For me this cat picture says a lot about the millions of beautiful and tender relationships between cat and the older person in Europe, America and anywhere in fact. We don’t hear much from Asia with respect to their cats but there’s lots of fantastic cat/human relationships in Asia too.
Why does this photo talk me? There is gentleness of the face of the lady and loyalty and contentment on the face of her cat. Her cat is “Sunshine” – which tells us a lot about the lady’s feelings towards her cat – and the lady is Lillian Scott. She is 73 years of age. My guess is that Sunshine is not young either.
This is the sort of relationship between domestic cat and person that I like to see – mutually very supportive and loving. The strange thing about this picture is that Lillian lives in an apartment block where between them, two people kept 150 dead cat in freezers. And it appears that they did this for a very long time – years. Bizarre but true. Not one person, but two were cat hoarders in the same high rise.
Unsurprisingly, there was a persistent smell in the hallway of this high rise block. I suppose people accepted it. People do. They just get on with their lives. Odd things happen in apartment blocks and one is very near one’s neighbors so you learn to accept things that are a bit odd.
In one apartment there were 127 dead cats. In all there were also 49 living cats. They were recovered and placed with the local Humane Society. That is it. The beautiful and bad in one place; or is cat hoarding bad? It is more sad than bad, I feel. There are lots of people living alone in the world, particularly elderly people.
Christmas is a tough time for them as often they have no relatives and few friends. On the radio this morning there was a telling story of a meals-on-wheels visitor who, when delivering a meal to an old lady, was asked by the lady to read out a page from a book. The old lady just wanted to hear a human voice. The loyal domestic cat is providing a great service to a lot of lonely people this Christmas.
By the way, Lillian looks after a cat colony as well. The block of apartments appears to be subsidized. I am not sure how it works in the USA. The block is part of the Windsor Essex Community Housing Corporation. In the UK the property would be a block of council flats (managed by the local authority and subsidized by the tax payer).
Note: I admit to not having received permission to publish the Windsor Star picture here but provide a link to their site in exchange in the hope that this is satisfactory: Windsor Star.
Since I was in Property Management in my early 20’s: We have ‘Section 8 Housing’ which I actually did some bookkeeping tasks on a couple of these apartment complexes. The idea is that a section of a property be designated section 8 and the income comes from the rest of the property, with a year-end subsidy coming from the US Government at the end of the year. [Side note: The US Government pays bills only once a year. They incur a years worth of late fees paying it all off in one large check at years end.]
I have a huge group of older folks, some alone, some taking care of a very sick spouse and others with spouses, who have 12-19 yr old cats that they’ve had for the cats entire life. I notice the ‘vibe’ I get from these kitties in the pix and vids they constantly share. They are loved. They are part of the family. They are companions, they are comforters and they are someone to talk to and talk about. God bless those beautiful little beasties. I’ve only seen my mom cry twice. Once when my big brother went off to university and when her Fluffy died. God bless those little paws.