Paw Prints closing

Noodle- currently available for adoption!

Isn't it interesting that it's been EXACTLY a month since my last post?  Complete coincidence for sure!

Changes. Sometimes change is good, sometimes it’s even better. But when this change will come, it’s going to be a sad ending to a great thing. Paw Prints is going to close their cat adoption center. There are a lot of reasons why, but I just don’t feel it necessary to explain the main one, mainly because it isn’t about me. Let’s just say that we suffer from a lack of funding and volunteers….good, reliable volunteers. We need dozens of them and we just don’t have them. We do have some great ones though: Leah, Rachael, Mary, Sharon to name just a few. But it’s not enough. Same as the funding. We do have funds, but it just isn’t enough. So we are going to now concentrate on getting grants to continue our population control issue.


Did you know that a female cat can produce over 4,000 kittens in her lifetime? No, that doesn’t mean she will give birth to that many, but would include her kittens, her kitten’s kitten’s, and so on and so forth. So spaying and neutering is our goal to prevent the thousands of euthanasias per year in Siouxland.

Paw Prints has been the subject of very negative and bad talk from other agencies in the area. These other places go so far as to bash what we do to vets that we use. I just don’t understand. Since when is it bad that we’re taking in homeless cats, getting them vaccinated and fixed a bad thing? We certainly don’t understand where the negativity comes from and we just carry on with it. But it could be so different. Wouldn’t it be nice if when the Humane Society is low on cats, they call Animal Control, who always has a surplus of cats, and take some from them to prevent them from being euthanized? Currently, they ship cats in from Sioux Falls instead of getting them from their own city. Isn’t it called Siouxland Humane Society???? I guess Sioux Falls is close enough. I guess.....

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could send people to each other’s adoption centers if they had a certain cat that we didn’t offer? It will never happen. Ever. And it doesn’t make any sense. These other agencies work so hard to keep to themselves and to put everyone else down. They don’t get the main focus, which really should be the health and welfare of the animals. The cats of Sioux City will pay the ultimate price for the things that go on and I hate that.  I hate that I can’t change people, knock some sense into them.

I wish I could win the lottery. A huge portion of the winnings would be put into a fund and we could provide a very nice adoption center with cleaning staff. We could spay and neuter any cat that we could and we could make a bigger difference faster. I wish a lot of things, but I really wish we could find a way to get people to care more. More people to put in a few hundred bucks, more people to come in once a week to clean. But they aren’t there regularly. So we face turning cats away, which has been done the last few weeks. We face knowing that they may face the ultimate when they get sent somewhere…animal control, humane society, a ditch. It’s a hard decision, but I know that some decisions have to be made.


So if anyone reading this would like to adopt a cat or kitten, now is the time to do it. Once we run out of cats, we will close our doors and concentrate on spaying and neutering and getting more grant money to work with.

Oh, I have more I could bluther on and on about, so I shall save that for another day. I guess I'll start a-singing.  CH-CH-CH-CHANGES....