Helping the Feral and Abandoned Cats in LA’s Arts District, 2004-15
When Kathy and I started helping the feral and stray cats in Los Angeles Arts District we never expected it would come to absorb our lives and bring us an enormous and happy family. For this we are grateful. Our cats love us with a devotion that has become the central fact of our existence. And we, of course, love them in return. We began this unexpected phase of our life in 2004 a few years after moving to the Arts District. We noticed a few cats in the neighborhood that looked hungry. These were apparently stray or abandoned cats, former pets that looked to humans for sustenance. So we fed them. At first we would feed in the early evening. Eventually it was very early in the morning when we would feed them. The cats would come out from hiding at that hour and we could get to know them and get to know their lives and problems. There were six colonies with from 3 to a dozen or more cats. They didn’t all reveal themselves at first. Over time more of them would come to trust us and come out of the shadows to meet us. Kathy developed a home made food for them from chicken and pumpkin with many beneficial supplements mixed in. The cats quickly and noticeably looked healthier and calmer.
We began a program of trapping the females and neutering them after they gave birth and then returning them to their colonies. This is a known strategy for controlling wild colony populations, and over the years we worked with the local colonies we saw this plan working and the cats get healthier and the populations level out and start to decline. Returning the neutered cats to their territory meant that the cat could hold onto its niche and not be producing more kittens. We kept the kittens expecting to be able to adopt them out. That never did happen as we fell in love with the little cuties and they became family. Many of those cats are with us still. We also adopted many aging cats from the street that appeared to be abandoned pets and many of them seemed to need a hand in surviving. At one stage we adopted some cats from the pound that were destined for shortened lives and brought them home to meet the rest. After some adjustment everyone learned to live together.
We found out that there were a lot of cats, strays abandoned and feral, living in our neighborhood encompassing perhaps ten blocks of an aging industrial area that had been occupied by artists in the 1970s and was now gradually turning, as all art neighborhoods do, into a chic district of expensive condos and apartments carved from the old building stock. Since we had moved there the district had begun to change from the artists lofts and punk music clubs neighborhood it had been into something lighter cleaner and more restrictive. As gallery owners we had begun to feel like foreigners. As event producers we were the enemy of quiet enjoyment. We came to see ourselves as like the cats; an unwanted nuisance to a particularly uptight new group that came to occupy our former playground. Whereas before everyone participated in feeding the cats this new group explicitly forbid it since the finish on their fancy car’s hood was more important than the comfort and safety of stray and feral animals. “Don’t feed the cats” signs popped up everywhere.
Finally the time came to make our exit and we took our family of happy cats and ourselves to a new playground in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. That was almost ten years ago and many of our cats have passed on leaving behind mounting debt and shrinking bank balances. We persevere and continue to treat each animal as the important individual it is to us, to itself, and to the rest of our colony.
And so we come to our plea; we are not asking for donations. We are offering a selection of cute and attractive items for you to purchase that will help us to continue to nurture our family of oddball cats through to the natural end of their trip here on Earth. We hope you find something here that will resonate with you and remind you of your friends in the foothills tending to their colony of unwanted pests with love, kindness and devotion.
