pyewacketsworld

Part 7:

I have to confess, relating a lot of what happened in the year 2006 isn’t easy for me. Especially the part when Animal Care & Control came into the picture and on an almost daily basis started taking the “extra” cats. None of this would’ve have happened if my mother had taken on the responsibility of getting the cats fixed on time. As mentioned previously, due to my disability I couldn’t travel to the vet who was quite a distance away. There was nothing however wrong with my mother, and as the cat population exploded, she actually thought it was normal to have so many cats…believe me it wasn’t, it was sheer insanity, and I got stuck trying to keep the apartment as odor free as possible (a losing battle), while my mother didn’t lift one finger to help clean. Yes, granted, in her last year of life she was very sickly due to having been diagnosed with cancer, but that doesn’t explain the ten, twelve, fifteen years prior.

The so-called good news though was that due to my connection with a pet rescuer who lived in Manhattan, and who had some ties with Animal Care and Control, as the cats were being brought into the facility, she too was tracking them and rescuing them out. A total of eighteen cats were surrendered to AC&C and she managed to rescue and take out ten, some who were later adopted out and some placed in a feral colony for those cats who had more feral like qualities and had little chance of being adoptable. As for the other eight. Some were unfortunately euthanized almost right away, mainly due to age. That could have explained a lot of my difficulty to begin with in trying to get pet rescuers in general to take the cats: age. I remember even talking to the director of North Shore Animal League one time, and at first she seemed to be interested in at least taking one or two, until I mentioned what the average age of most of the cats were, that being eight and up. She told me honestly, that even they have problems trying to adopt out cats older than three, as everyone wants cute cuddly, young kittens, not older cats.

I was to have other luck on May 1st of 2006 when private pet rescuers agreed to take some of the cats. I say private as these were pet rescuers who had somehow got wind of my story via cross-posting from the different pet rescue sites I belonged to. These type of rescuers do NOT want to advertise their rescue operation as they don’t want the “dumpers”, that is people who will anonymously leave pets at a rescuer’s doorstep. So each of the two private pet rescuers agreed to take five cats each. The saddest parting was to be with Whoopi, the female cat who in effect started the population explosion. If it hadn’t been our limitation to only keep two cats, besides the two I eventually choose to keep, I would have loved to have kept her, as well as maybe two others, Sherkahn and Bobbity…the later two were taken in by a friend, Lisa, who had already taken two cats during 2001 when my mother and I had the first eviction issue.

On and off, almost on a daily basis from April 18 until May 4th, AC&C was to come to our apartment and take at least one or two more cats, as I’ve mentioned they were to take a total of eighteen cats. By now we were assigned to a new lawyer via JASA-Legal Services of the Elderly, although she didn’t come to the very first court appearance which was on Monday, May 8th. Luckily the director of JASA had sent via DSL a letter of postponement to set another court date in which our lawyer could come and represent us.

Then there was an incident that happened that completely turned me off with the whole AC&C deal and I refused to surrender any more cats to them…don’t worry, I managed to place the cats elsewhere, but the whole AC&C incident was aggravating. I couldn’t help thinking it would have been so much better if the other pet rescuers I had contacted on and off all the way back to around 2003 when I got computer savvy and was able to contact  some many pet rescuers if each one could have taken at least one, then NONE of the cats would have gone to AC&C.

More and to be continued in my next entry.

©2009~Melanie Neer aka pyewacket

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