Santé D'Or — Local services in Los Angeles

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME FILLING OUT THEIR APPLICATION

I have wasted three hours of my life on this awful organization now.

My two bonus-children ages 14 and 12 went to go visit the cats last Sunday and fell in love with one in particular. We were loving on him, he was snuggling both kids. My son is Autistic and normally quite frightened of animals and even he immediately fell in love with this cat.

I spent a good ten to fifteen minutes speaking with a volunteer about the cat and full transparency she did tell me that he is known to scratch or bite when under/over stimulated but not ONCE did anyone mention to us in person that this cat could potentially be dangerous for children. I told the volunteer that we would be going home and applying for this specific cat and she told us how excited she was for us. Not once did she warn us to not even bother applying because we have "children." Again, my "children" are 14 and 12. I don't know anyone who considers their teenager and preteen a "child."

So imagine our surprise when we received a three sentence email from Sante D'Or that says:

"Thank you for your interest in El Chavito and adopting from Sante D'Or. Ele Chavito would do best in a home without children. He can be incredibly loving, but can also get overstimulated and react by scratching or biting. Thank you for your understanding. Morgan."

They did not even give us a chance to do a trial period. Then when I sent a follow up email with pictures and videos from when we met the cat, they had the audacity to send me cut and paste email saga about how "Our priority as an adoption organization is to match our animals to the home they would do best in." Well....to me it seems like your priority is to steal donations and gatekeep as many cats as possible.

Save your sanity, go to the...

I have been volunteering at Sante Dor for about a year, and adopted my girl Starlene, formerly known as Suna, in November.

First, on volunteering: It’s an awesome rescue where the cats live good lives, even the ones who go unadopted year after year have a good family right at the rescue. It is easy to accommodate volunteering as you sign up for shifts whenever you want - there is no minimum commitment so it works well if you have a busy schedule, although there are also those who choose to do regular times. There is a shift leader who will direct you through feeding, cleaning etc.

On adopting: I met Suna while I was volunteering, she had been fostered since she was a kitten by Sante Dor and is two now. She had a congenital liver issue that they had taken her to multiple vets to diagnose and come up with a treatment plan. They had thorough paperwork of all of her past medical work and gave me the truth about what this might mean for her future. The adoption process has several steps to ensure a good match and education of the pet parent to be. You won’t bring a cat home the same day but you will bring them home for a lifetime. They were flexible when I needed to delay bringing her home to treat my resident cat’s sickness and sent me home with some food, litter and medicine to get her started.

Heather, Morgan, and everyone at the rescue are amazing people who work really hard to serve these cats and...

I’ve been a weekly volunteer at Sante D’Or for over 1.5 years, also fostering several pairs of kittens, helping with TNR, and even adopting my own two boys here. This is an incredible organization run by a group of badass women. The care given to all their rescues and the difference they’re making in their TNR program to help strays in the community is phenomenal. I couldn’t recommend a better place to look for your forever furbaby or to volunteer than here.

Experiencing the inside of rescue truly gives you a different perspective. You realize how understaffed and underfunded these organizations are, and yet they are still doing incredible things. Knowing this makes me feel sad reading some of these recent ‘bad’ reviews. In anyone’s journey of trying to make a difference in your community, the best thing is to be a solution to a problem instead of the problem. Know the #1 priority to any rescue is giving the best quality of life to the current animals in their care, which means they can’t always save/rescue/help the thousands of others that come to the door (as much as they want to). So it’s important to educate and empower yourself in those situations instead of putting more of a burden...