Tuesday, November 11, 2008

I've become The Cat Lady




In the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans, my cousins and I would often leave the safety of Grandma's house to go on adventures. The neighbors thought we were a nuisance, but grandma never asked what we did, and we didn't tell.

There are a thousand stories I have to tell about those days, but this blog is not about that. It's about the old lady we used to make fun of. She hated people, especially noisy, nosy children, but she had a houseful of cats. There were cats in every window, every open doorway, outside, in the alley...wherever you looked, there were cats. We never asked her name, because she always "shoo'd" us away. We just called her "The Crazy Cat Lady". There's one in every community, you know. You just have to know where to look.

Down here in Chalmette, Louisiana, you only have to look at my trailer, and in my yard. You'll see me there, feeding cats twice a day. I've become that lady. I don't shoo children away, but I do get involved with the cats, talking to them, trying to get them used to humans, rudely lifting tails to see who's female and who's male. I'm cataloging them for Animal Rescue of New Orleans.

I have a seperate porch to feed cats. Animal Rescue brings me HUGE bags of food periodically to help me feed the cats. We're trying to get appointments to get the females spayed, if we can trap them. Most of them are feral or semi-feral. I didn't ask for the cats. I nursed a few kittens whose mother died, and word got out that I was a sucker. As humans started leaving, cats started showing up at dinner time. I swear, that's how it happened.

Kat Mama, a white cat with black markings, is the sole survivor of Katrina in the Packenham Mobile Home Park. Soon after we moved in, we realized that the place was overrun with rats. We could hear them gnawing at our trailers at night. Then a big old Siamese Tom came a-courtin' Katrina (soon to be re-named Kat Mama), and the litter that came from that union grew up and chased the rats away.

So, people around the park started feeding the cats. Not me. I had my own cat companion (named CoCo) to feed. Life was good for a while. Then FEMA started finding apartments for some of the people who had been in the FEMA trailers. And they left...without the cats. As each person left, I found another cat or two hanging around my door, meowing pitifully. I had to start feeding them.

Well, there are only a handful of FEMA trailers left of the fifty that were once here, and I now have a colony of 20 cats to feed. I hope the stupid MySpace slide show is working up there...if not, go to my pics and look for "Katrina Kats" to see a few of them.

It's not nice to watch little ones die because their young mothers left them or got killed on the highway. It's not nice to see a young female mourn when she delivers prematurely and can't stir her dead kittens. It's not nice to wake up at two in the morning to go outside and chase a tomcat away who is raping the females. If you look at the photos and see a little white and red tabby kitten, smaller than my hand, that's Peanut. She lived about a week and a half. She was just too weak by the time I dug her out from under my trailer. She didn't take to the bottle well. Her brother and sister survived and were adopted, but she died one day while I was at work. Eddie kept her inside with him and tried to warm her with his own body, but she died there in his lap.

And just last week, I found a dead newborn kitten who had tried to follow his mother and got caught in the skirt around my trailer. His mother couldn't pull him out, and he died there.

Please help us. Here in St. Bernard Parish, the interest and the funds have dried up. There are no traps left to help me catch the cats. We're depending on strangers to donate food. I'll have to pay at least $10 or more to have each cat altered. Some of them need vet care.

These are the people who are helping me, and who can use your help:

Animal Rescue of New Orleans

Please visit their website and see what you can do. ~ Rhonda

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