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What Do You Do When You Inherit +/- 18 Cats?!

Subtitled: HEEEEEEEEEEELP!!!

The Pride Cartoon™ Creator's Blog, August, 2010


This story is a year overdue.  I'm just getting around to it now because I'm just coming out of denial.  Maybe. 

See, I am not that woman.  I know it seems like it, but I'm definitely not that crazy cat woman running around with cases of cat food and traps, driving miles every day to feed a colony of 18 ferals.   No no.  That is NOT me.  My mother was the one feeding every cat in Queens to the point that her yard has more cats than acorns.  (My cousin Lesli calls it "your kitty garden.")  I got the benefit of seeing their adorable faces when I visited, and the occasional cartoon idea, but they weren't my cats.... my life.... my onus.  I had two cats, see.  The end.  Just enough to drain my pocket book, just too much for my asthma - just enough.  

Until now.  O help me lawd.  One can't imagine the dread, the pressure, the horror, the shock and denial (even though I knew it was coming) to inherit somewhere in the area of 18-22 cats upon my mother's death last year.  Two indoor girls, Jackie and Sandra that Aunt Betty thankfully took home with her, and +/- 16 ferals in the yard (Ruby, Cindy, Opal,  Bangs, Snake, Hahn, Smudge, Garnet, Peach, Jack Cowson, Jack Adolphson, Slug, Sandy, Penny, Pearls and Black Shuck.  Those are the regulars that we see every day.  The +/- are a handful of up to 5 others that are, as my grandmother used to say, "sometimey"). 
And not just cats!  After a 2.5 year illness, my mother's house was a wreck.  And I don't mean simply messy or dirty or cluttered.  In the year 2012 the house will be 100 years old.  A house that old, if not constantly and minutely maintained, can very quickly become decrepit.  And it had.  It had good bones and great potential, but the kitchen floor was so worn you could see through parts of it to the basement.  There were these 50-year old things my mother called "linoleum rugs" on every floor that she thought were vintage gems and wouldn't pull up even though there was no discernible design on them anymore.  Pieces of tin paneling in the upstairs bathroom were literally standing at a 35º angle to the wall, forcing you to lean to one side when you showered.  And not to be outdone, there was the catastrophe of the half-finished ground floor bathroom, intended to ease my poor mother's life in her infirmity, halted in the middle by a spiteful contractor and held up in Buildings Department for more than a year (my poor mother died waiting for that bathroom to be done, a thorn that still sticks in my side, but that's a story for another forum).  There were bare sheet rock walls, exposed electrical wires and an entire floor of ungrouted 1" tiles that would trip you if you even looked at them crosswise.  If finished, a brand new ground floor bathroom would add great value to the house.  Half finished, it was worse than useless.  

And Opal had just had kittens.

LSS, it was just a Hindenburg zeppelin.  You couldn't just clean it up and rent it.  For all the same reasons, I couldn't live in it.  Nor sell it.  No one in their right mind would buy this pit.  The only interest I might have gotten would be from developers who would tear it down and build something new.  Which doesn't sound like too bad an idea, except:

What about the cats?  My mother's yard is their home.  Most of them were born there or in a neighboring yard.  It's the only place they know.  They've never had to fend for themselves.  They've eaten every meal of their lives on her back step.  Some of them have never been out of the yard (except Jack Adolphson on garbage day.  He walks out front, crisscrossing the street from can to can on garbage day scavenging people's discards, bless him.  He's very brave and ambitious.  He's also the great, great, great, grandson of Cow who used to do the same thing).  


Unless it was to an individual who loved cats, a sale of the house would cost these cats their way of life at the very least.  Sale to a developer, and the resulting chaos of demolition and construction, would drive them out into the street where they would encounter god only knows what.  A shattering ordeal for them at best.  Sixteen potential tragedies at worst. 

I see their sweet faces out there, the grass up to their noses on a summer day, or sprinting back to their insulated shelters through the snow in January.  I'm not that crazy cat lady.  But I'm also NOT the one that's going to turn them out to a cruel, unknown fate in the street.

It was like inheriting a Rubik's Cube.  What do you do with a money guzzling house, 18 cats, and zero income?  With her two pensions and social security, my mother could sustain a big, dusty old house and all those cats.  As a freelance artist, I can sometimes count the dollars I make in a month on my fingers and toes.  Where was I going to get $3800 every month, starting today?!  Yea, Mom left a little something, but it wasn't enough to care for 18 cats and the Titanic indefinitely.

Unless I relocated them?  Was that possible?  (Ugh.  I won't bore you- and disgust myself all over again- with the details of the wasted phone calls, most of which ended in barks of derisive laughter at the suggestion.  Just take my word for it that every agency you think would be the one to handle a relocation of  +/- 16 feral cats disappoints.)

Top of the do-list was that they had to stop having babies.  +/- 16 cats could not be allowed to grow to whatever exponential number they had the potential for if left to decide the matter themselves.  Not on my budget, anyway.  I had a local group, Friendly Ferals, come out and help me trap, neuter and spay all the cats with the mobile ASPCA clinic.  That was an unknown number of new problems prevented.  But not an answer to the question of how we were all going to eat.

I slept very little in those months.  All I did, 24 hours a day, is stare into space and turn this Rubik's Cube around and around and around and around in my mind.  The sides never lined up.  I was out of my mind with anxiety.  If I slept at all, I dreamed of cats.  Kittens.  Cats having kittens.  Kittens having kittens.  Me having kittens.  And all of us living in my yard.

When my father died in October and his widow offered me his kitten, Bochiche, I almost slapped her.

I could take a tenant and just tell them the yard belongs to the cats.  But then what if I got a bad one?  I've known people with rental properties that got stuck with deadbeat tenants who didn't pay their rent.  One friend of mine got a guy who wouldn't pay the rent and was a drug dealer.  He had guns and pit bulls and people pulling up in cars at every hour.  It can take 8-10 months to evict a bad tenant.  Are you kidding?  2 months and I'd be bankrupt.  That was out.

The only time the sides of the Rubik's Cube almost lined up was with the idea of short-term rentals.  As in renting the house for short periods to tourists from out of town.  This idea would solve most, if not all, of my problems:  I don't have to sell in a bad market.  I don't have to gamble on a tenant.  The house makes an income.  The cats aren't disturbed.  All options stay open and I can change gears at any time, even in a pinch.  Vacationers need less than residents.  A renovation for this purpose could be done very quickly, and much less expensively.  hmmm....

I decided to go for it.  I took the bit of money Mom left and put it into a simple renovation.  I did, no joke, about 50 years of work in 12 months.  It took way longer and a near heart attack more money than it should have, but the house is finished and open for bookings.  I designed a super cute website, listed on three vacation rental databases, and have so far had 4 guests.  And one film crew!   I hesitate to declare it a success yet because it is still brand new and there is a lot of time unbooked.  I hope it means nothing that there's been a dearth of inquiries in the month of August.  But the cats, all +/- 16 of them, have not yet missed a meal.

Although, I can only take partial credit for that at this moment.  About halfway through the renovation, when I was almost broke, I started writing letters to cat food companies and humane groups asking for donations.  Here's what happens when you ask cat food companies for donations of food for homeless cats:  Nothing.  I wrote every cat food company in the country.  BIG companies, you know the ones, to whom a year's supply of cat food to me would be a grain of sand on their Malibu Beach.  From 5 of the 6 major cat food companies, not even the courtesy of reply!  From the 6th I got a $2.00 coupon!  (That is two dollars in case you thought it was a typo)  HA!  If I wasn't so poor, I would have sent it back to them (with a token of thanks from my "kitty garden"). 

Just one group -one in all the many that I wrote, and the smallest- found the love in their hearts to give my feral cats a donation of food to pull us through the worst of the crisis.  They generously gave me a $1000, one-time donation of cat food, wet and dry, and even delivered it right to the door.  The only condition they placed on the gift was that I swear to never say who gave it lest they be inundated with demands.  I swore.  And I won't ever tell.  I am so grateful for that gift.  That cat food was delivered in March and will last well into October or November.  Without it, I don't know how I would be feeding those cats.  And I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it runs out.  I just hope the rental house is doing well enough to support its feline residents.  Wish us luck.

Any suggestions and bright ideas are welcome for how to maintain or relocate my colony.  (PS: I'm NOT that crazy cat lady.)  

-JD