Idyllic Retirement Home Promises Paws to Reflect

WESTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Like many homes for the aged, the Golden Years Retirement Home here is expected to feature a carefully landscaped setting, a professionally staffed clinic and individualized dietary plans.

But Golden Years also will have scratching posts, climbing ledges, an indoor play ring carpeted with synthetic turf and heated floors to warm the paws of the 100 dogs and cats expected to spend their declining years there.

The Bide-A-Wee Home Assn., a nonprofit organization that operates veterinary clinics and no-kill shelters in New York City and Long Island, says it has received hundreds of inquiries from interested pet owners about the 9,000-square-foot home that apparently will be the only one of its kind in the United States exclusively for dogs and cats.

Would-be clients have inquired from as far away as Japan and Germany, said Elizabeth Cooke, Bide-A-Wee president. Ground may be broken this spring, she said, and the home could open late this year.

For a one-time $10,000 fee, Bide-A-Wee plans to house dogs and cats that are at least 8 years old (that’s about 56 in human years) and are considered unadoptable, in part because they are so accustomed to their longtime human companions that they cannot acclimate to a new home.

“We had one man who called us, and his wife has passed away, and he has three pugs, and he does not want them to be separated when he passes away,” said Cooke. “Like many other people we’ve heard from, he didn’t really want the dogs adopted.”

Over the next 20 years, Cooke said, Bide-A-Wee plans to develop a complex in Westhampton that would include an obedience-training center, a new shelter and a facility to train Seeing Eye dogs.

At Golden Years, dogs will not be caged. They’ll each have doorless, tiled cubicles. And the cats, whom Bide-A-Wee promotional materials refer to as “feline residents,” will enjoy free reign of a “cattery” partitioned by glass panels into three or four areas.

Dogs will have two daily walks. Plenty of window seats will be available for cats in their “cattery,” which will have one end enclosed by wrap-around, greenhouse-style panes of glass.

Cooke says Golden Years will cost $1 million to build and more than $500,000 annually to operate. Cooke said the $10,000 fees are not expected to cover all expenses, and donations will be used to make up the difference.

The closest existing facility to what Bide-A-Wee plans apparently is the Stevenson Companion Animal Life-Care Center at Texas A&M; University in College Station, Texas.

There, for a $25,000 fee, the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine will house, care for and study the pets until they die. The center now houses five cats and dogs, but 195 animals have been registered by their owners to eventually retire there. Those animals include horses and a llama--the large-animal fee is $50,000--said Sally Knight, the center’s director.