Amber Snethen

Happy Home Animal Sanctuary is a no-kill, no-cage, non-profit organization dedicated to saving the lives of abandoned and homeless cats and dogs. We have been happily serving the Southern Nevada area since 1997.

Our mission is to offer care and a peaceful living environment for abused, physically handicapped, aged or homeless animals. We provide an open space facility where these “special needs” animals can be provided with medical care, love, and attention that will ultimately lead to their adoption. If an adoption isn’t possible, the sanctuary provides a lifetime refuge for these animals.

Our goal is to protect the welfare of the animals and to promote the humane treatment and wellbeing of these animals by:

• Providing shelter and medical care for stray or abandoned animals.
• Responding with personal commitment, humane sensitivity, compassion, and technical skill to the needs of these animals.
• Actively promoting suitable adoptions of the animals.
• Encouraging the spay and neutering of dogs and cats to ensure the numbers of unwanted animals be kept to a minimum.
• Helping to prevent cruelty to animals by promoting animal welfare legislation and public education.

We are an all-volunteer group with no paid staff and as a result, we rely solely on adoption fees, donations and the generosity of cat and dog lovers around the world to continue our efforts. If you love cats & dogs, like we do, and support the humane treatment of them, we would encourage you to visit our donation page to learn more about how you can help.

Thank you for stopping by and we hope to see you again.

Amber Snethen

This coming Saturday, June 19th, we will be at the Las Vegas Harley-Davidson participating in their Inaugural Pet Adoption Day. This should be a terrific event and we will have some great animals (dogs & cats) with us that are ready for adoption and looking for their Forever Home.

The event is running from 9am to 3pm and is being hosted at the Harley-Davidson store at 2605 S. Eastern (Sahara & Eastern) in Las Vegas.

They will be having a lot of activities going on all day, with raffles, prizes, contests, demonstrations, and more. It should be a great day for the whole family, so we hope you come out to say hi and maybe find a new member of the family

Here is the flyer posted at the Harley-Davidson website:

Happy Home Animal Sanctuary continues to trap at the apartment complex where the six kittens were found foamed into a wall. We’ve been out there multiple times every week, but progress has been slower than we would like. Many of the remaining adult cats have shown remarkable savvy avoiding the traps, and every day that passes without catching them increases the odds of them creating more kittens. Frustrating!

We did manage to get two more kittens from the complex. Both are males, between three and four weeks old. Currently, they are being kept in the same foster home, but separate from the other nine kittens, until we’re certain they are completely healthy. As you can see in the picture, they are still pretty small. The one on the left actually has a white blaze which extends across his entire belly. He is also sporting white “mittens”. The one on the right is mostly white, with some dark grey/black markings.

They are currently eating solid (wet) food, but we’re supplementing with kitten formula. In a week or two, after they gain a little more weight and start feeling a little less nervous, we’ll give them a bath, which both desparately need! Right now, their white furr is dingy and grey with dirt. Can’t wait to get them nice and clean! It may sound funny, but after you give a kitten a bath, they really do act happier and more “bouncy”.

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In preparation for their next vet visit, we decided to weigh each kitten. This would give us an idea of who would be ready to be fixed, and who still had a bit of weight to put on first.

This photo of Twitch sitting on the scale gives a slightly misleading impression about how this whole operation went. Even without the scale, getting one of these guys to sit still for more than three seconds before darting one way or the other is nearly impossible. Actually weighing them was an exercise in madness! Oh sure, Twitch looks nice and calm here, but approximately a half second later, he was flying off in one direction and the scale was flying off in the other.

We did manage to get them to hold still long enough to get weights on each, and as we suspected, Lucky is the lightest and Twitch is the heaviest.

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I know we talked about feeding time before, but I thought I would touch upon the topic again. I have a new picture, and some video footage which is absolutely hillarious. As the kittens have gotten healthier and larger, their zeal for food has reached dizzying new heights.

As I mentioned before, I feed the kittens by preparing their food on a large platter. Since I got tired of them climbing up my legs while I prepare their food–one actually made it all the way to the counter, once!–I don’t let them out of the bathroom until after I put the platter on the floor.

Honestly, the commotion they raise while waiting for me to open the door is completely over the top. How is it possible that kittens so small can make such loud meows? And the pawing at the door! It sounds like a pack of wolves in there!

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If there is one thing a well-adjusted kitten isn’t short on, it is energy and enthusiasm. Throw together nine in the same room, and you have a recipe for excitement. Lucky, who started out as a rather shy little kitten, has turned into quite the thrill seeker! Apparently, this past weekend, Lucky’s thrill seeking went just a touch too far…

We’re still not certain what happened. Perhaps one of his flying leaps off the edge of the bathtub went horribly wrong. Maybe it was one of his spring-loaded jumps of doom at a litter mate that caused the issue. Whatever the cause, Lucky suddenly found himself unable to put weight on his front legs…

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A couple of days ago I promised pictures of the ninth and final kitten in the “foamed” litter, “Phoebe“. Trapped last week, she was fortunate enough to have avoided being foamed. She is very beautiful, but very shy. She doesn’t interact with the other kittens very much, prefering to sit on the cat condo.

She is calm while being held and handled, but just as she starts to relax, one of the other kittens will rocket past and you can sense she wants to be somewhere else. Butterfly and Victoria were like this at first, and they’ve both opened up nicely. Phoebe seems to be taking a lot longer to come out of her shell, so we’re spending extra time with her.

Perhaps this is simply an issue of her being the last one trapped. Maybe in a few more days she’ll start to enjoy the other kittens, or maybe she’ll always be more comfortable with people instead of other cats. Until she gets a little older and more used to things here, we’re going to continue working with her.

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In my last post, I promised pictures of the three new kittens from the litter that was foamed into the wall. In between constant cleaning, litter box changing, feeding, and medicating, I finally managed to get their pictures together, so here we go…

Sierra was the first kitten that was rescued from the apartment complex. Only her paws were covered in foam, but that was enough to let us know this wasn’t going to be a “normal” rescue. The president of Happy Home Animal Sanctuary, Amber Snethen, took Sierra back to the sanctuary with her and began coordinating the rescue effort with the rest of the volunteers. She was reunited with the rest of the litter a few days ago, so we could get her to the vet appointment with the rest of the kittens.

Sierrra started out as a bit of a shy girl, unlike her brother Floyd who has similar markings but is quite an outgoing character. Now that she is settled in, she is beginning to show her true personality. Generally a calm kitten, she has moments of pure joy when she discovers a new toy or simply decides to pounce one of her unsuspecting litter mates…

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Now that we have the serious stuff out of the way, I want to talk about feeding time. The kittens receive a mixture of wet and dry food. As soon as the first can is opened, the meowing begins. We carefully spread the wet food around the edge of a large dish, mixing in a healthy portion of dry. Generally when the plate gets about a foot off the floor, we have at least two kittens hanging on the edge and the other six sitting on the floor meowing loudly.

As soon as the plate hits the floor, food begins to fly. The floor is covered in food. The kittens are covered in food. We’re covered in food. This is when personalities really start to show. Floyd and Twitch usually battle for the center of the dish, getting their legs and bellies completely covered. Grace can be pretty pushy as well, shoving aside her more polite litter-mates.

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We had some good news after the rescued kittens’ vet visit… they were all deemed healthy enough for their first vaccination. They also tested negative for FeLV (Feline Leukemia Virus), which is a very good thing! In a few weeks, they will have their second vaccination and we’ll have a better idea when they can be spayed and neutered.

We also had a few new additions to the litter. Sierra was the first kitten which helped bring this mess to our attention. She was in the care of Amber Snethen, the president of Happy Home Animal Sanctuary. Butterfly was trapped near the infamous foamed wall, and she is clearly part of the same litter. Finally, Lucky was picked up yesterday from the complex. A resident found him roaming around the wall as well. If you’re keeping track, that makes for eight kittens in this litter.

Lucky was particularly lucky… hence the name . He had a bit of foam on his tail, and it was a real mess. Under the foam we found blood, a bit of infection, dirt, and dead skin and we initially thought he was going to lose his tail. Fortunately, there was just enough blood flow, and the vet thinks he should be able to keep his tail. He is on a course of antibiotics to help fight off any infection.