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.
As you know we have the same problem with banks in the UK. Perhaps we have been a bit tougher on them than in the USA. As to writing about abandoned cats I don’t really choose the topic. Nearly all news on cats is about five topics (a) feral cats (b) abandoned cats (c) non-native species preying on wildlife (d) shelters – overcrowding and euthanasia (e) cat abuse.
As I have to write daily to keep the site alive I end up writing about these things. I sympathise with people in financial difficulty. However, they booked a hotel room and drove up in a car. They are apparently not broke. In my book of rules, the car goes before the cat. The TV goes before the cat. All my possessions go before the cat. The cats stays with me.
I guess I just have different rules to these people. I believe that a lot of people who keep cats, should not. They are not suited to the task and set standards that are too low. I respect other people’s view however.
I can see how stray cats are attracted to hotels, which may provide a cover for people who want to abandon their cats at hotels. The fact that stray cats hand around hotels may encourage people to dump them there.
People who dump their cats should never have had a cat in the first place, but who can stop them? Irresponsible people who don’t have their cats neutered and so end up with a litter of kittens just give them away to anyone to be rid of them.
Cats Protection do home checks and Kays Hill ensure all cats go to good homes, but some places don’t.
Cats just don’t seem important to some people and it drives me mad too Michael.
We’ve had people who supposedly loved their cats them, like our ex neighbour. How can some people walk away and leave cats to their fate? Never to know what happened to them after they’d gone? I just don’t understand.
It is crazy, but I don’t think it is new. I just remembered that our first cat when I was a kid was a stray and my parents immediately assumed she had been dumped by some tourists. Many people come out to the country to dump pets, thinking the animal will have a better chance there than in the city. So I think cats getting dumped by motels is not a new thing, really. It might just be happening more as the economy worsens.
p.s. again. It’s not so uncommon for families that have lost their houses to move to motels, as a way not to become immediately homeless. I assume if a motel allowed family cats, that would be a positive for families trying to “hang on”. Not knowing what the situation is at this particular Inn/ motel, vis a vis long term rentals, I have no way of assessing/ guessing at the reasons that cats are abandoned there.
But, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other motels that experience cat abandonment- families that stay as long as the money holds out, living in one motel room with their cats, and then have to move b/c money is gone. To a tent city perhaps, or living on the streets.
p.s. to above comment. Michael, you’ve written a lot in the past about people dumping their cats- in the context of the worsening financial situation in US and in UK. For example, people moving out of houses (some times b/c of foreclosure) or other financial exigencies. The people find themselves homeless, or in homeless shelters that don’t accept pets. And just leave the cats behind. In some places (as I’ve read over the past several years) cat shelters are full up and can’t take more animals. So, leaving cats behind might be an act of desperation, having failed to find a shelter for them- or others (not the better humans) choose to dump the cats w/o trying to find shelters.
The whole foreclosure mess in the US has not been dealt with in any sort of effective way by US govt, and that has been going on since the collapse of the “house price bubble”. There has been no prosecution of banks who have lied to borrowers, banks who have lied about details of people honestly trying to sort out a mess created by unscrupulous lenders, and, to add a term most in UK will not be familiar with- “robo-signing”. It is a huge scandal, which the US corporate-friendly government has simply refused to deal with. The banks and various other parties involved in mortgage fraud have not been prosecuted. Same for turning a blind eye to all sorts of other fraud perpetrated by banks and financial institutions.
While I don’t know the details of the people who leave cats at the “Inn” mentioned (looks like a glorified name for a motel based on the picture) there may be more to the story than meets the eye.