More About Us
Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary is a no-kill cat sanctuary located in a cage-free, home environment (find us on Petfinder). We sometimes rescue dogs and parrots, but our hearts belong to the kitties! Your donation is tax-deductible (click here for details), 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. 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. Our oldest resident (also our first) just turned 18. This website is a work in progress so please excuse any dead links -- first I feed the cats, then I clean the litterboxes, then I work on the website if there's time leftover!
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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!