This is a great story. This is what I would like to do here if I had the money... All those kitties who need attention and love...All cats all the time at Clowder
By Eric Mink
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Wednesday, Sep. 20 2006
It's Sunday morning at Kaldi's Coffee on DeMun, and I'm having a tough time
reading the newspaper: Smudged eyeglasses. I take them off, hold them up to the
sky and see what's blocking my line of sight: the dried imprint of a cat's wet
nose.
I spent a couple of hours Saturday at Clowder House -- a combination retirement
home, sanctuary, adoption facility and, in a few cases, nursing home for cats
-- on the city's South Side. I had walked, sat and lain among dozens of them. I
had gazed at, held, comforted, spoken softly to and -- okay, I admit it --
gently teased a few of the 130 or so cats and kittens now in the care of the
Clowder House Foundation Inc.
In exchange, they had graced me with nuzzles, purrs, rubs, paw flexes,
full-body stretches, sleep cradled against my chest and a few of the
inadvertent, unavoidable scratches that attend close contact with kitties with
claws. I'm pretty sure it was 10-year-old Shoes -- a large black long-haired
female -- who signed my glasses with her nose.
I'm a cat person. No apologies. I love dogs, but cats . . . well . . . it just
seems to me that dogs are always really grateful for any attention they get
from people. With cats, it's the other way around. If a cat shows you some
attention, much less affection, you must have done something to deserve it.
Clowder House is all cats, all the time. It occupies spiffy space on the
gut-rehabbed ground floor of what once was an abandoned three-story brewery
storage facility on Wyoming Street near the intersection of Gravois and
Compton. Diane Hurwitz, its founder and driving force, acquired the building
about three years ago and supervised its transformation at a cost of well over
$350,000, she said, all from private donations to the all-volunteer,
non-profit, 501 (c) 3 organization. Ambitious plans for the rest of the
building are on hold until more funds come in.
The principal mission of Clowder House is to provide a safe, loving home for
endowed cats, those whose owners make a one-time payment to guarantee
lifetime care for their cats when they no longer can because of
illness, infirmity or
dislocation. Some include provisions for care in their wills.
The idea for Clowder House took root, Hurwitz said, just before her mom died
several years ago. "She gave me her cat, and I started thinking, 'What's going
to happen to my cats when I pass away?'" There were a dozen or so places in the
country that accepted cats in exchange for a placement fee, she learned, but
none of them in the St. Louis area.
Clowder House is a happy place. Volunteers vacuum and mop glossy-painted
concrete floors, put out fresh food and water, wash dishes, do endless loads of
laundry, haul plastic furnishings outside to be hosed off and haul them back
inside -- and brush, pet, hold, talk to and play with the cats, keeping an eye
out for signs of eye colds, infections, skin rashes, whatever.
Litter boxes, where healthy cats obligingly deposit their bodily wastes onto
special pine-based cylindrical pellets, are everywhere. They're sifted daily
and changed as the pellets break down into dust.
On arrival, each cat spends 10 days alone in a reasonably roomy cage to see if
there are any apparent health problems. All are spayed or neutered as soon as
age permits. After that, the population is segregated according to the animals'
needs and conduct. A computer database records each cat's physical description,
age, gender, inoculations, how and when it was acquired and any special
behavioral traits.
Those on special diets or with special medical needs are kept together in
floor-to-ceiling enclosures with built-in shelves and ramps to encourage
activity. Chicken-wire walls let them watch what's going on nearby. A few of
these are set aside for cats with FIV (a feline AIDS-like immune system
disease).
Most of the cats at Clowder House, though, roam relatively free. In the large
open front room, for example, about 40 well-socialized cats amble about
unrestrained, biffing toys, climbing carpeted towers and plastic shelving set
at various heights, ripping up scratching posts, chasing each other and finding
cozy nooks to snuggle in and sleep, which is, after all, what most cats do most
of the time.
A lesser number of cats with a little more, um, attitude share a smaller open
space, which tamps down group pressures. And in a glassed-in room next to the
office area, 10 to 15 especially shy cats and some eligible for adoption lead
quieter existences. (When owners sign endowment agreements, they specify
whether or not a cat may be adopted.)
The standard endowment fee is $3,000, based on the calculation that a cat will
require care for an average of 10 years after it arrives. There's a discount
for cats in their teens and a discount for endowing more than one cat at a time.
But endowment money doesn't cover all the costs, partly because of the heart
factor. Endowment cats make up only about 40 percent of the current population.
The rest represent rescues -- of one sort or another. When the neighbor of a
Clowder volunteer was dying of cancer, for example, his three grown cats were
taken in immediately. Efforts to raise the endowment fee are ongoing.
Hurwitz, 52, is a Washington U. law school graduate who earns a living as a law
clerk in Illinois and rehabs a handful of South Side properties each year.
She's at Clowder every morning before work and every evening after work making
sure the cats get food, water and, if needed, medicine.
She and her small army of volunteers allow visitors on weekends, so long as
they're not too young or too noisy. "They [the kitties] enjoy the company,"
Hurwitz told me, as a sleek black short-hair named Newbie leaped from the floor
into her arms. "We give the people brushes, and let them brush the cats. We
have lots of brushes."
Liz Kinder, a business analyst for MasterCard who drives in from O'Fallon, Mo.,
to volunteer on weekends, talked about the man with cancer whose cats Clowder
took in. "We allowed him to sleep at night," she said, "and concentrate on
caring for himself and getting into the hospital. His cats couldn't take care
of themselves on the street. There are too many nasty things out there. Humans
domesticated cats and dogs, and we have a responsibility to take care of them.
They're all God's creatures," she said, "and they are sweet, sweet souls."Labels: kitties rock
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