Jewel, a one year old cat, had her leg amputated.--SUBMITTED PHOTO
lthomson@medicinehatnews.com
Paws in the Park, a large fundraising event hosted by the Humane Society of Southern Alberta set to happen Saturday in the Redcliff Lions Park, has been cancelled due to soaring COVID cases in the Medicine Hat area.
Active cases in Medicine Hat and immediate area continue to spike; rising from near single digits in late July to 526 cases as of Thursday afternoon.
De Seaton, board president for the Southern Alberta Humane Society, said Paws in the Park was done once in 2019 and was a big fundraising success.
“Our event this weekend was going to be phenomenal,” said Seaton. “It’s fundraising for all of the animals in our care. We have an $18,000 vet bill. This was our big chance, our biggest event. We couldn’t have it last year because of COVID, so this year we were going to go huge.”
Seaton said they had numerous activities planned for the event on Saturday, including an all-day barbecue, 17 vendors from the Something for Everyone Market, an obstacle course bouncy castle, firetruck tours, mobile dog grooming, live music, raffles for several different baskets, 50/50 tickets and three local food trucks.
The group was hoping to raise between $8,000 and $10,000 to put toward its sizeable vet bill, explained Seaton, with money coming out of donations from the barbecue, a percentage from the food trucks and market vendors.
Seaton got the news Thursday morning that it wouldn’t be safe for the event to go on because of the rising number of active COVID cases in Medicine Hat and immediate area.
“We checked in to it and found out from Alberta Health Services,” Seaton explained. “The red flags they said were the food, bringing animals from households, the mingling of children, and also that we could ask people to wear masks but we can’t enforce it. It was too much, so we had to do the responsible thing and cancel it.”
Seaton is disappointed the event had to be cancelled, but wanted to thank all the local support, vendors and businesses that donated. She says they won’t be rescheduling because of the high COVID numbers.
“We’re hoping to do an online auction or a raffle in the next couple of weeks for the baskets that we already have.”
The Human Society is also asking for any monetary donations, for community donations and for businesses who would like to donate items or services to be added to the auction.
“We just want to thank everyone for what they do to support us,” said Seaton. “Just recently we’ve had huge vet costs. We had some very sick kittens that cost us $5,000, we had a cat that had to have all it’s teeth out, that cost us $2,000, and we had a cat that had to have it’s leg amputated and that was $1,000.”
Seaton also explained the Humane Society is self funded.
“We don’t get grants and we don’t have steady money coming it, it’s just what we can fundraise.”
