magnetic lasso woes

I posted this image in the Critique forum, and one of the suggestions was to use lens blur on the background, and to adjust the black statue to be "more black". To pull this off, I had to select the statue and seperate it from the background in CS. I used the magnetic lasso tool, but it was a pain and took quite a while to do. If you look closely, the whiskers were the hardest part. Can anyone give me some tips on selecting a foreground image like this, or tell ma about a plug-in for PS?

Thanks