives of individual cats (and, not
insignificantly, the lives of their caretakers), I overcame my qualms and threw
myself into developing my trapping techniques.
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| Dolly |
My mission is to see as many Jackson-area cats as possible get
fixed, and I estimate that over the past eight or nine years I’ve helped with
the trap-neuter-return of close to a thousand cats, preventing countless
litters.
The Big Fix Clinic, operated by the nonprofit Mississippi Spay and Neuter, is an essential partner in this work, and I am sincerely grateful
for their excellent services. I support them by volunteering at outreach events
to help educate the community about the importance of spay/neuter for cats and
dogs. Mississippi, like many other states, has disturbingly high kill rates in
animal shelters due to cat and dog overpopulation, and the Big Fix Clinic
addresses this by providing affordable surgery.
Similar to when working with authors and their manuscripts,
I call upon a combination of patience, precision, a helpful spirit, an eagle
eye, and a “cat whisperer” intuition to communicate with a distinctive,
sometimes temperamental, breed, so that the process goes as smoothly as
possible. Well, that may be stretching the comparison, but only a little!
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| Tiger |
I have gotten other UPM staff involved in my cat rescue too—recently
our order supervisor adopted an adorable orange and white kitten (“Tiger”) that
I caught in a restaurant parking lot. I’ve climbed into porch rafters,
descended into a storm drain, crawled under cars and through bushes, and driven
dozens of miles on winding country roads to rescue kittens in danger, and it makes my efforts totally worthwhile to see them adopted
into purrfect loving homes!
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