Locust Dale site of cat center

By Jane DeGeorge
Eagle Reporter
Published: August 28, 2008

While working at a Locust Dale cat rescue center, staff member Darrell Zwemke peered into a cozy cat bed atop the cages and noticed a “present” one of the felines had left behind.

“Who pooped up there? That’s pretty rude!” Zwemke said aloud causing the cats in the room to scurry away, as if they were trying to remove themselves from a line-up of possible culprits.

It might seem unusual that Zwemke – whose wife, Siri Zwemke, founded the rescue center – speaks to the cats as though they can understand him, but he isn’t dealing with your everyday domestic pet. The Siamese Cat Rescue Center focuses on a breed known for its intelligence.

The cats’ heightened understanding and attention-hungry personalities can be a challenge when it comes to placing the
rescues successfully in a new home, according to the couple that runs the center based on a six-acre piece of property in the rolling hills of Locust Dale.

“They are fairly intelligent cats, very people oriented. And they don’t necessarily like to share and live in large groups, they get annoyed,” Siri Zwemke said.

“And when they’re annoyed they find a way to tell you,” her husband added, finishing his wife’s sentence.

Rescue center emerges

A decade ago, Siri Zwemke was in search of her own Siamese cat when a friend suggested that she rescue one, she said. 

“I said, ‘You mean there are Siamese that need homes? You’re kidding,’” she told The Eagle.

Zwemke – who worked as a hearing impaired teacher in Orange County at the time – called all of the animal shelters within 100 miles of her Locust Dale home, asking them to contact her if they ever received any Siamese cats, “never thinking they would actually call me,” she said. “All of a sudden I got six cats.”

It soon became clear that her Madison County home wasn’t equipped to handle all of the cats the shelters were willing to turn over. So Zwemke “just kind of jumped in” to the rescue business, got a kennel license and “then it just took off,” she explained. “We did 150 cats the first year.”

After trying to juggle her full-time teaching job and her responsibilities at the rescue center for three years, she realized she had to make a decision. Zwemke chose to focus her attention on rescuing cats and establishing the center.

“It’s been such grueling work building the business. We finally just took a vacation,” she said of the organization, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

When the center first started in 1998, Darrell Zwemke was living in Utah maintaining his own Siamese-friendly organization – the Siamese Internet Cat Club, a Web site with information about the breed.

When the Locust Dale center’s founder decided that her rescue organization needed a Web site of its own, a friend referred her to Darrell Zwemke for help. The couple – who both have an affinity for Siamese cats as they grew up with them as pets – started “dating” via the Internet, eventually leading the former Utah resident to transfer his job out to Virginia.

“We did our own version of ‘match.com’ I guess,” he said laughing.

On-line ‘matchmaking’

In addition to establishing the rescue’s Web site, the Siamese Internet Cat Club Webmaster eventually established a database system to assist the organization with placing cats with future owners.

The center – which receives and places about 800 cats per year – houses most of its rescues in foster homes up and down the East Coast. The organization’s two staff members – Siri and Darrell Zwemke – and its hundreds of volunteers do the majority of their communicating on-line.

“We couldn’t run this type of program without the Internet,” Siri Zwemke said.

The “matchmaking” process is “very technologically advanced,” according to the couple, who use what they call the “Meezer Online Management System” to pair potential adopters with cats they have rescued. (“Meezer” is a popular nickname for the breed.)

Center representatives enter information, including personality traits and medical history, about each cat they take in. Information gathered about those who apply to adopt and are approved – including their living habits, daily schedule, behavior of their current pets or children as well as two personal references and a reference from their veterinarian – is also entered into the system.

With the help of the database, the rescue center then works to “match” a cat that will work well for an interested adopter.
But the program isn’t for everyone, she says.

“Some people just want to go out and pick up a cat for their daughter’s birthday and don’t want to deal with a big, long matchmaking process,” she said.
But the center gathers an abundance of information up front, “so that we send a cat home that’s going to work,” Siri Zwemke said. “It used to be that you go into a store and you pick up a cat, maybe it’s going to work, maybe not. There’s a bigger push now toward ‘matchmaking.’”

Even so, the adoptions don’t always work out as planned. The center has a policy that allows adopters to return any rescue cat that doesn’t work out at any time because “from our perspective, the reason we’re here is to save a life,” Darrell Zwemke said.

About 10 percent of the cats the rescue places in homes are returned to the center, he said.
Increase in adopters

In recent years, there has been more public awareness of the overpopulation of cats and dogs and the need to adopt these pets from rescues and shelters, according to the couple.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – which ravaged communities in Louisiana and Mississippi in August 2005, leaving many “orphaned” pets behind – brought the issue to the forefront, according to Darrell Zwemke.

With the push toward pet adoption, the rescue has seen the types of people applying to adopt their cats expand.

“Now we get everybody, and they don’t understand that these cats have issues, but they do, because that’s why they’re here,” Siri Zwemke said.

The No. 1 reason pet owners give up their cats to the Madison County-based rescue center is due to “litter box issues.”

The center allots about 20 percent of the cats it takes in for “geezers,” that are in their teens, and other “hard to place” cats.

Over the years, the couple has adopted a number of the cats it has taken in. Often the Zwemkes’ pets include the rescues that have more complicated medical and behavioral problems.

Currently the couple has five cats and two dogs, all of which are rescues. The cats include, Alphonso (who is blind), Brit (who is deaf), Whiskey (who is given fluids through intravenous therapy each day) Jazz (who had been abused and refused to be touched but “has come a long way”) and Princess Wobblebottom (who doesn’t have control of her back legs, so is constantly falling over).

“We take a lot of the unadoptable cats,” Siri Zwemke said.

AT A GLANCE:

*Who: Siri and Darrell Zwemke.

*What: Siamese Cat Rescue Center in Locust Dale, Va.

*For information: Call (540) 672-6373 or visit the center’s Web site at va.siameserescue.org.