Columnist Susan Snyder: Ex-dancer a feline’s best friend

Sunday, Jan. 23, 2000 | 9:11 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@ vegas.com or 259-4082.

Renee Lyss hasn't graced a Las Vegas stage in decades, but she's dancing as fast as she can.

With a dancer's discipline and an animal lover's passion, the former Stardust performer spends her days cleaning litter boxes, washing food bowls, sweeping floors and juggling veterinary bills for the more than 100 cats under her care.

"They like easy listening," Lyss said, adjusting the volume of a radio that played to an audience of about a dozen cats.

She had just finished cleaning a play area in one of the three mobile homes and two open-air enclosures that house up to 300 cats under her care.

Lyss has been rescuing Las Vegas' unwanted cats for about 30 years. In 1997 she created a private, nonprofit group called FLOCK, which represents For the Love of Cats and Kittens.

For five years Lyss and her band of volunteers have been making better lives for feral cats and abandoned pets at a five-acre compound near Sloan.

They work on a shoestring budget, and they work quietly because Lyss says the rural residential property isn't zoned for a kennel. That brought plenty of hissing and spitting last week from neighbors of a nearby manufactured home community.

Clark County Planning Commission members on Tuesday said in April they would decide whether to grant Lyss a zoning variance that would allow her to keep the kennel running.

No one complained about the sanctuary until a July flood knocked down all of its fences, Lyss said. Volunteers have replaced the fences and rounded up most of the cats. Traps still are set for the others.

The hearing was a diversion in Lyss' clockwork existence. Every day she cleans and fills dozens of dishpans with food and water, changes litter boxes, washes floors and tends to sick cats. Twice a week she and the volunteers wash and dry all of the blankets.

In her "free" time Lyss does the paperwork and bargain-hunting that keeps FLOCK afloat. At night she hits the Strip with cat traps and a lot of patience.

"I don't leave my traps. I wait," she said. "It gets pretty cold sometimes."

It's a far cry from the way Lyss used to work on the Strip. She was one of the Stardust's original Lido dancers back in 1958. And she was one of Madam Bluebell's dancers, an English group widely known for its beautiful, talented dancers.

When she retired from dancing, Lyss took a job shuttling tourists for a Grand Canyon air tour company.

In driving all over town, Lyss said she saw hundreds of abandoned cats.

"I saw starving cats and little skeletons of kittens," she said. "The amount of death, starvation and disease -- I just couldn't take it anymore."

So she took them in. She finds them abandoned by their owners in hotel rooms or at her doorstep. She traps feral ones.

It's taking a toll. Lyss says 67 is too old for the constant work. And the shelter is running at a $9,419.28 deficit. She constantly frets about money, lives with the cats, shops in thrift stores and has no vacations.

"I have no life," Lyss says.

She stooped to pat the purring pussycats rubbing around her ankles.

"But I don't see how any decent human being could ignore the situation."