Featured Visitor: A Good Hairdresser Can Change Your Life!
Cathy Ramsey is one amazing woman, and the animals are lucky to have her! She became a pet groomer 36 years ago, and grooming has served as a backbone for her work with the animals ever since. Throughout the years, in addition to working as a groomer, she would go and volunteer her grooming services in shelters wherever she and her husband were living at the time.
When she was living in Texas, she started fostering dogs and cats locally, and bringing puppies and kittens back from the Turks and Caicos Islands when she & her husband would go and work on their beach house there.
While she had been a supporter of Best Friends for years, it wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina that she had the chance to volunteer with Best Friends. She first went down to volunteer in Tylertown, Mississippi in November of ’05, and then to Celebration Station in New Orleans for several weeks in January & February of ’06.
Cathy said the time she spent grooming and volunteering with Best Friends and the Katrina animals was life altering. “The most heart wrenching rewarding thing I had ever done” she wrote. She lost both her parents within 6 months of each other, and truly felt that the volunteering, and the people she had met volunteering, helped her get through this very difficult time.
One of the people that she met during her work on Hurricane Katrina was Ed Fritz, who later contracted her to come to Best Friends and help train two of the employees here on grooming. Just before the 3 week training session that they had set up, the Great Kitty Rescue of Pahrump Nevada came into the forefront – and needless to say, Cathy made a detour and spent a week in Pahrump before coming to Best Friends. Because of her detour, two beautiful tabby cats became part of Cathy’s family, Elmer, and Emmett – who after what they went through in Pahrump, truly must believe they landed in Heaven.
Currently in California to care for her sister, she started fostering kitties (again!) and now runs a small cat and dog rescue. They are in the process of getting their 501c3 for the rescue, and Cathy said – “I know without a doubt if it hadn’t been for volunteering with Best Friends I wouldn’t be running the rescue I run today.”
On behalf of all the animals Cathy – Thank You!
Written by Jennifer JohnsonPhotos from Cathy Ramsey