Website Seeks Homes for Abandoned
But Adoptable Cats
by Jennifer Dunning

Communities are like mosaics, made up of the vivid fragments of everyday lives and memories. The small black-and-white cat that lived behind the bushes near the subway, called Princess by some and YinYang by others, was such a fragment. A surprising number of Roosevelt Islanders knew her because she accompanied them to and from the subway, poking her head out when she saw or heard them coming.

After her death in September, 2004, a memorial was held, organized by Cheryl Tyler, near one of Princess’s favorite bushes. Attended by about 15 people, including a corporate consultant who had postponed a trip to Boston and an actress who had rushed from work in Manhattan to sing All Things Bright and Beautiful in the drizzling dusk, the memorial inspired the idea of a website to try to help cats like Princess and let Roosevelt Islanders know about them. And now that website – www.islandcats.org – is up and running. Suggestions are welcome for this work in progress. (We are thinking of including Island children’s cat drawings and stories, which can be sent to ripyy@care2.com or mailed to Jennifer Dunning at 531 Main Street.)

Princess was full of curiosity but also fear. She would not let even familiar humans come too close, and she didn’t seem to care much for other cats. But she made many of us smile with her funny, fastidious, crotchety habits. A Red Bus driver once slowed to watch her flinging herself repeatedly into a high snow drift. He worried she was having fits, but quickly realized she was playing.

Acutely aware of danger though she was, she slept deeply in a small Styrofoam shelter admirers had built for her. She loved to leap after fireflies in the summer and went through a nightly ritual with her feeders, eating her dinner only if she had her own non-communal bowls of food and water and only if she could watch each being filled. Her death was caused, indirectly, by cat-dumping, for she was chased into the path of a truck by an aggressive cat allowed to run loose.

Cute kittens grow up and their owners don’t want to spend money neutering them. Some newly abandoned cats found wandering on the Island have been old, with terminal illnesses. But there is no excuse for abandoning inconvenient pets. Imagine a world suddenly without boundaries, a totally unfamiliar world of freezing cold in winter, of starvation and dehydration, of slow and painful death by illness or injury, of attacks by other cats protecting their small turf.

Living outdoors is not the way of nature, as some say, for domestic animals that have spent their entire lives within four reassuring walls, fed and cared for. It is no more natural than a seagull, squirrel or possum – yes, we have possums on the Island! – being brought indoors to live. If another home cannot be found, it is kinder to euthenize an unwanted or inconvenient pet than to abandon it outdoors.

The idea of the website, which was put together by Roosevelt Island Princess YinYang Project (RIPYY), an ad hoc group of residents, with the help of web designer Gretchen Peters and consultants Ann Hallowell and Rossana Ceruzzi, is to let people know about the serious problems of stray cats and cat-dumping on the Island, and to find homes for those that are adoptable. (Messages may also be left at 212-593-1054.)

The website contains a page with photos and biographies of cats that are ready for adoption, all of which have been neutered and tested negative for feline AIDS and leukemia. Foster homes are needed, too, as are committed volunteers to help with feeding one or more of the approximately seven colonies scattered around the Island. Even once a week would help. And we welcome ideas, especially for our Kids’ Page, and about how to curb dumping, some of which is done by Islanders who throw pets out or leave them behind in vacated apartments. In time, RIPYY hopes to help owners before they abandon their pets but resources are now limited.

Formal animal rescue actually began on the Island around 1977 or 1978, when Marjorie Marcallino, Linda Egan and Pat Lyons got together and began to feed strays and trap, neuter and find homes for as many as possible. "Bicycling around the Island, you saw them," Marcallino said, "particularly near the two hospitals, the Tram and the old nurses’ residence. We were all seeing them. Pat put out a notice and we had a meeting at her apartment to which Linda came." The job was eventually handed on to second-generation rescuers. Over the years, many rescued cats have found loving Island homes.

Construction on the Island and the recent temporary suspension of the only affordable spay-neuter clinic in the City have made things worse. Formerly hidden cats have fled into new areas like the community gardens, where some have been dismayed to find cat feces in their plots and to see the bird population dwindle. Individual gardeners are exploring mechanical and topical deterrents.

What can be done? Poisoning is a felony in New York State, punishable by two years in prison and/or a $5,000 fine. (Two City animal groups offer rewards of $1,000 for information leading to arrest and conviction.) Relocation and formal extermination programs are other options. Rescue specialists say that there are few reputable sanctuaries with room and that locally relocated animals almost always return. Even specialists who consider euthanasia to be a kinder alternative to living outdoors say that extermination doesn’t work. Vacuums tend to be filled, often by newly dumped cats.

The most highly recommended approach to the problem is Trap Neuter Return (TNR), a nationally recognized program in which the cats are trapped and neutered, on an individual and mass basis, and then returned to their colonies to die out naturally. Some wily survivors will always escape the first time or two. But TNR has been recognized by the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals (AnimalAllianceNYC.org) and its member rescue groups as the most effective way of cutting back stray cat populations over time. A group of Roosevelt Islanders has been exploring the idea of an Island-wide sweep to be conducted by Island rescuers working with Neighborhood Cats and the ASPCA, which donates its services to groups that can provide a few days’ warm shelter for recovering cats. An off-Island rescuer has volunteered the use of her horse trailer.

The work of rescuers has long been fodder for jokes about cat-feeders and solemn talk about ecosystems and random kindness. There is no solution for the problem of homelessness, for humans or for animals. So why bother?

Asked that question, the animal-rights lawyer Jane Hoffman, who directs the Mayor’s Alliance, told the following story: A man picking his way along a beach strewn with debris after a violent storm saw another man in the distance, laboriously bending over to pick up stranded starfish, one by one, and fling them back into the sea. "The beach is covered with starfish," the first man said. "You’ll never get them all. What does it matter?" The second man looked at the starfish in his hand. "It matters," he said, "to this one."