A person living near the Penns Woods Inn Manheim, USA, thinks that guests of the hotel abandon their cats at the hotel. He has a seen an increase in stray cats. These are domestic and sometimes declawed cats.
“People come there and bring pets, including cats. But when the people leave, they don’t take their cats with them…” (Ken Kaylor)
This story caught my eye. What is going on? Is this is a new phenomenon? Are people checking into the hotel, which allows pets, specifically to dump their cats? What is going through the minds of people who leave their cats behind at the hotel?
Message to Americans: I am simply reporting what I read in the online American press1 and discussing it. It is interesting to any person, anywhere, who likes and cares about cats. I am being as polite and as objective as possible.
The pictures of the hotel show me that it is made up of semi-detached or terraced bungalows (single story cabins) spread across quite extensive grounds. On the face of it, it is a good place to let your cat go walkabout. Perhaps guests let their cats out to explore the grounds and they get lost or don’t come back. Then the cat’s owner gives up and drives off. Great!
Perhaps it is careless rather than callous behavior by cat owners who are travelling through Manheim and staying at this hotel, which incidentally receives a very poor customer rating. Customer reviews say the place is filthy dirty and needs decorating. The showers don’t have hot water. It appears to be badly managed. It may have a reputation as a place to dump your cat for all I know.
Ken Kaylor’s statement indicates that people deliberately leave their cats behind at the hotel. If that is the case you’d have to believe that some people come to the hotel with the idea in mind of abandoning their cat at the hotel. I would very much doubt that it would be a spur of the moment decision.
If that is true, it is both bizarre and horrible and demonstrates a complete lack of probity and morality. It really is treating the domestic cat as a consumer “product” that can be discarded at will. Clearly they are not fit to keep cats or any companion animal.
Source:
- My Manheim Central News (note: I don’t provide hard links because they often break and I have to repair them. I don’t have the time to do that.
You are being kind, Marc. “Weird” is a mild description of some things that happen here in regards to animals. HORRIFYING, INSANE, DEVIANT, DISGUSTING, EVIL come to mind when I look around me. I, truly, love my country with the exception of how some treat animals. It’s hard to see much middle ground. There are those of us who love animals and those who hate them.
It’s not unknown in the UK for people who pay for their cats to stay at a boarding cattery, to then just leave them their and not pick them up. Sometimes they pay the fee upfront, sometimes half the fee, some catteries didn’t charge until the cat was picked up by the owner.
Of course these foul people give false contact details. This leaves the cattery owner with a real dilemma. What to do with the cat?
Our local independent shelter, Holly Hedge is absolutely filled to the max with cats and dogs right now. They just put out a plea for foster homes in the press.
It’s holiday season and people are just abandoning their cats, locking them out of the home whilst they are away. The lucky ones end up at Holly Hedge.
The wierdest stuff happens over there – the stories get wierder and weirder – this is beyond the imagineable partly because it almost doesnt make sense. You have to really think hard to see any sense in it and of course the sense in itself is horrible.
Just another way to dump cats,go off on holiday taking the cat then go home without it,how convenient.
It’s so hard to find pet friendly motels. People dumping their cats are going to cause the management to get rid of the pet friendly policy and say “no pets” like almost everywhere else. People I know who ran pet friendly motels told me that they never once had damage to a room from someone’s pet. All motels should allow pets, I think. But this kind of thing is a huge reason not to do it. Suddenly you have a feral cat colony you did not want. Terrible. It used to be that tourists would take your pet– it happened all the time when my mom was young and to our friends who owned a motel. They’d find their cat in someone’s motel room– or worse, in their car as the person was about to drive off. This is the first time I have heard of people leaving a pet instead of trying to take one. All we need is those dimwits who try to steal pets to stay at this motel and take a cat or two with them. Kind of like “take a penny leave a penny” at the corner store. “Take a kitty, leave a kitty.” No, I’m just kidding, that’s really horrible. But people in both cases (leaving or stealing pets) are treating living, breathing creatures as if they are worth no more than loose change you find lying around.
I suppose if it’s well known that cats are welcome at that hotel and in the grounds, there could be people not even staying there who are dumping their unwanted cats there too. Maybe they think another one won’t be noticed!
It’s bad enough dumping healthy cats but to dump declawed disabled cats is even worse.
Have those people got no conscience?
As for guests leaving their cats, surely there could be some kind of system set up to check people in, they could take s deposit from the guests for each cat, to be returned when they leave the grounds with their cat. No cat booked out, no deposit returned.
These things seem to keep happening and no one thinks up a logical way to stop them happening …. it puzzles me why not?