A three-acre ranchette nestled on a hillside in the Texas Hill Country town of Bulverde is full of survival stories.
One of its residents, Jerry, an orange-and-white speckled cat, was injured when someone tied a firecracker around his neck and lit the explosive. Fortunately, a good Samaritan found Jerry, and his wounds have since healed.
Lucky, a brown cat with black stripes, was abandoned by his owners after they vacated their apartment, while Helen, who suffers from a neurological disorder that hinders her ability to walk, was on the kill list at San Antonio's Animal Care Services.
The felines are among the neglected, abandoned and "ugly" cats getting a second chance at the Bear Den Cat Sanctuary.
The homespun rescue facility, whose rescue and fundraising videos have garnered thousand of likes on Instagram in recent months, is the brainchild of Blake, 51, an aesthetics nurse. Before launching the facility in 2021, she'd pondered her legacy.
"I got to a point where I started to question, 'What am I doing with my life?'" said Blake, who asked that her last name not be used for privacy reasons since she and her daughter also reside at the sanctuary. "How am I going to leave the world a better place than when I got here?"
After soul searching and the loss of a beloved pet, she decided the solution was to give homeless cats a place to live out the rest of their lives in peace.
And in San Antonio, there are plenty of cats in need.
The Sanctuary
So many, in fact, one of Blake's primary concerns is folks dumping animals at her property.
"We've had issues with dumping. It's a serious problem," Blake said, pointing to Dog, a mutt who exhibits mannerisms more reminiscent of a cat. The canine is among the animals abandoned at her property since she opened the shelter.
Blake, who moved to San Antonio in the 1990s from Austin to attend nursing school, got the idea to open the sanctuary after her beloved indoor-outdoor cat Bear went missing. She made posters and followed every lead, zig-zagging San Antonio in search of her pet.
"I went all over the place," Blake said. "And although it was never Bear [I found], it was a homeless cat. So that opened my eyes. Like, oh my gosh, who in the world would think there's this many homeless cats?"
The San Antonio Feral Cat Coalition, a partner of the Bear Den Sanctuary, estimates more than 200,000 feral domestic felines roam San Antonio. ACS has euthanized 75 this year alone.
After seeing the stray cat problem, Blake used a modest inheritance from her father to open the sanctuary. The money wasn't enough to buy a luxury sports vehicle, but it was sufficient to place a down payment on the property and make her dream a reality.
The Bear Den sanctuary is now home to more than 150 cats. Some are healthy and eventually go to partner organizations for adoption. Others are chronically ill, while some just need to be spayed or neutered — the most important tool in fighting San Antonio's stray cat problem, according to Blake.
"It's absolutely the most fundamental process to end the suffering of homeless cats and dogs," she said.
Community effort
The facilities at the Bear Den Sanctuary are nicer than some veterinary clinics, and the well-kept hillside is dotted with miniature cat homes, which cost $1,500 each. There's also a new barn built of stained wood that provides shelter for cats at night and during inclement weather.
Blake doesn't need to worry about payroll since Bear Den's work is carried out by a "motley crew" of roughly a dozen volunteers, including college kids, a pharmacist and a Southwest Airlines flight attendant.She continues to seek volunteers and donors through the facility's website, beardensanctuary.org.
Even so, the costs are steep.
Between the ever-rising cost of pet insurance, medical bills and spay and neuter procedures, she spends roughly $4,000 a month to keep the operation going, at one point even taking out a personal loan to keep her dream alive.
"Donations have been a huge help. They helped build the buildings, they helped build the fence," Blake said, referencing the anti-coyote barrier surrounding the property.
Indeed, the Bear Den Sanctuary has become a victim of its own success.
The sanctuary recently hit capacity and is longer accepting new pack members, and last week alone, Blake received calls about taking in 400 cats from other shelters, animal-care organizations and apartment buildings.
At this point, she's looking for an animal-loving property owner to lease land to her nonprofit to help the cause — and, naturally, receive a tax rebate for their efforts.
"I really don't want to box it in and say, 'Hey, I think it needs to absolutely look like this," Blake said. "But, I think it needs to be at least 20 to 30 acres. If someone has a big-ass ranch and they've got, I don't know, 5,000 acres and could give us 20-30 acres of land, that would be fantastic."
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