Cat rehoming service 4 Paws Kitty Galore is searching for a property to temporarily house up to 12 cats while renovations to their own premises get underway from the end of the month.
“When we first started, we got bombarded left, right, and centre with cats and didn’t get a chance to finish doing the renovations,” Christine Grenfell, who runs the service along with her partner Ray, told the Barrier Truth.
“The Council would like [the renovations] all done to a [certain] standard. To do that, we have to find a premises where the remaining cats that we’ve got, if we can put them in a different premises while that works being done and then when it’s passed, they can come back.”
Renovations to the current dwelling include a fire break, a veranda to make a second entrance, and cladding the internal wall in one of the rooms. Getting it up to scratch and for Council to pass the property as fit, Ms Grenfell isn’t putting a timeframe on when renovations would be complete, only indicating “a couple of months to be safe”.
“Even if someone’s just bought a property and they’re doing to do it up, before they do it up, if they’d let us use it, we’d appreciate it. We wouldn’t wreck it, and if anything needs doing, we’ll do it in an appreciation for letting us have the premises”, Ms Grenfell said.
Ms Grenfell added that every cat is house trained and that even the kittens will be toilet trained by the time the end of the month rolls around and is just hoping that a solution can be found for the 12 felines they’ve currently got – which may change as some could get rehomed within the next few weeks.
“We don’t want to put any of our cats down because they’re all healthy,” she said.
“Also, we’re finding homes as we’re going along so the count could go down by the time the end of the month comes, we might have less cats by then. We did have 80 and we’re down to 12, so we’ve done pretty good in the last couple of months.
“Broken Hill people have been fantastic to us. We can’t praise them any more than we can because Coles has got a bin for us and people donate in that beautifully, plus I get people that come around [to the] home and donate goods and everything. People are very good to us here.
“If it really comes to the crunch and the Council continues to say we’ve got go down to zero cats, we’ll most probably have to hand our cats over to them. We really don’t want to because the ones that we’ve got are beautiful cats and we like to know who they go to.”
To see the cats up for adoption from 4 Paws Kitty Galore, visit their Facebook page, or to discuss temporarily housing the service’s cats, contact Christine Grenfell on 0400 017 852.
