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Pet Adoption

May 2010 S.O.S. (State of the Sanctuary)

It’s been a busy few weeks at Wee Paws and the next couple of months promise to be even crazier!  As I reported last month, gov’t. entity Freddie Mac has decided they no longer want to allow us to rent the property we’re in.  They’ve returned our $1400/month rental payments and told us they’re starting eviction proceedings (oddly enough, they did this at the same time that they asked the gov’t. for $10 billion in funding… perhaps they need lessons in money management, like, don’t turn away good tenants in an area with the highest home vacancy rate in the country).  We tried to counteract the eviction by bringing FM a legitimate buyer who was pre-approved to buy an investment property (i.e., the Wee Paws house), but they turned down all offers made on the house and ultimately decided to pull the house off the market.  When you’re next complaining to your senator or representative about your taxes, feel free to tell them about Freddie Mac’s knee-jerk eviction policies and their refusal to sell homes in their inventory to qualified buyers.  This feels a lot like the time the feds gave the banks billions of dollars so they could modify underwater mortgages for people like us, but instead the banks took the cash *and* took the losses when the homes went into foreclosure.  Regardless, we’ve reluctantly come to accept that we’re going to need to move.  We’ve been in the Wee Paws house for almost a decade, and made some wonderful modifications to it so we could have an aviary for the parrots, two isolation rooms for cats, a large outdoor enclosure for cats, a feeding station for ferals from the local farm sanctuary, etc., and we’re going to be sad to leave it behind.  We rehabbed arthritic dogs in the pool and went for wonderful daily jaunts in a safe neighborhood that was built up enough to have a vet and grocery store within walking distance, but was rural enough that we could walk to a “pick your own” orchard and pass horses along the way.  From our upstairs window we could see three different mountain ranges, and fireworks on the Las Vegas strip—we were extremely lucky to have had this experience and will never forget it.  We feel we did everything we could do, from loan modifications to bringing in investors to try to save this house in this location, but have been thwarted at every turn… perhaps it’s a sign to move on.  While we’ve been waiting for other people to make decisions about our future we’ve had to put the work for Wee Paws on hold, and that doesn’t benefit anyone.

We’ve decided to move right out of Las Vegas, to the little town with the funny name on the other side of the mountains:  Pahrump.  It’s about an hour’s drive from Las Vegas, so we’ll still be close enough to visit, but it’s got more of a “wild west” attitude and definitely has wide-open spaces!  We’ll be going from a property that’s about one-fifth of an acre to one that’s five to ten times larger, and where zoning laws will allow us to keep chickens, horses, and maybe even a goat or two.  That means we’ll finally be able to foster farm animals, something I’ve dreamed of doing but have never been permitted because of where we lived.  The best part is the price—we’ll be saving a lot of money over what we would have paid to stay in Las Vegas, and that means we’ll have more funds available to help the animals.  Although I’ll be sad to leave our house and all the memories here, I know this is a good change for Wee Paws and for us.  For the first time in a few years we won’t be filled with financial stress, and as a bonus, we’ll get to see stars in the sky at night and not just that giant beam of light from the Luxor!

So, that’s where things stand on May 13, 2010.  We’re hoping to find our Pahrump “dream house” within a week so we can start the awful work of packing and moving and not have to do it in a rush.  We’ve asked Freddie Mac to delay our eviction until July 31st so we have time to find somewhere to go—we have no idea if they’ll allow it or not, but it never hurts to ask.  Keep your fingers crossed for us, and hopefully the next news you hear will be our announcement of “Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary in Pahrump, NV” (our slogan: “We are not a brothel… that’s down the street and a few blocks to the left”.)

P.S.  We still feel Siobhan Magnus was robbed!

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.