As with many people drawn to helping cats, our involvement started from a concern for their welfare. While researching how to provide successor care for our own cats (in event of our death or disability), we learned the grim truth that the odds of their surviving our demise were slim. Once a cat turns 5 years old, most adoption shelters give up on them -- no matter how cute and cuddly they are. It's not that they are unadoptable, it's just that they take longer to place, hence cost more money to shelter and tie up precious cage space that could be better used on very young and friendly cats and kittens. There are so many kittens born each year, the older cats don't stand a chance competing with them for homes. All too often the cat's age is the sole determinant of whether they live or die. The No Kill Movement is working to change this, but many traditional shelters will either not take in older cats or simply euthanize them on arrival.
In 1999 Cat Fancy Magazine ran an article on Cat Retirement Homes and how they offered people like us the chance to provide successor life care for our cats if we are hit by the proverbial Mack truck. Coincidentally we had recently sold our business and were looking for new avenues to develop in our Foundation. We did our research, attended the annual No Kill conference, and by November had roughed out a program. We recognized that there would be a lag from when we opened to when we would receive our first "true" retirement cat because the people applying were at the estate-planning stage, not the end-of-life stage. To get established we devised a plan to rescue older cats from "death row" at the local shelter to either adopt outright or foster to the elderly through a program we called Older Cats For Older People. We purchased a farm and renovated the house to provide a cage-free shelter that was so nice some of the people who adopted from us said they felt guilty about taking their cat away. We had a resident caregiver, three part-time employees, and 45 volunteers giving the 12-18 cats housed there all the love and attention they could muster.
As perfect as everything appeared, and as rewarding as the farm was for the staff, volunteers and visitors, something seemed to nag at us. Three years into the program we had rescued 70 teenaged cats, placed half in good homes and fostered many to senior citizens. Those aspects ran very well. The problem came from the cats who, as old cats do, developed health issues -- with frequent vet visits, complicated medical routines and the need to observe their behavior more closely, the shelter environment simply did not work. Soon we had a shadow shelter of chronically-ill or hospiced cats living in our home so they could receive round-the-clock care. To add to this, whenever a cat came home, a new cat was rescued to take his or her place at the farm. To calculate our total population, we had to add those at home and out on Older Cat foster to the group living in the shelter and that number was growing beyond the number we could comfortably commit to overall. We soon realized the inherent flaw in our lay-run retirement community and decided to refocus our efforts to an area where we could be infinitely more effective -- pro-active spay/neuter. We sold the farm, phased out the cat shifts, and brought the remaining cats home to live -- thus creating a closed retirement community now containing 18 cats. Fortunately, we had built our home to be cat-friendly and could house the cats at home as well as they were housed at the farm, but with one important difference -- they now have care available 24 hours a day.
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