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Pet Adoption

A Vote for Siobhan

Just added:  Thanks to “Team Siobhan” for letting us know that Siobhan Magnus has an adopted tabby cat from a shelter in Rhode Island, and the kitty’s name is Ophelia!

Click here to listen to Siobhan talk about having a cat named after her; she answers a question we sent to her via Twitter last week.

You’d have to be living under a rock to not be familiar with the TV show, “American Idol”.  Even if you haven’t made a point of watching it over the past nine seasons, you’re probably familiar with the names of some of the talented performers who’ve found success through the program.  We’ve always enjoyed watching the show as a light way to wind down after a stressful day, but we’ve never picked up the phone to cast a vote for a particular contestant, not until this season when we first saw Siobhan Magnus.  At first, we were thrilled with her amazing voice, but as the weeks passed, we started to admire the young woman for sticking to her convictions and for wearing her heart on her sleeve.  It wasn’t really a surprise when an online profile of Magnus revealed that the independent and soft-spoken singer loves cats (all the smartest people do!), and we wanted to do something to thank her for entertaining us, and to encourage her to continue to embrace her inner “crazy cat lady”.  We had a rescue cat who needed a name, and we had a cat lover we wanted to honor, so we put the two together and ended up with a very pretty black and white cat with a cute pink nose who now answers to the name of “Siobhan”.  We think all the “American Idol” contestants are great, and we’re looking forward to more beautiful music from people like Crystal Bowersox and Lee DeWyze, but we can’t deny that Siobhan Magnus, with her desire to live her life as a cat (a life of sunbeams, food and belly rubs), and her gorgeous voice, has firmly won our hearts.  We wish Magnus a long and successful career, because we know she’ll be a dedicated and outspoken advocate for the underdogs who need a champion, even if the underdogs are cats.

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Above is a photo of the very pretty cat we now call “Siobhan”:  She came from a high-kill shelter where she was scheduled to be euthanized not just once, but twice, and both times the vet in charge sent her back to the adoption floor because she was so sweet and gentle.  We don’t know anything else about her background or how she ended up at the shelter, but she was once loved by someone and still shows some signs of grieving the loss of her former home.  She’s gentle with us but also seems vaguely impatient, as if we’re keeping her from being someplace else and she wishes we’d let her go back to the family she remembers.  She’d been spayed before she arrived at the shelter, and we have no way of knowing if she ever had a litter of her own, but she’s already shown herself to be a loving and patient foster mom to the younger kittens here, and she does seem to find comfort in spending time with the youngest cats.  She came to us with a generic shelter name that she absolutely refused to respond to, but she definitely knows we’re speaking to her when we call her “Siobhan”!  We asked her for a few of the reasons she identified with her human counterpart on “American Idol”:

Top Five Reasons Siobhan the Cat is supporting Siobhan Magnus to win “American Idol”

1.  When asked the question, “If you could be any animal, which one would you choose?”, Magnus replied, “A cat because they’re so lucky. When I think of my cat, she’s my princess. She’s spoiled and fat. She just flops down, like ‘Rub my belly, please.’ And I do it.”

2.  Magnus once played the Cheshire Cat in “Alice in Wonderland”, so she’s making honest attempts to infiltrate the minds of cats to better understand and appreciate them.

3.  Magnus is from Cape Cod, and any place named after a fish must be full of people who are pro-feline.

4.  Magnus’ song choices on AI seem especially designed to appeal to cats.  “Wicked Game” is obviously about “accidentally” forgetting to retract your claws while playing with a human, and “Superstition” is about every silly thing people have believed (and occasionally still do believe) about cats.  “Across the Universe” must have been written for a cat, because it’s about stuff flying and slithering and doing other things that make cats happy (it probably once mentioned “catnip”, too, but the word was lost to the anti-drug censors).

5.  Magnus has a tattoo of Mary Poppins, who sang… What?  It’s not Mary Poppins?  Magnus has a tattoo of art by Edward Gorey, and Gorey was a man who would have felt right at home at Wee Paws.  As a matter of fact, in this photo Gorey practically looks like he lived here!

Even though Siobhan is no longer competing on American Idol, we hope you’ll still support her in what will undoubtedly be a very successful career!  If you want to know more about her, check out her official page on the American Idol website, or follow Team Siobhan on Twitter.

All About Wee Paws

Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary is a no-kill cat sanctuary located in a cage-free, home environment.  We’re proudly listed on Petfinder. We sometimes rescue dogs and parrots, but our hearts belong to the kitties! Your donation is tax-deductible (see the footer on our homepage for details of our current 501c3 status), and we’ve been running our facility since 2004. Every penny donated to us is spent only on the care and upkeep of the animals. We do not draw salaries, and we don’t have staff—if you donate $10, the animals receive $10 in food or vet care. Our administrative costs at this point are 0% of our donations, and although that number will need to change if we want to expand, we’ll still only engage in small, simple fundraising projects which require little overhead (i.e., you’ll never be invited to a $500 per plate dinner put on by us).  We specialize in caring for “unadoptable” cats, especially those who are elderly, chronically ill, are FIV+, or who have behavioral issues, but we also care for litters of orphaned kittens throughout the year. We have a special place in our hearts for pets whose owners have passed away, and endeavor to provide them with patience and understanding as they grieve. We’ll do whatever it takes to keep a cat at home, with its family, even if that means offering behavioral counseling to correct problems, or providing long-term, low-or-no-cost foster care for families in transition.  We started relatively small, and have expanded to 24 resident cats; our oldest resident (also our first) just turned 18.

It’s been our plan to continue to slowly grow to accommodate more cats with each passing year, to an ideal maximum of fifty.  To achieve this, we work on making sure the current cats are properly cared for with the best food and facilities that we can afford, and if we start to notice that our food donations have increased, or that our monetary donations are more reliable, that’s when we’ll expand to add another cat or two.  The resources must come first so the cats who already live here are never short-changed on food, toys, veterinary care, or attention.  We often have specific future goals in mind, for example, we’d like to start to offer hospice care for one or two cats to see if owners need the service and if we can do a good job of providing it.  We’d like to get word out to human hospices that we will care for the pets of clients who don’t have family members to help.  We’d eventually like to offer to take in cats for people who’ve prearrranged it with us via a will or estate plan… these are all ideas we want to explore.  We also hope to one day have a small, separate office building on our property where we could offer a home to a couple of cats who are FeLV positive.  We want to do as much as two people can possibly do, and do it as well as it can possibly be done.

We’ve been living in the same residential property since 2001, in a house that was designed with rescue in mind.  Instead of a third bedroom, it has a room with specific amenities for parrots.  Instead of carpeting downstairs, the house is furnished with linoleum and concrete flooring because it’s easier to keep clean.  We always wanted to do rescue, and we started with parrots back in 1999, and then rescued our first cats in 2004.  Wee Paws has never owned the property, but operated at this location with an understanding similar to being on a long-term lease, and we felt confident that the animals would be safe and protected here for as long as we chose to stay.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as planned, and late last year the owner of the property lost the house to foreclosure.  When we were offered the chance to stay on as renters under a program offered by Freddie Mac, we jumped at the chance, especially because we were told we could continue to operate Wee Paws without interference.  We started to make plans to purchase the property ourselves at that point, knowing we needed the security of owning the house if we were to continue to do rescue.  Our only realistic alternative to buying the property was to move to a less expensive part of the country, and that seemed like such an impossible task that we firmly decided we wanted to stay put.  This house already has many features for the animals, including the beginnings of a large outdoor enclosure for the cats, so it seemed like a wise decision to just remain in Las Vegas.

Our first hurdle to overcome was to find financing to buy the house, but we did that about a month ago.  Our next hurdle was to raise the down payment of 20% that we needed if we wanted to close the sale.  That’s where we stand right now: we’re trying to raise the funds to put a down payment on this property.  It had been our plan to just continue on the month-to-month lease while we came up with the down payment, but Freddie Mac has given us notice that they plan to evict us.  I think they just want the animals out of the house so it’s easier to sell, but we can thwart them by getting the down payment together and making this purchase now!  We’ve put down $1500 in “earnest money” and have put in an offer, and if necessary, we’ll agree to pay the current asking price.  However, we do need to have the rest of the down payment before the sale closes, so we anticipate we have one month to either buy this place or to be forced to leave it.  One month to determine the fate of all the animals in our care… it’s a heavy burden for us and the stress had been difficult to manage.

I would never be so bold as to ask a bunch of strangers to give me a down payment on my house.  However, this house is not my home as much as it is a home for the cats, dogs, and parrots who live here.  The humans literally reside in one room (sometimes two, if you count the office, but it’s also a quarantine room).  Once the down payment is paid we can take care of all subsequent payments until the house is paid off, and we will have all legal paperwork in place to ensure that the deed belongs to Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary: the house will belong to the animals.  No matter what happens to us, even just old age, someone else can move in and take over the work of Wee Paws if we wrap up this purchase within the next month.  I really think we can do it, and once we have, we’ll give back by teaching others how to start their own small sanctuaries, too.  If every community had a dozen or so small sanctuaries like ours, small “group homes” for pets that take the animals who would otherwise fall through the cracks, it would save a lot of lives, and help an awful lot of people, too.  Micro businesses are currently all the rage in the financial community, and maybe it’s time for micro shelters to become the norm in the rescue community.