On a cold January morning, after an hour’s drive through blinding snow, the PetFix mobile clinic rolled into Andover for the first time. As we made our way through this seemingly deserted town on Lake Pymatuning at the very edge of Ohio, scrawny cats and kittens peeked out from under mobile homes and darted across the frozen ground from one boarded-up building to another. Finally, we spotted the modest Piano Sales sign we’d been told would identify our host for the day, Kitten Care & Rescue.

At the sight of the van, Lynn Niemi and her volunteers rushed out to embrace us. They had made breakfast and baked a cake. Inside the little building next to her house where Lynn teaches piano and drum lessons, we found rows of crates, each holding a stray or feral cat, some representing grueling hours of trapping during cold, dark nights and each carefully marked with the appropriate paperwork. By the end of that first day, 12 cats had been altered — and we had met our first PetFix Hero. Since then, we've been back to Kitten Care & Rescue 67 times and we've altered 1,483 cats (our average now is over 22 cats per clinic). Our staff members vie for the chance to go there. Maybe it's the food, but more likely it's Lynn's unparalleled efficiency as a PetFix Partner.

Lynn has been championing cats in her impoverished, rural community since 2000. For the first two years, she tried taking in all the animals in need herself, funding the operation with proceeds from her business. When she became completely overwhelmed, she established Kitten Care as a nonprofit organization and began focusing on prevention. Spay/neuter is now her thing. Although she still adopts out a few cats each year, her main thrust is helping people in her area alter the friendly strays and occasional ferals that appear on their doorsteps and in their barns. According to Lynn, most people are willing to keep the cats if they are spayed and neutered. While she reports a decline in the number of calls she gets since she began working with PetFix, she feels there is still much to be done. We salute Lynn for her tireless efforts on behalf of the Ashtabula cats — and we look forward to our continuing partnership.

You can nominate a PetFix Hero – someone who is making a major difference for cats and dogs in northeast Ohio through extraordinary spay/neuter efforts. Just send the name and story to petfix.neo@sbcglobal.net.