We approach the dingy wooden house with plastic flapping across the door and windows in a misty rain, a good hour before the sun will begin to rise. Five of us rose in the middle of the night to make this journey. We are energized, filled with the excitement and the possibility of doing a good thing.

All the lights are on inside and the glow is ghostly in the fog. The outside looks clean enough, just a few empty bowls and pet carriers strewn across the lawn. This isn’t so bad, we are thinking. Not what we expected.

As we step inside the tiny room that was once a porch, cats swarm around our ankles. They are friendly, well fed, certainly sociable. Not bad at all, we communicate to each other with a few glances as our hostess shoos them away. We haul in our carriers and soon the room is filled with them, fifteen carriers to take cats out of the home they have known for several years. There must be twenty, no, forty cats in this room. Who can count them? Some wear neckbands identifying them as the cats selected for our rescue program. Lots of bands are chewed off and strewn around the room.

We wander after the cats into the next room. And there it hits us, hard, in the throat and nostrils and lungs. Ammonia from pools of urine on the floor, the stench of feces mostly but not all in children’s plastic pools full of dusty clay litter, the dander of so many unwashed cats swirling around us now in all colors and ages and sizes and conditions of cats.

This is awful. We can’t breathe. We can’t leave until we have chosen our twenty cats. Who do we save? Who do we leave behind? We are choking on the putrid air. Our eyes burn like our throats and airways. The decisions make us dizzy.

How do these cats stand it? How have any of them survived without serious psychosis?

And more of them come pouring out to welcome us to their home. They swarm like herds of mustangs through the rooms, every conceivable color, black, buff, tabby, Siamese, calico, torties, and a lovely elegant white cat who watches us regally. They come and they go, back and forth, into other rooms, out an open window into a wire sanctuary in the back yard.

One black tom clings desperately to our pants legs, not climbing up but begging us. We shoo him away and he chooses another volunteer. Black is the one color we can’t take, because it is hardest to adopt out, no matter how sweet the disposition. We must think in terms of marketability, adoptability, desirability, not in emotions. We all feel bad leaving him behind in this orphanage.

We follow them, trying to find the ones wearing our neckband ID, trying to choose whose future is ours. It is hard. A cat darts into a half-opened cupboard in the kitchen. When we open it, at least ten new pairs of eyes glare out at us. Overhead, another cabinet reveals even more lounging half sleeping, half on guard for strangers who want to take them from their homes.

A few ignore us and try to find a clean spot in the pools of litter to do their business. They’ve been fed while our hostess was waiting for us. Now another odor blends into the acrid air.

We see the refrigerator where one cat lived for four years above the maddening crowd below by never leaving the small metal rectangle of his world. His food and water and a small litter box completed his life up there. I had been told that when the first rescuers began taking cats away, he flung himself into one person’s arms, knowing he was saved. Cats can be very perceptive.

Our choices have been partially made for us, so this should be simple. And yet it is not. We can select about six more, as many as we can squeeze into the back of our two vehicles. We could take dozens, but space and time don’t permit us. All of these cats have to go somewhere or they die. Take that one – no, wait, that one. It runs into the cupboard so we pick another. But we already have three of that color. What about this nice pumpkin colored tom?

No, our hostess says. She’s keeping that one. And this one. And the one over there. And this one too.

That’s the problem. That’s why 158 cats swirl through the four rooms and bath – because, like most animal hoarders, she just loves them and wants them to have safety and comfort. Folks have left cats on her doorsteps and have asked her to take in their unwanted discards. She does not have the heart to say no. And she doesn’t place many of them into new homes, apparently.

She’s a better home, she believes, and besides, she loves them all. She’s given this house to them and moved elsewhere, no doubt with other animals. As over a hundred cats mill and churn around us, she knows them all by name and disposition and where she got them. Most, to her credit, have been spayed and neutered and had a rabies shot. Many shots have expired in the years the cats have stayed with her.

And so they stay, and sometimes there have been shortages of good food, and sometimes there have just been illnesses that sweep through the family. Most sneeze and have runny eyes. Some look seriously sick. We decline to take one, just for the ride to the vet clinic, because he is so ill and the close confines of our loaded cars make us leery of his conditions.

This hoarder has been bailed out before, I was told, maybe a couple of times before. Other rescue groups have come in and taken many cats in years past. This is her final chapter, and I’m not sure even she can comprehend the seriousness of her situation. She seems too cheerful to be parting with such old friends. She seems to be holding back too many.

This time legal restrictions will never again permit her to own more than eight pets or she may go to jail for contempt of court proceedings. This time the state is involved, and they don’t take collectors like this lightly.

In order for these animals to be saved, the vets at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine have agreed to spend a great deal of their time and money to help other rescuers. Once we are loaded, packed completely full of carriers until we can hold no more, we head out to Raleigh, another two hour drive. Our cargo meows, some loudly and relentlessly. Some who have just had breakfast can’t hold their bladders and bowels for a long trip into an uncertain future, and our cars soon smell foul. Even before, the stench of their urine-soaked fur was hard to stomach. Now the trip is merciless for the humans, who are also packed tightly around the carriers.

Finally we arrive at the vet school’s satellite office and we unload the carriers, stacking the hallway full. We are embarrassed at the smells, but the students and volunteers who work there seem pretty familiar with this routine. Two work stations are readied in an exam room, Dr. Ferris and one of our team at one side and Dr. Stevens and another helper at the other end. The check-ups begin.

And the results are depressing, almost frightening. First a blood sample is drawn. A product called Revolution stains the fur at the nape of the neck to kill fleas, ear mites and internal parasites. The fleas escape up our arms in an exodus of black specks that makes our skin twitch. Dr. Ferris listens to the heart.

Two of our cats have heart murmurs that will require another trip in a few days for an ultrasound to determine the extent of heart disease.

Dr. Stevens probes inside the mouth. Over 30 percent have advanced gum diseases. One needs to have all of his teeth pulled as soon as he is healthy enough for surgery. He’s a lovely swirl tabby, brown with wide black stripes like an exotic jungle beast. Now he’ll be toothless.

The vets palpitate internal organs. One cat is so obese that she can’t find the kidneys at first. Odd, that in such deprivation, this old girl is in danger mostly because she’s so fat. Her diet may have been plentiful, but it was poor quality.

Several have eye ulcers. This could be a result of ammonia build-up from the urine. The eyes may heal. Or, maybe not. Most have eye drainage and runny noses. Some are congested to the point that they pant and sneeze blobs of mucous across the table.

Inside the ears, mites have created black greasy plugs. Revolution will stop the mites, but later we’ll have the distasteful job of squirting oily medicine into the canal and having cats shake violently the oil and chunks of black debris on our aprons.

Nails have grown grotesquely long, curling back under on some of the cats. Filth and litter make hard clumps around them. The coats cover crusts of flea dirt and scabs from scratching. Each cat deserves a good bath, and we shake our heads at the prospects of dunking them in our wash basins. Cats don’t take kindly to baths, even as dirty as these babies are.

Every cat gets vaccines and a rabies shot as our folks wash the carriers and line them with fresh newspapers. Some towels are so soiled that we throw them in the trash.

The elegant longhaired white kitty who watched with such queenly interest as we chose our crew has her own special house with us, a nice soft-sided carrier with a plush blanket on the floor. As it turns out, she is also the healthiest of the troops, with few ailments beyond her fleas. She’s settled down nicely now, as though she knows her life is changing for the good.

The others have mostly stopped protesting and as they emerge from examinations, they accept confinement with quiet, perhaps hopeful, resignation. They’ve spent another three hours at the clinic. Now they have a two-hour ride to their new home.

NCSU has just donated medical services that would cost the average cat owner around $200 per animal. They load us up on antibiotics and eye creams. We had nineteen patients, plus one that we left at the vet school. The following day will produce another forty or so cats as other organizations come in. By the end of January, 100 cats need vet care, not to mention those with critically serious ailments and some who need to be spayed or neutered. The cost to the state to end one cat hoarder’s problems is not cheap.

And now each rescue organization who chose to participate in the project has to invest food, housing, litter and care for as long as it takes to find good homes for their salvaged cats. Will anyone want a toothless swirl tabby? Or a grouchy older tuxedo? Or a very obese calico who needs a special diet to lose weight?

Is there a better solution? Perhaps Animal Control should step in and euthanize all of them. Very often that happens. Often, on a smaller scale, the cats are just released outside into the neighborhoods to become someone else’s problems.

This evening I walked past the cages holding the thirteen refugees that we kept at Kitty City. Six cats went to other rescuers. On a rainy Sunday night, it was quiet and peaceful.

My white queen cat purred and rubbed her beautiful head against the bars of her cage as I talked to her. I moved to a lovely calico with a flat round orange face like a pumpkin. Already she’s become one of my favorites because of her sweetness. I scratched a dark calico head through the kennel door. A few grumpies just looked at me and didn’t bother to rise. The blue-eyed Siamese crosses studied me curiously but did not move to greet me. In the quarantine room, a gray longhaired kitty who glared at me before cocked her head and, I think, smiled. They all looked so happy.

I want to keep them. I want to bring them all home with me and turn them loose to sit on the back of my sofa and stare out the windows at birds and squirrels.

And this is my salvation. I’m not a collector. I care enough about each one of them to want for them a human who has just one pet, or maybe a few of them, to share comfort and happiness with for as many years as they may have left, especially the beautiful blue-eyed shy Siamese tabby who has a heart murmur. I want the toothless jungle cat to have a special owner who can hand-feed him if that’s what it takes to make him happy.

I want the collectors and hoarders to understand that we can’t save them all, and sometimes in trying to do the right thing, we do the most horrible crimes imaginable in keeping 158 cats confined in four small rooms.

 

Jason, a Kitty City volunteer, assists Dr. Stevens with kitty care