Alicia Cuccia picks up the ringing phone. The woman on the other end has a problem. She’s relocating to Europe and wants Cuccia to find a new home for her four-year-old cat. Cuccia patiently explains that France does not require a long quarantine for pets–she should take the cat along. The woman hangs up on her.
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When Cuccia opened Paws for Thought five years ago, she had no idea that her pet-supply store would one day double as a licensed, cageless animal shelter and referral service. At the time she had only four cats. Since then she’s had about 2,000 cats adopted by customers; on any given day you’ll see some 30 felines lounging on the counters, perched on cat trees, and nesting on the purple shelves between the cat toys and birdseed. “It can be a markfest around here sometimes,” Cuccia says. “Sometimes they all choose the same day for puking and hair balling.”
Cuccia doesn’t deal in such pet store mainstays as lizards, puppies, and hamsters or the expensive accessories that go with them. “We could sell them and make a buck, but we don’t.” Recently she stopped selling fish. “People don’t know how to take care of them–they don’t know the proper filtration. They would come in and say, ‘All my fish died. I need new fish.’” When she worked for another pet store, the worst part of her job was “when customers would ask to go into the alley to beat the feeder mice and rats we sold them to death, so they could bring them home to their snake.”
