EAST CENTRAL — The North East SPCA is planning their grand opening of their new shelter in the fall.
“We’re planning to have a banquet kind of thing with speakers and the whole deal,” said Pat Shiels, board chair with the North East SPCA.
The grand opening is slated for Sept. 27.
The Harry and Eve Vickar Shelter currently has a completed foundation, while the floor and plumbing has been roughed in. The walls and roof are up and sheeted from the outside, and the interior rooms are framed. The next step will be the windows, doors, sides and roofing.
The highlight of the building process for Shiels was just before construction began, and she saw a marking flag in the ground where the shelter would be built.
“I was so excited to see that marking flag in there, it was so funny, so I took a picture... It was so long it was just a big green patch of land,” Shiels said. “It has been like seven or eight years now when we first started. When we first started, we could have bought something used and tried to put animals in it, but we talked to a bunch of other SPCAs and they said, ‘don’t rush it, just make sure you have the money to build what you need’. Because if you buy something you have to retrofit it with a bunch of air exchanges and you end of spending a lot of money.”
The facility is expected to hold up to 60 cats and around 27 dogs, depending on additional space. Additional space can be made for other animals such as rabbits or ferrets.
“We usually get other small pets like that. If you look at Saskatoon’s, they often get birds, bunnies or that kind of thing. We’ll take them, we’ll just have to find a different spot for them other than the dogs.”
Without the SPCA, Shiels said the responsibility often falls on community members to take cat of stray animals.
“We’ve been doing this stuff out of our own pocket for forever. If you talk to any of the vets they do the same thing. It will be nice to have the responsibility go where it should be.”
Shiels recently picked up a stray cat in Kinistino, finding it had a frozen leg.
“I took it into the vet and had its leg amputated, because you can’t do anything for it,” Shiels said. “It’s actually a lot better off without it than with it, so anyways, I now have a $700 cat, so far. He still needs to be fixed, and he had ear mites and now he has an ear infection.”
The cat was named Sasha.
