Oh God The Cats
On Kitty City, Kindness, Responsibility & Wanting To Run Away
Like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys, ‘Live and let live’ is my core philosophy, if I really think about it, which, honestly, I don’t very much.
We are all creatures of instinct and although I like to imagine I’m in charge of my own decisions and destiny, mostly I just react and respond to the ever changing twists and turns on the river of life.
The idea of freedom has always felt like a dangling carrot to me, of being able to jump on a plane at a moment’s notice and go somewhere/anywhere to play my music, that’s really living the dream. But as a caregiving mother since the age of 20, its never been a very realistic dream.
In keeping with my jet-setting fantasy life, as much as I love animals, I never wanted pets.
I shared a beautiful Belgian Shepherd called Hockey with my daughter and her dad’s family for 14 years. At first I was furious when my daughter returned home from a weekend at her dad’s with a tiny adorable black ball of fluff, her new puppy that I had not been consulted about, and I knew immediately that I was being plunged headfirst into adding a new member to my family - like when Phil Spector gave his young wife Ronnie Spector twin five year old boys for Christmas. Of course I got over it and fell in love immediately, forming a seriously psychic bond that saw Hockey become my shadow, walking beside me everywhere I went. She came to work with me, settling down behind the speakers or the drum kit if it was a gig, or under racks of vintage dresses in the store where I worked. Everyone fell in love with her, and she had intensely loving relationships with all the people in my life, especially musicians I worked with and also with many people I didn’t know, as she moved back and forth between our homes, theoretically along with our daughter.
When Hockey went to doggy heaven, after fourteen wonderful years, I swore to myself I would not have a pet again. I found the responsibility and the heartbreak of it was so intense. I couldn’t not think about her wellbeing, her comfort, her hunger. By that time I also had two more small children, the youngest of whom was obsessed with cats from the moment he could communicate.
But we were a young family on the move, flying across oceans and living in seventeen different houses over the next seven years. Through it all, young Chester gathered a coterie of toy kitties that became his little gang, his imaginary friends. Big brother Dutch was anointed the namer of the cats and President of Kitty City, a job he took very seriously, requesting a suit to wear so he could preside over the kitties in the style to which he believed he should be accustomed. Often on the move or living on film locations, home schooling, away from other kids, the toy cats became a source of grounding and constant entertainment, our little family that came with us everywhere. Tabby Jr was the beloved centre of the cat family tree, along with brother Cabby, aunt Kalaya, Snowy, various cousins and uncles; the roots went deep. Days were spent concocting cardboard furniture, handmade outfits, kitty food and elaborate political scenarios involving the President and handing out of medals and awards while listening to The Cure’s ‘Love Cats’. Through it all, Chester constantly requested a real kitten of his own and I felt terrible to have to dash his dreams over and over. But I knew a pet was for life, not just for Christmas.
Our lives required being flexible and moveable, there was just no way we could have a real cat of our own, although we were lucky to care for a few real cats along the way - they would find Chester like he was a magnet, wherever we went. We even rescued and looked after an orphaned feral kitten who survived an ice storm in Georgia (we named her Moxy) and eventually managed to find a home for her in Kentucky with the lovely production manager’s lovely mother Deb when we had to leave town. We drove 9 hours to visit said kitten in KY the next time we were in Georgia. Nine years later we are hoping to go visit Moxy & Deb in Palm Springs some time. Cat connections run deep.
Returning to our home of Sydney, Australia at the beginning of the pandemic, we landed in a sweet, dilapidated house with an enormous backyard in a predominantly Greek neighbourhood. We soon noticed there was a motley gang of cats that sunned themselves and stared at us intensely from the tin roof of the carport in the backyard.
Knowing that Greek people often traditionally care for cats as a community rather than individually owning them, we decided to just trust that these cats were all adequately provided for by sweet old Greek cat ladies and men. They all appeared to be well fed. I was absolutely determined to not get involved and warned Chester to do the same. But his magical cat vibes ruined that plan.
A small cat leapt in our bedroom window around 3am one night, seeming desperately hungry and in search of food, but totally panicked and flung itself wildly around the house when it realised there were humans within. We opened the back door so it could escape and put a little plate of ham outside. Rookie mistake. They smelled our weakness. Before too long, Chester was hand feeding little meaty treats daily to a kitten he called Scruffy. Eventually Scruffy’s mates/sisters/parents (turns out cats aren’t too fussed about these distinctions) started sneaking up looking for Scruffy’s leftovers.
Before too long we were putting out multiple little dishes of food for them. They would still all run off if we got anywhere near them. Except for one big silver tabby that was very friendly, slamming his head into our legs demanding attention, jumping in our lounge room window and making himself comfortable on the couch whenever he could. We shooed him out. He looked very well fed and clean and we felt he was taking us for a ride and definitely had another home to go to.
Chester and I made signs that said DO YOU KNOW THESE CATS? with beautiful cat portraits he’d taken and posted them all around the neighbourhood and on the local Facebook group. No replies. Before too long we started the process of trapping and getting them to the vet for desexing and letting them back out to live their lives. I didn’t really want to take responsibility but I was rightly terrified that if we didn’t we’d be living amidst a much larger cat colony before we knew it.
Scruffy and her once very hissy rather terrifyingly aggressive sister Spicy became somewhat domesticated after their vet visits. They enjoyed indoor rests and cuddles but still got distressed if we shut the door. The big bossy silver tabby we’d called Cha Cha turned out to belong to a woman who lived around the corner. His name was actually Precious. She sent me a message one night (my number was on the now faded cat flyers still up on posts around the hood) saying she’d noticed Precious had been shaved ‘down there’ and wondered if we’d desexed her cat. We got chatting and she said she wondered where he’d been disappearing to every day. She had a great sense of humour about it and we agreed that next time he turned up I’d contact her and she would collect him. We did this a few times, a few times I popped him in a shopping bag and walked him back to her place - a very well appointed mansion with a Mercedes in the drive - but he’d just come straight back to ours and we’d find him defiantly and determinedly on our couch or on Chester’s bed - or carousing and lolling around with Scruffy and Spicy. Eventually she stopped finding it funny and became a little offended by his constant rejections and wouldn’t come collect him anymore. We weren’t happy about it but felt kind of helpless. He had adopted us whether we liked it or not. We changed his name to Boofhead, for his habit of boofing his head against us insistently until we’d give him some love.
There was another skittish, mangy one we started calling Spooky because she had spooky cloudy eyes and jumpedanywhere near her. I tried to trap her but couldn’t. It soon became clear she was already pregnant. She disappeared for a while and then we noticed her looking especially ragged, picking up chunks of meat and taking off with it clenched in her teeth across a long and precarious network of fences, only to return looking for more food ten minutes later. Eventually we heard tiny kitten cries from under a big metal fence at the back of our yard and saw little faces peeking under. We started slipping little lids of kitten food underneath it and trying to work out how to save them.
Every cat rescue we contacted was overrun and underresourced and no-one could help, except to offer advice. It became very clear there was a terrible epidemic of homeless cats and nothing official in place to deal with it, except for a bunch of kind hearted people who do the endless and thankless work of trapping, desexing and returning or trying to find homes if possible, so we’d have to work it out ourselves. Councils don’t even provide reduced rate desexing, or didn’t then, I think they may now. It’s brutal out there, as Olivia Rodrigo would say. My friend told me she rescued a bunch of tiny kittens tied up in a plastic bag and left in a gutter to die. The vet told me she had one elderly woman surviving on a pension who trapped and paid for desexing of a giant colony of cats by herself, one by one. One kind soul who ran a service finding foster homes for pets that were suddenly abandoned when their owners went to prison or hospital offered us to lend us a drop trap to catch them all in one swoop, and talked us through the process. We door knocked neighbours who lived behind us until we found the house where the kittens and Spooky were sheltering, and although it was exceedingly tricky to communicate our plans with the couple that lived there as they spoke little English and the old Polish fellow had terrible delusions that he was still in WW2 and under attack, but they let us set up this giant drop trap in their back yard and hide and wait until the kittens emerged to eat. It’s an adrenaline producing process - if you don’t get them all at once the first time, you risk losing some, it’s also possible that you’ll injure one by dropping the trap on it. Then you have to get these totally psycho freaked out kitties out of the big trap into cat carriers without losing them. Its a lot.
Amazingly Chester and I managed to catch the four kittens and Spooky the mum first go, and somehow get them back to our house. A cat rescue helped us sort out getting all the vet work done and we managed to find all the kittens forever homes just through word of mouth - after Chester got to enjoy his kitten dreams come true for six weeks. We were amazed to receive a message from the new owner of Baby Cha, one especially feisty, hissy kitten that we never managed to pat or pick up, telling us how she now loved to snuggle and play dress ups and she felt liked she’d won the cat lottery.
But no-one wanted to take Spooky and there was nothing we could do except let her back out with the others and continue to feed them all, and keep trying to get them used to people so we had a better chance of rehoming them. No one wants a cat you can’t get near.
This is Cloudy, who liked to shelter in an polysterene box, with a deep head wound and the saddest sad eyes you’ve ever seen. For unknown feline reasons the other garden cats were total mean girls to Cloudy, scratching and hissing at him when he would try to eat with them so we knew we had to try to find him a new home. I posted about it on Twitter and much to my surprise someone offered to take him, so I trapped him, had him desexed and de-flead and microchipped and delivered him to his new home - but tragically he managed to escape out a window left open one single centimetre within an hour, still groggy and recovering from his desexing surgery, and was last seen running towards a main road. I spent days wandering through the neighbourhood with a cat trap and hot chicken calling his name to no avail. At least he won’t be creating more sad homeless cats but it was a pretty heartbreaking experience and I still see him looking sad in my dreams sometimes.
To date we have desexed/vetted nine cats. I still need to trap and take care of Fancy, who I believe is probably a Nebelung, a coveted and expensive breed of cat. Fancy is super fast and whip smart and also breaks my heart, especially when it’s freezing cold and rainy and I find him sheltering under a bush, shivering and wet. I create all kinds of cosy makeshift shelters around the back yard with tarps and cushions and boxes - my husband complains it looks like a LA underpass homeless encampment - but the cats are suspicious of them and mainly ignore them, or use them briefly then abandon for unknown reasons and return to sleeping in the dirt or my flower boxes. My husband, despite pretending I’m the troublesome cat lady and he has nothing to do with it, spent days making an elegant and stylish wooden cat hotel with multiple entrances and little rooms that they all loved for a few weeks and then suddenly refused to go near anymore, even when it rained. Cats are so fickle. He also throws them his delicious meaty leftovers (the kids and I are all vegetarian) late at night winning their adoration. They barely give me a second look. I guess Fussy Cat just doesn’t compare to organic chicken thighs.
I made the mistake a few months back of accidentally watching one cute cat video on social media and now I’ve been funnelled into a heartwrenching rabbit hole of amazing people around the world dedicated to rescuing cats and giving them a good, safe indoor life of comfort and I now spend my evenings sobbing and wondering how I can find one of these dedicated cat super heroes. I feel sure if I could trap Fancy and get him to the vet and then deliver him to a nice safe indoor home, he would eventually adjust like the cute social media cats and be very grateful and happy. I also feel sure that if I trap him and then can’t rehome him and have to release him, I’ll never be able to trap him again and so now I’m in a kind of Fancy limbo. Same with Tuxedo who also keeps to himself and sleeps rough and I am pretty sure is already desexed but can’t get close enough to be sure.
The trouble is that now I’ve been feeding them, they are reliant on me. When I go away, I now feel completely responsible for five cats being fed - at one point it was somewhere between seven and nine cats, but we’ve lost a couple to tragic misadventures. And unfortunately this house is a rental and of course they want to rip it down and redevelop so we won’t be here forever. My family will also be spending extended periods of time on the other side of the world while my husband works there, and so I seriously need to find a way to get these cats somehow safe or taken care of in the next few months and I’m really starting to stress about it.
The Cat Protection Society have a waiting list of two years and won’t take cats that aren’t friendly to humans. They suggested I contact the RSPCA, but also told me they would almost certainly euthanise them, as no one wants a cat you can’t cuddle. Cat rescues are always over full and unable to take undomesticated cats. Vet nurses have told me the kindest thing to do is to trap and euthanise. That street cats without dedicated feeders live very challenging miserable lives that generally end brutally. I’ve been warned against putting up notices on Facebook looking for homes due to the sickening practice of people using cats as bait for dog fights.
The other trouble is of course the whole ecosystem ethical reality of the destruction outdoor cats cause to native wildlife. When I trying to find a home for Cloudy a few years back there was someone I used to know who just kept posting ‘Kill it’ along with sanctimonious comments until I blocked him.
Personally I struggle with hierarchic value on life and try my best to avoid responsibility for killing anything, including ants, much to the annoyance of my family, and I can’t quite buy the argument that outdoor cats should just be euthanised as its not a fair fight between them and the native animals they kill. I know it makes social sense, and honestly I wish I could, but once you get to know a cat personally and it gets its claws in your heart, it’s really hard to think of killing them to stop potential future deaths of other animals. That’s not a fair point I know but what can you do?
Look at funny little Spooky, who after four years of daily feeding still hasn’t got a clue who I am and leaps away from me like I’m the devil, but is all of a sudden becoming very interested in the indoors, slipping into the kitchen when I leave the back door open and just quietly watching from a distance while I cook. When it rained all last week, I found she had curled up on a chair and gone to sleep. My heart skipped a beat in joy! Almost domesticated!
If there are any cat lovers out there in Sydney or surrounds who would be willing to rehome a weird, lonely garden cat or two or three and teach them to experience the joys of cushy indoor living (if I can catch them) please do reach out! Suggestions, advice and stories with happy endings also very gratefully received. I do feel sure it will work out in the end, so it mustn’t be the end yet… and for now, I’ll just be another proud cat lady, living’ large in Kitty City.
Oh Lo ! this made me laugh .. I read this story during the early hours of this morning, while re lighting the fire 🔥 & cup of tea_ing over a post joint thirst. The ‘shaved down there’ , the LA underpass homeless looking shelters & the photos - (especially of Boof )
thank you Lo 🙏 x
wonderfully written👌
Zelda has that same cat magic! She’s rescued two kittens from dark, dangerous gutters who were each stranded away from their respective mamas, and brought them to good health. With the first one she spent a week singing beside a sewer drain to get him to trust her and the second she visited every day for two months. They were supposed to be fosters but you know how that goes…Fawn and Simone are now fat, happy and part of the family.