Building to honor memory of vet student, family members who died in plane crash
A building donated to the St. Martin Animal Shelter to house the shelter’s cat population is dedicated to the memory of Giselle Doucet, who died in a plane crash in May of 2024 along with her brother and father, only days before she was set to graduate from the LSU Veterinary School.
Dr. Megan Simon a veterinarian at Country Place Veterinary Clinic in St. Martinville, said that Doucet and her brother Jean-Luc, who was set to graduate from LSU with a degree in chemical engineering, and their father, plastic surgeon Dr. Lucius “Tre” Doucet, all loved cats.
“They would foster cats a lot and they were just cat lovers, and so we donated the building in their honor, as a way to remember them,” she said.
Simon invited the public to visit the animal shelter and spend time with the cats at the new building. People should call the shelter before visiting.
“The building is there as something that the community can definitely get involved in,” she said. “The whole point of it is it’s kind of an open house in a way. If somebody just wants to come look at the cats, or is having a bad day and they need a little bit of cat cuddles or want to play with the kittens or anything like that, it’s for people to be able to go and interact with these animals so that they’re not just in a cage all day every day and no one ever says hi to them.”
Simon joined her mother, Dr. Jackie Simon, at the veterinary clinic when she finished studying at the LSU Veterinary Clinic. The two spoke to the St. Martin Parish Council earlier this year about donating a building to the shelter specifically for cats.
“It was hard to get all the approvals and get all the ducks in a row,” Megan Simon said, noting that the building had to be hooked up to electrical service and meet other requirements before it could be donated. “A lot of the hesitance was if we have another building and more space, then that means we have to increase the budget for cats, but we said no, your budget can stay the same, you just don’t have to push everybody into one cage, and that’s six cats in one cage. You can spread them out so they’re not all on top of each other.”
Simon said she is pleased with how the building looks, and that the building was needed for the shelter.
“They did a really good job of adding some very nice stairs and railings and stuff like that,” she said. “It definitely was a good size and much needed. The building that they had beforehand was very outdated and over-full.
“The amount of cats that they’ve got in this city and the amount of ones that are just not fixed and that you find on the side of the road dead because they don’t have an owner is just too much.”
The Simons ordered the building to donate to the shelter.
“We looked at a lot of different places for an extended period of time and finally settled on one that would fit in the location and fit with what the shelter needed and the restrictions on how big it could be,” Megan Simon said.
Building
The added room gives the shelter the ability to deal with the cat population more thoroughly and humanely.
“Hopefully we’ll get some more stuff for the shelter and they’ll be able to continue doing what they do,” Simon said.
St. Martin Animal Shelter provides more vaccines for cats than many shelters do, and also has the cats spayed or neutered on site instead of sending them to a clinic off-site and then returned to the shelter as many shelters do.
“With the situation that we have in St. Martinville, we can have them fixed there in the shelter so they can get everything they need within one building,” she said. “They don’t have to outsource them to different clinics. It works really, really well. And they get microchipped. A lot of places don’t necessarily do microchips. The shelter here does a lot of very good preventative medicines.”