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Wendy Erskine cuddles Benny, one
Wendy Erskine of Wendy's Feline Friends, a rescue operation in Colonial Beach, has 130 cats and kittens waiting for people to adopt them.
Louis Tierney cares for about 12 feral cats at his farm on Winter Harbor Road in Westmoreland County. He says it's getting expensive to feed the strays he's taken in, but 'As far as cats go, you can't get nobody from the county to help you.'
Two orange tabbies awaiting adoption cuddle together |
Kathy Arllen, Louis Tierney, Wendy Erskine and Pat Fitzgerald all agree: Westmoreland County doesn't do cats.
Arllen found out the hard way in October in a hospital emergency room after a feral cat bit her arm as she was feeding strays at her home on Seventh Street in Colonial Beach.
She said emergency-room workers called the county and asked an animal-control officer to trap the cat to find out if it was infected with the deadly rabies bacterium.
The reply, she said, was, "We don't do cats."
Arllen decided to take no chances, and began a painful series of four rabies inoculations that day. The county later offered to loan her a trap to catch the cat, but by then it was too late, she said.
Ten miles from Colonial Beach, Louis Tierney, 68, lives in a motor home beside a rundown house on a 60-acre farm on Winter Harbor Road. He says his cat problem started when a man who lived a quarter-mile away went to jail and left two cats.
"Them two cats had two female kittens, and one had three kittens, and one cat come up with five and another one had two. When I figured it out, I had 18 or 19 cats," Tierney said.
Scientists at North Carolina State University estimate that a breeding pair of cats could cumulatively foster 420,000 offspring in seven years.
When Tierney took four or five cats to the Westmoreland County Animal Shelter, he quickly found out "the only thing Westmoreland County does anything with is dogs," he recalled.
Animal shelters in most other Fredericksburg-area localities accept cats.
"There were three stray dogs around here, and a woman did come in and set traps and took them all away. As far as cats go, you can't get nobody from the county to help you," Tierney said.
"It's too hard on me fooling with all these cats and what it costs to feed 'em. It takes 60 pounds of dry food every month, costs me $20 a month at the dollar store."
County dog wardens referred Tierney and his cats to Wendy Erskine, who runs a cat rescue mission at her home near Colonial Beach. She took four kittens.
Erskine's house at Westmoreland Shores is decorated with cat figurines, cat salt-and-pepper shakers, cat cookie jars, cat calendars and cat curtains. The legend on one cat picture reads, "One can never have too many cats."
One recent day, Erskine had 114 cats. They were on tables, chairs, sofas and afghans. Nine were napping on her bed. One was sleeping in a wooden bowl, another in a basket. Others curled up in carpeted cat condos and pet carriers with open doors. Some played with cat toys on the floor.
"The cats are not living in our home," she said. "We're living in their shelter. We have our own private space. It's called the bathroom."
The cats come and go through a series of pet doors. Outside, they climb on trees and the roofs of two outbuildings built to isolate mamas and kittens and other cats new to Erskine's shelter.
"Mostly, they come from people who just can't take care of them anymore," Erskine said. "Or from people who moved away and abandoned them. Some weeks, I take in eight or 10 and adopt out two or three."
Her rescue operation is called Wendy's Feline Friends. Human friends contribute about $6,000 a year in cat food. A half-dozen volunteers show up most days to help her dust, clean and scrub the house, empty 30 litter boxes and take new animals to a veterinarian for vaccinations and neutering.
Erskine says she owes her vet $10,000.
Erskine spends much time on the phone. Her boyfriend, Phil Oby, manages her Web site, wendysfelinefriends.org. It receives about 1,700 hits a week.
"If you call me, and I trust you, you can adopt a cat," she said. A neutered cat costs $75. A non-neutered, vaccinated kitten costs $45. All her cats, she says, are "98 percent flea-free."
"My goal is to find these children a good home," she said. "I have two rules. If it's not neutered, get it fixed. If you ever decide you don't want it, bring it back."
For the past 12 years, Pat Fitzgerald of the Colonial Beach Humane Society has been trapping cats in and around town, taking them to vets for neutering and inoculations and releasing them.
So far this year, the Humane Society has spent $5,788 to treat 68 cats. Since 1992, the society has trapped, neutered and released 887 cats, Treasurer Zedda Viets said.
Colonial Beach has fewer cats now than before the society started its work, town Mayor G.W. "Pete" Bone Jr. said.
"The trapping and neutering effort has kept the cat population down," Bone said.
But Fitzgerald says her four cat traps are getting "old, beat-up and dilapidated."
Viets said the Humane Society receives $500 a year from Westmoreland County and $500 from the town of Colonial Beach. This year, PETsMART awarded the society a $3,000 grant. The rest of the society's $12,000-a-year budget comes from a variety of fund-raising efforts.
"Our main expense comes from Westmoreland County because they don't do cats. They only do dogs," Viets said.
Westmoreland County will spend $80,534 this year on animal control. The county pound handles about 950 dogs a year, but no cats.
Westmoreland County Administrator Norm Risavi says eight or 10 cats hang out at the trash bin at the county office building in Montross.
"I was putting some trash in the Dumpster last night, and two cats jumped out and scared the daylights out of me. Somebody is feeding them little cans of cat food. I don't find that helpful," he said.
Risavi, who lives in Mount Holly, about 30 miles from Colonial Beach, said there's a cat problem there, too.
"I can't even put my garbage outside. The cats tear it up. The other night, a cat and a raccoon got in a fight on my deck," he said.
In the past five years, Westmoreland County has reported three rabid cats and seven rabid raccoons to state health officials. No rabid dogs were found in the county during the same period.
Statewide in 2002, 317 raccoons with rabies were found, followed by skunks (147), foxes (56), cats (27), bats (17), cows (9), bobcats (5), dogs (4) and horses (3).
"There are an awful lot of cats," Risavi said. "It seems to me it would be close to an insurmountable task to get people to tag and license cats. But if the Board of Supervisors adopts an ordinance about cats, we'll try to enforce it."
To reach FRANK DELANO: 804/333-3834 DelanoBigtree@aol.com
