Brand new Sherbrooke animal shelter gets cat condos, 'state-of-the-art' clinic

Inside Sherbrooke's new animal shelter,the cats and dogs have something many other caged animals do not: space to roam.

Their cages are larger than the standard required,with mostseparatedinto two compartments with a connecting door.

On one side, animals havea place to rest and eat, and on the other,a place to relieve themselves.

The Eastern Townships Animal Protection Society (SPA) calls this a cat condominium.

Employees and volunteers spent the weekend moving 200 animals and equipment into thenew state of the art facility, which opened officially today.

Genevive Cloutier, who runs public relations for the shelter, told CBCNews the sheltertook extra measures to make the move go as smoothly as possible for the animals.

It put around half of all the cats into temporary foster homes in the community in order to lighten the load, she explained.

Then, each of the 80 or so cats was moved one at a time, to keep their stress levels low.

"We have a lot ofvolunteers who are helping us today in order to move all the cats," said Cloutier. "We are not putting all the cats in a big van in order to move them. It's one by one."

Cloutier said that around 80 per cent of all the animals the shelter receives in a year are cats.

Shelter more than doubles in size

After eight years of planning, the shelter has now been set up in the former Bell building on SauvStreet.

The entrance now leads to a store and an adoption area, and thespace is a bit more than double the size of the previous shelter.

Dr. Lois Saucke, co-owner of the veterinarian clinic attached to the shelter,has been working in partnership with the shelter for more than 15 years.

She helped design the new spaceand said she's particularly happy about the new surgery room, which now has two operating tables.

"In our old clinic, our surgery room was about a third of the size and our surgery lamp was actually an old dentist's lamp," she said. "It really is state-of-the-art."

Saucke explained that in the old shelter, cats were "sandwiched between adoption dogs and stray dogs," which made for a lot of noise.

The new system keeps the cats and dogs at arms-length.

Private donations from animal lovers in the community helped pay forthe new site and its services, but it also receives funding from employees like Saucke.

She said she gives a percentage of her paycheck to the community fund, which has reached just over $750,000.

The goal is to get $100,000 in private donations, and the shelter plans to keep fundraising until that goal is met.

With files from CBC'sRebecca Martel