Cat Sanctuary of 700 Cats Continues to Expand
by Michael
(London, UK)
There is a nice and at the same time disturbing story of a “mad cat lady” (not) who has been rescuing cats for a very long time and who never turns away abandoned cats. People just bring abandoned cats around to her facility overnight in a cardboard box. She always accepts them and the facility constantly expands. She has 25 staff! She works 24/7, 365 days of the year (of course with 700 cats, what else!).
Who funds all this? And more importantly how long can she go on for? She will stop one day but the cats will keep on coming indefinitely because no one is really tackling the problem at source.
She is reacting to the problem. It is valiant and brave and some might say foolhardy. What is needed is local government intervention – no one else can do it – to encourage people to behave more responsibly in respect of the job of cat caretaking. And I know I go on and on about this. I feel for this lady. She is driven to do something about these abandoned cats. She is driven by her kind heart but…there is no limit to the numbers of abandoned cats that will arrive over time. But there is a limit to her funding, her time and her energy. These are certainties. What happens when she stops or winds down? There could be chaos.
The cat lady’s name is Lynea Lattanzio and she isn’t crazy. She is kind and hard working. She runs her cat sanctuary called, “Cat House on the Kings”. There is 12 acres of it! I guess there has to be to house 700 domestic cat and more.
It is the largest cat refuge in California. I should think that it is one of the largest in the world.
Here is a video (hope it keeps playing as sometimes these go blank).
If you wanted to be critical you could argue that in some ways she perpetuating the stray and abandoned cat problem because she is providing an outlet for irresponsible people.
Michael
