Cat Tribunals Part 1 - Backstory

Over the last 30 years, I've had anywhere from two to three cats, and they were always strays that just found the place. People sometimes move out of the neighborhood and leave their cats behind, and they become my cats. One of the older cats that's here now was a kitten born next door and the people who lived there at the time just kind of abandoned her. She was just a few weeks old and kept stumbling over here with her head bobbling around and she's been here ever since, she's probably 16 or 17 years old. One of the other three baseline cats, I was at a swap meet, waiting for it to open, and I heard this crying. Somebody somehow had managed to put a small kitten in a dumpster that was surrounded by a fence of razor wire, and I climbed over it and rescued the thing. That's my normal level of cats, three or less. I never went looking for them, I've never bought a cat, I don't breed cats. I don't eat, breathe and sleep cats.

These three have been strictly indoor cats. There were a couple of others that would come around once in a while, and sometimes if there was one outside I might put some food out, but I didn't think of them as my cats. Everything was just like that the whole time, not a big deal.

In general, this neighborhood is made up of boxy 3-bedroom tract houses with very little character, slapped together after World War II for the returning veterans. It's pretty quiet, and generally has been harmonious. For instance, two houses on this side of the street, and two on the other side, have the same gardener cut all of our lawns and bushes and blow the stuff away, all on the same day. It's kind of a camaraderie, and I think because it's a bigger stop, he takes a little more care than just "I gotta move on." It's efficient for the gardener, not to have to load and reload his tools four different times. A good deal for him, a good deal for us, everybody wins, and it's a symbol of the way the neighborhood was up until recently.

Originally, all of the homes on the street had fruit trees in the back yard and shrubbery in the front and out by the street, but during the last 10 or 15 years the trend has been toward cement - driveways, patios, swimming pools - so there's a lot less habitat for both natural creatures and domestic creatures outside. Two houses over, there used to be a guy in his nineties who had lived there since the house was built in the early Fifties. His place was the last in the immediate area to have something like the original amount of trees and shrubs, and it became like an island surrounded by cement. A lot of critters which included possums, raccoons, cats, squirrels and lizards ended up there, and he lived harmoniously with them.

About two and a half years ago, he could no longer live alone and went to live with his daughter in Hawaii, and they rented out his house to a young guy. Shortly after he moved in, the neighbor in between us did a major yard cleanup, and is said to have suggested to the young guy that he ought to do the same thing. So one day, a truck and a bunch of workers showed up at what used to be the old guy's nature reserve. They cut down all the trees and bushes and shrubs and hauled them all away, and roto-tilled the ground into a plain of sterile dirt, and the next day another truck came and put down rolls of sterile-looking sod.

As a result, all of the critters who lived in there ran for their lives in every direction. The animals were frenzied, their habitat was destroyed and they didn't have anywhere to go. A lot of the houses have dogs, so they either got killed or chased away by the dogs. Our yard, though it has a lot of cement, has areas around the perimeter maybe four feet wide, with bushes and flowers, and no dog, so we got out share of critters - raccoons, possums (including a couple who drowned in the pool over time) and a whole lot of scared cats. I put dry food out because the old man wasn't around to feed them any more, and didn't do anything to chase them away. They laid around on the lounges and the hammock and the benches and kind of chilled out and relaxed. I started giving some of them names and saying hi to them. If you'd give them food, they'd come and rub against your ankles. They were friendly and nice, and I enjoyed having them out there. They didn't destroy anything in the yard, they didn't hurt anybody. I guess you could say they felt welcome, and they were. Squirrels came too, I enjoyed the squirrels and put corn out for them. The possums I can't say I ever really liked, and I can't say I enjoyed the raccoons but they needed somewhere to exist as well. Across the street, some cats were received in a friendly matter at houses where they either didn't have dogs, or had friendly dogs. So everything was cool, and as far as I knew, nobody was overtaxed at the time, and life went on.

Cat Tribunals Part 2 - Trouble in Paradise

The week of Thanksgiving, not too long after everything had relaxed and normalized, I went to the driveway out front one morning to get in my car. There was a very young little calico cat that had never let me touch it or get close to it, in the bushes at the base of the palm tree, motionless and staring at me. I thought that was odd, especially when I got closer and it didn't run away. When I got close enough to touch him, it became obvious that he was dead. I thought, "What happened to this beautiful young cat, that he would be dead?" So I looked up in the tree as my first inclination was to think he did something stupid like go up the tree after a bird, and fall and hit himself on the head. But it was odd how his eyes were open, and I couldn't find any marks on him.

Over the next few minutes, I found four more cat bodies scattered around the yard, all in the same condition, dead with their eyes open. The next day, another one was close to death. I took it to the vet, and it died while the vet was examining it. He said that everything about it, and everything I told him about the others, was consistent with strychnine rat poisoning.

I was shocked and sad, and didn't know what to think. There hadn't been any rats or mice in the neighborhood for a long time, because the cats had done them all in. If you don't have any rats or mice, there wouldn't be any legitimate use for rat poison. Had somebody stored rat poison in a place where cats could get into it? Maybe that could happen with one cat, but six? I remembered an automotive journalist I had worked with years ago, who drowned cats in his garage by putting them in a cage and dropping them in a trash can full of water referring to the procedure as "teaching them to swim". All of my bad feelings about that character surfaced, and I started thinking, "Someone has poisoned these cats."

I was worried about the well-being of the rest of them, and I just felt like the first thing I needed to do was protect them, and meanwhile try to figure out what was going on. It's like potted flowers when a frost comes, you might take them in the house. I felt that protecting them in the house would be more useful than calling authorities that rarely solve a crime such as this. I deal with the government on any level as little as possible, and generally, not voluntarily. A lot of people look to government for relief and comfort. I just don't want anything to do with them.

So every cat that was gentle enough to catch, which was mostly the young ones, I took inside the house. I couldn't catch them all, or I would have brought them all in. Some of them were pregnant, they had babies, I tried to save the babies, and so on. There was no way for me to know who poisoned the others, and I didn't want any more of them poisoned. Time went by, and no more of the feral cats outside were damaged, but I still had this feeling that maybe it was only because I took the pressure off by bringing a lot of them in the house.

There were too many cats around, and someone had to do something about it, but poisoning them was not the answer. So a program of fixing most of them and adopting them out, seemed to be the right thing to do. So I started fixing some of them, as I could afford it, got them their shots and all that, and started trying to find homes for some of them. I was lucky at first. The neighbor across the street had a cousin who wanted one, and she took a couple herself. I adopted out five or six cats successfully to people who even paid for the fixing themselves, or paid me back, and they got good homes. I felt good about myself and the cats. It was all success in the beginning, and I thought, "This is going to go real well, just keep doing what we're doing." There was no pressure, everything was very nice.

After I'd hit the neighbors and friends, the next thing seemed to be, put an ad on Craigslist offering free cats. I started getting these very hostile emails, from one woman in particular, lecturing and criticizing, basically saying I was a monster for allowing these cats to breed. She didn't know the situation at all, and I sure didn't want her coming around. I thought, maybe people who have too many cats are Public Enemy #1, and these emails are from the BATFF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Felines), or some other kind of law enforcement, like the ones that try to flush child molesters out of the closet. So I kind of got wary about Craigslist.

At the same time, other people were telling me to be careful about who I gave the cats to because people are using kittens for snake food. And there are always the rumors about laboratories where mad scientists clamp cats into immobility with screws in their skulls to hold their heads still, attach electrodes to sensitive areas and discover how much pain they can take before they die of it. I didn't want any of these cats to become either snake food or research subjects, so that was the end of Craigslist. The adoption project slowed down. Life was complicated. Some of the cats I befriended, some of them I really like, and some of them I don't like. Same as people, they come in all different types. I just fixed as many of them as I could and took care of them.

Cat Tribunals Part 3 - The Long Arm of the Law

One day, when I wasn't here, an Animal Control officer showed up and filled out a form and stuck it in the fence, notifying us that we had more than three cats which was in violation of local laws and that would need to be changed. The neighbor across the street saw the truck, and came out thinking maybe one of the local pets had been hit by a car or something, and they got to talking. This woman was involved in the fixing and adoption efforts and in finding pet carriers for trips to the vet and so on, and knew the background of the situation, so she was filling the officer in on how it happened that we'd ended up with a lot of cats here, and how we were getting them fixed, as money and time allowed, and all of that. Then I pulled up.

We had a cordial conversation. The officer said that our next-door neighbor had reported us as having too many cats, and the cats were shitting on their lawn, et cetera. I said, "I wouldn't exactly call them our cats," and tried to explain that the ones outside on the lawn are feral cats. "They're wild cats, and they go where they want, which, except for places where there are dogs, is still pretty much everywhere." She explained to me that the law in the city is, you can have three cats, total, inside and outside, period that you are feeding, unless you take out a kennel license or something, which they're not going to grant in a residential neighborhood anyway. I said, "It's kind of hard to control the number of feral cats, they come and go as they please." She made the point that they hung around because we offered food and water, and you're not allowed to feed feral cats, or give them water. I said, "Can't give them water? Are they an enemy or something, like Al-Qaeda?" She said, "No, you're just not allowed to do things with wild animals."

She was concerned about me giving the cats water, but unconcerned about six of them being poisoned. And she didn't mind that, if I didn't give them water, they'd drink swimming pool water that has all kinds of cancer-causing chemicals in it, or they'd drink water in the street that has radiator fluid in it, or some other dirty water that they find. That's not good for the animals.

She told me they wanted to inspect our house and verify that everything was clean, and count how many pets were in there, and so on. I said, "You can do that, but I'm not ready for you guys, I'm not going to have you in there today." She said, "You know, we could get a warrant." I said, "Yes, you could. Do you have any evidence that there's anything wrong, other than possibly having too many cats in here?" She said no, the outside animals looked healthy, and the house appeared from outside not to be harboring any serious health threat. But she said I needed to start a process of reducing the number of animals, and that they would work with us on getting them fixed, and help get extra discount coupons to defray some of the cost. She was talking about working through the situation in terms of months, and that they would make progress reports, and would be back to inspect. At that point I really didn't have a problem with animal control coming over, it was just one of those things that happens in life, and they comported themselves well.

Cat Tribunals Part 4 - Neighbors Gone Wild

I wasn't happy that we'd been reported to Animal Control, especially by the people next door. If they were worried about health issues, they could have started with the pond in front of their house where mosquito larvae flourished. I don't think making an official report and complaint was necessary, or that every set of neighbors would have done that. I think a lot of people would have offered to work together on such a problem. It's what I would have done. It was odd too, that they would complain about the cats shitting on their lawn. For about 12 of the 15 years or so that they've lived here, their dog lived in back a good part of the time. The dog got out in the street a lot, because he went through the bars of their fence, and he used to shit on our lawn and everybody else's lawn, and he'd screw all the female dogs in the neighborhood he could chase down. We used to grab him and put him back over the fence for his own protection. They also had four chickens at one time. When they had just a rough grass yard, they weren't so picky, but when they spent probably two thousand dollars cleaning up their yard and putting down sod, they wanted their thing to be perfect all the time, and now nobody is welcome.

Something has happened to these people, and they're not like they used to be. They used to be more normal, and they're quite bizarre now, very unfriendly and very hostile. They certainly weren't operating from logic. Because a cat can only be in one place at a time, if it was in our yard, it wasn't in their yard. Where's the harm? It's like providing an activities center for restless teenagers, keeps them from congregating in parks or other places where people might not want to have them. Why don't they realize it's a benefit to them, that the cats have somewhere to go?

They have four kids, and they all live in this compound. I refer to it as a compound because it's got bars all the way around it, and over most of the windows, and double gates on the driveway- literally a sally-port. One of their children in particular is extremely mean and very hostile, really a little nutcase of some sort. The kids don't play with other kids, they just keep to themselves, and spent a lot of time screaming and yelling. They throw rocks at the cats, they throw shit at the cats, and they throw bottles and pieces of pipe at the cats. Sometimes one of them will throw something into the bushes between our yard and their yard, and all of a sudden you see half a dozen cats explode out of the bushes and run away terrorized.

The woman is an intolerable person, and it's a pressure-cooker situation, especially with the youngest one being such a monster. We were used to hearing her screaming at her kids, and occasionally whacking them. She was a bomb waiting to explode, and it happened to explode over cats. She started to really lose it, she'd be out in the yard screaming at the top of her lungs, very out of control, screaming over at us, "I'm going to get you, you bitch," and all kinds of profanity in English and Armenian. And she started throwing catshit over the fence. Some would land on the ground, and some would go in our swimming pool. It was hard to ignore, but I tried to ignore her.

So, one day when she was really screaming and ranting and raving and throwing stuff, I decided to go over and have a talk with them. I asked another neighbor across the street, who is from the same culture as them, if she would accompany me. One, there wouldn't be any misunderstanding about anything I said or did, and two, I figured I'd keep myself under control better if there was a neutral third party there. The woman was in the yard and I asked her to ask her husband to come out, because I wanted to talk to them. She says "You can talk to me." I said, "I know I can talk to you but I want to talk to both of you, I want to make sure you both understand what I have to say."

So he came out, and I talked about her screaming and throwing shit over the wall. When I mentioned that I didn't appreciate being reported to Animal Control, her husband turned and looked at her. He did not know she'd done that, it was a surprise to him. They started screaming at each other in Armenian, and I don't know exactly what was said, but I could see that he was very unpleased with her. So besides our argument, there was his argument she had to deal with, so she really flipped out.

The lady I'd brought with me tried to inject some neutral wisdom. She said, "Please, try to understand, you're living in America now, and you don't treat animals the way you did in the old country. There are a lot of animal lovers here, they're living on both sides of the street and all around you, and they don't want to see animals having things thrown at them. Just please try to control yourself and not make enemies out of your neighbors. You never know when you'll need your neighbors."

The woman next door was mad at the neutral neighbor, mad at me, and mad at her husband, and he was mad at her. She really screamed vile things at me that day, with the other woman as a witness, and that's when I really knew there would be some big problems on this street. That conversation didn't accomplish anything, and things just kind of got worse and worse. Even when I move the cats, there isn't going to be a happy ending.

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