Rethink Your Life!
Finance, health, lifestyle, environment, philosophy
The Work of Art and The Art of Work
Kiko Denzer on Art



Cob: cob and others: animal shelter?

Vivian Westfall vivian at gentoo.net
Wed Aug 20 09:10:46 CDT 2003


Amanda,

The kind of building you build can actually be pretty flexible if you 
finish it off to meet your needs.  There are many ways to be very 
creative and make something that has very little cost in terms of 
materials.  What you need to do that is time, ingenuity, and boldness. 
 We are currently building a duck house (very small scale compared to 
your terms) for very little cost. We are getting free logs from the 
post-Cerro Grande Fire mitigation projects (forest thinning). We live in 
a volcanic area so when they built our house they simply took the excess 
rock from excavation and made 2 rock "gardens" (which I hated). These 
are making our Rubble Trench Foundation (we spent $25.00 on a drain 
pipe).  The fencing and chicken wire to cover the enclosure came from 
the metal salvage at the local dump... Which brings something else up... 
The dump is a virtual treasure trove. Ours has a habitat for humanity 
trailer where people can leave building supplies and get a tax 
deductable receipt.  Since you are providing a community service maybe 
you could do the same. Our insulation (ducks lay eggs better in cold 
weather with an insulated house) came from a restaurant remodel. I saw 
it in a dumpster and asked if I could have it. they went into the 
dumpster and even got it out for me. So, you could go to construction 
sites and ask that they save stuff for your project, contact stucco 
companies. Really the possibilities are endless. The other day someone 
dropped off a load of decent used materials at our house. The only catch 
is that it really takes a lot of time.  Besides the hunting down of 
materials, for us, the hauling and stripping of logs and rocks, and the 
piecing together of a rock foundation has been very time consuming. 
These are some of our ideas. You may have even more success since your 
project is a community service.

Vivian
P.S. You can probably get food donations as well. We get the throw away 
fruits and vegetables for our birds from our local grocery store.  

Amanda Peck wrote:

> My turn to be naive and idealistic.
>
> I'm on the board of what we hope will become the county-wide no-kill 
> animal shelter.  It may not be too early to start thinking of ways we 
> can use natural building for us.  We don't have land yet, nowhere 
> close to enough money to build even if that is donated.
>
> But the requirements may be suitable only for concrete, huge drains, 
> near fire-hose supplies of water.  I am looking for ideas--links 
> welcome--to do something different.
>
> Must be easy-to-clean.
>
> Moreover MUST be easy to disinfect.  Nothing worse than presiding over 
> a raging epidemic that surfaces again after a new lot of (mostly dogs 
> here) animals arrives.  And we could use a small surgery.   There are 
> traveling spay-neuter programs, but they need  a location to work in.  
> Surgery for dogs and cats is NOT aseptic, visit your local vet!, but 
> it does need to be pretty well antiseptic, like a field hospital.
>
> Must be proof against digging, chewing, marking with urine, don't need 
> a gorgeous building that's falling apart after a year.  On the other 
> hand, concrete floors work a lot better if they have those huge rubber 
> mats on them
>
> We really want to build with volunteers (local when possible) because 
> staffing later on is going to be mostly volunteer unless somebody 
> comes up with a whopping endowment.  So natural building ideas--cob, 
> straw-bale, compressed earth blocks, sound like a really good idea to 
> get people involved.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> There are two kinds of shelters:  Big, that house unadoptable and 
> retired animals for the rest of their lives--like the not-too-far away 
> elephant shelter, cat retirement homes and so on.  Small, that take in 
> animals (quarantine, take care of the most immediate medical 
> problems), distribute to foster care and eventual adoption.  The 
> former is lovely and romantic--and needed.  The latter, if the network 
> is in place, is less disruptive to the neighbors, better for the 
> adoptable animals.  We'd prefer the small one.
>
> Sorry, people, if, like me, you get two of these messages.  But I'd 
> like ideas from as wide an area as possible.
>
> Amanda.
>
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