It started in the 1987 when Kay McElroy, new to the Caledonia area, learned of a cougar for sale in the area.
The 5- or 6-month-old big cat turned out to be in terrible shape, held by an owner who eventually traded it to McElroy for an old tractor. McElroy had no intention of keeping the cougar. She began looking for zoos or animal sanctuaries that could take it in. The more research she did, the more she realized she was the animal’s last hope.
More than 25 years and thousands of animals later, Caledonia’s Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary still provides homes for animals with no place else to go — including exotic cats like lions, tigers and cougars.
“All these animals have lost their place in society by no fault of their own,” said Executive Director Nancy Gschwendtner.
“We are their voice,” added Cheryl Craig, who runs the administration. “We are their only voice.”
But the sanctuary is facing financial hardships it hasn’t seen in around 20 years, Gschwendtner said. It costs about $50,000 a month to keep the sanctuary running. It’s now existing week-to-week, relying on donations from an increasingly aging donor base.
McElroy still works at the sanctuary, but the daily running has fallen to Gschwendtner and Craig. A younger generation of animal lovers, including a veterinary student at Mississippi State University, is working at the sanctuary and plans to take over within the next few years.
“What we’ve got to do is get financially from here to there,” Craig said. “That’s where we’re having problems.”
Cedarhill doesn’t receive grants or loans. The sanctuary relies totally on donations. They’re reaching out to increase their donor base and have hired a professional fundraiser from Starkville to analyze the sanctuary and help them come up with a business plan to reach out to a broader base. In particular, Craig and Gschwendtner want to reach out to younger people, so they have moved increasingly to social media.
“People think they need to make a large donation,” Craig said. “I would ask everybody…to go to your bank and have them draw $15 a month and send it to us.”
None of the animals at the sanctuary have anywhere else to go, Gschwendtner said. If they didn’t live there, they would be euthanized.
“We can’t fail,” she said. “We have no choice.”
Animal houses
The sanctuary is home to 10 tigers, 20 dogs, one cougar, seven horses, three bobcats, three lions, more than 200 house cats and an assortment of birds. The exotic animals were all bred and sold as pets, their owners panicking when they became too big to control. Most — though not all — of the animals have been abused.
The lions and tigers live in large cages and bask lazily in the shade or get up to eat or get hosed down when an employee showers them through the tall fence. Horses graze in their pastures, and the hundreds of domestic cats mostly stay in their houses.
No one ever touches the wild animals, but it’s a different story in the cat houses. The minute volunteers or employees enter the buildings home to domestic house cats, a flurry of fluffy, meowing cats arrive to be fed or petted. They climb into human laps, rub their faces against human hands or sniff at human drinks. The employees know all their names — Diesel, Baby Tina, Gus, Eddie and hundreds more — and can tell visitors their ages, their personalities, what kind of health they’re in and how they get along with the other cats.
The cats stay together in houses filled with furniture, blankets and cat food. Senior cats or cats with special needs stay in a smaller house where they laze around, while the younger, more active cats stay in a bigger house.
Those who weren’t abused were given up by owners who had to move into nursing homes or families from the Columbus Air Force Base being stationed abroad. None of the animals are up for adoption, and they’re all spayed or neutered — with the exception of a small colony of feral cats that live on the property but have so far evaded capture.
Money from this year’s Mississippi Craft Fair in Jackson will go to the sanctuary, Gschwendtner said. Cedarhill will make an appearance itself, selling paintings by its big cats who splatter child-safe paint on canvases, leaving paw prints and hair in the paint.
To donate, go to www.cedarhillanimalsanctuary.org
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