8/15/2023 0 Comments Ccat house cincinnati![]() ![]() And here’s the kicker: none of the cats in that 16 percent were even eligible for adoption, due to illness or other factors. In 2017-18, the euthanization rate had dropped to 16 percent. Indeed, Catman2 has been an enormous success story: a decade ago, 69 percent of cats that entered the Jackson County Animal Shelter-one-third of which were healthy and adoptable-were euthanized due to space limitations. That money paid for the spay or neuter of more than 600 cats. The museum and shelter are wholly intertwined: over the past two years, the museum raised $35,000 for Catman2. It’s still going strong, housing anywhere from 60-80 cats at any given time, sans cages, near Sims’ home in Cullowhee. The museum itself is an outcropping of the cat shelter that Sims opened in 1996, called Catman2 (“like Katmandu,” Sims explains), which became the first no-kill cat shelter in Jackson County. Since retiring in 1991, however, he’s dedicated his life to one cause: the honor and protection of felines. Sims has been, by turns, a Navy man, a doctor of education, a boat builder, a biologist and a professor. “German cats are stern-proper and sober-which is typical of that culture. It’s interesting, Sims says, to see how different cultures interpret the essence of the feline. A wide variety of countries are represented, from Japan to Germany to Hungary and virtually everywhere in between. Sims, who purchased everything in the museum himself, doesn’t discriminate in the items he chooses. There’s also a pinball machine, a carousel, wall art, and so much more. In addition to the tree trunk kitty and the mummified feline, the museum boasts a stunning array of feline paraphernalia: a petrified corpse that was extracted from a chimney in England, wind-up toys from the 1890s, Tiffany glass and California glass pieces, containers of now-defunct cat food brands, and a robotic cat that pops out of a trashcan like Oscar the Grouch. Neither museum offers the breadth or diversity of Sims’ collection. The former features a functional cat house designed by the late modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright, while the latter boasts over 1,000 plastic cats that wave their paws. ![]() ![]() The two closest contenders for the crown are, oddly enough, both located in Ohio: the Feline History Museum in Alliance and the Lucky Cat Museum in Cincinnati. There’s a good chance that the American Museum of the House Cat is, indeed, the premier house cat museum in the United States. “But it’s probably the best one in this country.” “It’s not the best one in the world,” Sims says of his museum. The museum is located in Sylva, North Carolina, right off US-441, and features numerous charms, including a mummified cat from ancient Egypt (which Sims named “Hebony”) and a tree-trunk sculpted into the form of a house cat, which purportedly dates back to 17th century Borneo. Since then, it’s seen upwards of 15,000 people from all over the globe walk through its doors. His creation, the American Museum of the House Cat, opened in 2017. “We don’t know cats around here.” Even so, he felt compelled to honor the existence of his beloved felines. Sims, 84, understood this argument to an extent. To build one would be a waste of time, money and effort. ![]() Harold Sims heard it over and over again: there was simply no market in Western North Carolina for a house cat museum. ![]()
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