As 2014 draws to a close, one word comes to mind: cats. This was the year of the cats for us. During the last few months of 2013 we noticed a significant number of community cats hanging around our yard. As the weather grew colder, it became obvious that these cats were looking for food, water, and shelter. These were not cats that had been let outside by their caregivers but, rather, these were cats who had nowhere else to go. This was, to say the least, distressing. We later learned that there were some situations in our neighbourhood (abandonment, hoarding, etc.) that led to the spike in the number of community cats hanging around. At the time, however, we weren’t sure what was happening but began putting out food and building shelters. We started to get to know some of the cats, the ones that came to our house the most frequently.
First there was Ollie and Ernie. We had been feeding them for a while and they started coming regularly, like clockwork each morning at 6am. Ollie, a little tuxedo cat, was friendly almost from the first moment we met her, but Ernie was quite afraid of us. Very early on in January we brought Ollie and Ernie in to the house. Our 14 year old house cat Jenny doesn’t really like other cats, so we weren’t sure how this would go. We put them in the basement to quarantine them (not sure what we were dealing with) — not ideal, but at least they were out of the polar vortex temperatures.
The day Ollie came in, it was one of the coldest days of the year and temperatures were around -20 C. I looked out the window and saw her stuck in a snowbank, crying her head off. She had dove from the fence to escape pursuit from one of the unfixed male cats in the neighbourhood and could not get out. By the time I got to her, she was soaking wet and shivering. After Ollie was in the house, her pal Ernie started spending a lot of time near the basement window. I’m convinced they could see each other and it wasn’t long before Ernie was also inside.
We couldn’t get near Ernie for the longest time, even after she was inside. Yes, we discovered that Ernie was a SHE when we noticed her ever-expanding belly. We managed to get her up and out of the basement and in to a bedroom just hours before she gave birth to four beautiful kittens. We still call her Ernie (the name stuck!), but her full, official name is now Miss Ernestina Maria.
The kittens were born in March, and they were a true delight. It was wonderful watching them grow and explore the world around them. Luckily we found people willing to adopt these kittens, and they are all doing well in their new forever homes now.
Throughout the spring and summer a big fluffy cat we named Tom started coming around regularly. Poor Tom seemed to always be getting in to scraps and scrapes, and one morning he showed up with a pretty nasty war wound. He had a bump on his head about the size of a small apple and it was swollen and bloody. Of course, he wouldn’t let us get near him. It was that day that we decided we needed to do something for Tom and the others, so we worked with our neighbour, Allyson, to organize a fund-raiser for the community cats of our street. Allyson was also providing food and shelter and comfort to as many cats as she could throughout the cold months of 2014. We decided to hold a yard sale and bake sale in July, an event to raise money to help get some of these cats off the street and in to their forever homes — they all needed spaying/neutering, and many needed medical attention. The event was a great success, not only in terms of the amount of money raised (way beyond our modest expectations), but also in terms of bringing neighbours together to talk about the problem.
Throughout the rest of the year we upped our efforts to get the community cats off the street. The money raised was a big help, but it wasn’t nearly enough to deal with the scope of the problem. We also received generous assistance with the spay/neuter procedures from Niagara Action for Animals. Many kind people also donated cat food to the cause.
All in all, we were able to help 10 cats from our community this year, 3 are still with us and the rest have been adopted out to their forever homes. All of them are doing very well. We also heard through the grapevine that the hoarding situations near us have been “dealt with” — I’m not exactly sure what that means (although I have some guesses). I hope the cats that were removed are ok. I wish we could have helped more of them.
Over the last few weeks we have breathed a sigh of relief each time we look out on freshly fallen snow and see an absence of paw prints. I know that there are hundreds and hundreds more animals in need in Niagara so I’m not resting too easy, but I’m glad that for the moment things are a bit better for the community cats in our neighbourhood. I was also glad that we were able to help these 10 cats and would do it again in a heartbeat, but will also be quite happy if 2015 doesn’t bring quite as many cats to our doorstep. It was an intense year–if we weren’t actively taking care of them, we were talking about them, worrying about them, or raising money to help them.
