Stay Wild: Trumansburg’s animal rescue and sanctuary

Stay Wild Rescue, a small nonprofit rescue organization in the village of Trumansburg, wants to make the village a better place for animals.

The rescue rehabilitates orphaned or injured wildlife and domestic animals, mostly dogs, cats, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, woodchucks, opossums and fawns. Kittens, cats, puppies and dogs are sterilized and vaccinated and available for adoption. Also available is a sanctuary for unadoptable and special needs animals.

All of this is possible through the care and appreciation that cofounder and operator of Stay Wild, Jane George, and her dozens of volunteers have for local wildlife. Together, they partner with Cornell Wildlife Health Center to provide care to animals in need. George, an English teacher at a local high school, has been working on this project for the past decade. 

“We do this out of our home,” George said. “We’re on five acres, and we have two barns that we kind of work out of, and have a lot of the wildlife out of those facilities.”

There is also a small sanctuary component to the rescue. 

“That is where we have rescued pot-bellied pigs and sheep. And we take in a lot of chickens, as well,” she added. “We currently, on the property, have 28 dogs and about 12 cats.”

The rescue uses a foster care system to care for the animals.

“We don’t have cages or a shelter on premise, per se,” George said. “The dogs all live in our house, and most of them are very young puppies. Then, the wildlife and the sanctuary animals are obviously housed outside.”

To care for some of the rest of the animals, volunteers help care for animals in need.

“We have about 12 foster families who take in kittens and puppies or dogs for us, and they’re located all around the area,” George said.

Christine Wallace, who volunteers hosting kittens at her home, noted that George and the volunteers drive a terrific operation as a labor of love.

“We are volunteer-run, and 100% of all donations are used for the animals’ care,” Wallace said in an email. “We are also a non-profit organization.”

George commended Wallace’s efforts to help wildlife.

“She has been fostering with us for years,” George said of Wallace. “She came to us and offered to start fostering shortly after we started taking in a lot of rescue cats and kittens, and she’s consistently been fostering and doing rescue work with us.”

Volunteering at the rescue, George said, is a wonderful opportunity to forge bonds with community members and learn how to work with wildlife.

“My high school students often volunteer with us,” George said. “I just had five students here on Sunday. We were doing a spay/neuter clinic, and I had a vet here who was doing the surgeries. [The students] were here volunteering and helping recover the puppies and the kittens and assisting the vet, and the vet led them through a dissection of some of the tissue that had been taken out from the spay/neuter surgeries.”

George said that it has been a great experience watching her volunteers grow and go on to sometimes work in the field themselves.

“Over the years, we’ve had many of our volunteers, who were former students of mine, go on to become wildlife rehabbers themselves, or go to vet school, which has been really amazing,” she noted. “It has been kind of an ongoing operation here locally, bringing youth in and walking them through, and just trying to raise awareness and bring about change in our community.”

Generally, Trumansburg is a very friendly place to animals, George said. But the experienced wildlife rescue operator says that there is still some work to do helping with the local stray cat population.

“It’s probably better here than it is in many areas,” she noted. “We have access to the Tompkins County SPCA, which has amazing animal control, but I would say that we need to make sure that people spay and neuter their cats.” 

Ulysses Connection appears every week in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@vizellamedia.com. Contact Eddie Velazquez at edvel37@gmail.com or on X (formerly Twitter): @ezvelazquez.

In brief:

The Ulysses Philomathic Library hosts its weekly “Art and ‘Anime’tion” sessions every Thursday. The next session will be Jan. 30 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. 

A post on the library website encourages attendees to “celebrate anime and manga every Thursday afternoon with pocky, popcorn, otaku art, and more. We watch ‘Cells at Work,’ ‘My Hero Academia,’ and ‘Bofuri’ while folding paper stars for luck, playing otaku bingo for prizes, and drawing our favorite characters. For tweens and teens.”