300 Cats, Yes. Craziness, No. 

Source: New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/garden/300-cats-and-counting.html?ref=cats&_r=0

HANDS ON Siglinda Scarpa with one of her charges.

LIKE her name, Siglinda Scarpa seems to be from another world. And not just Italy, where she was born. But one in which you can hear the animals speak, and everyone gets along. Ms. Scarpa, 72, lives in a wooden house painted robin’s egg blue, in the middle of an open woodland, with old oaks and pines rising over sandy soil. With its second-story porches covered with the canes of Lady Banks’ roses, Carolina jasmine and wisteria, the house could be something out of a children’s book.Some people come here to adopt a cat from the Goathouse Refuge, the animal sanctuary she runs, tucked back in the woods. Others come to buy her pottery or ceramic art, which is displayed in the sunny showroom on the first floor of this whimsical house: abstract pieces that evoke storms brewing in the sky; clay roasting pots shaped like squashes, with frogs or artichokes on their lids; or teacups molded like the face of a cat, the lines of cheek and jaw, nose and mouth drawn by a knowing hand. For there are real cats everywhere. 

A white one sits as still as a snowy owl on a post overlooking the woodland. Others walk among dogs napping in the sun. More perch on the railing of a porch, staring at the birds zooming in and out of feeders beyond their reach.Once in a while the cry of a guinea hen or a turkey rends the air. Pecking for bugs around a garden full of greens, they, too, are unafraid of the sleeping dogs — although those dogs came immediately to attention when I opened the creaking gate, joyfully barking and wagging their tails.“Umbra!” a voice shouted from above. “Musa! Solé!”Ms. Scarpa, a tiny woman who is barely five feet and as slim as a reed, with gray hair knotted over a moon-shaped face, appeared at the top of the porch stairs.Umbra, which means shadow in Italian, is her soulful gray Labrador-Weimaraner mix with blue eyes. Musa, her muse, looks like a little coyote. Solé, her sunny boy, is a huge White Great Pyrenees with jet-black eyes.The dogs looked up, as if to say, “We were just having some fun.” Upstairs, in the sunny kitchen, were more cats — sitting on tables and chairs, napping under the wood stove or beside a snoozing dog on the couch, and nestled in the big wooden bowl Ms. Scarpa carved from an oak downed by a storm. 

If you are picturing a crazy lady living among mountains of newspapers, with a pack of yowling cats stinking up the place, forget it.Even on a winter day, there is a pine-scented breeze. The wood-burning stove keeps everything so cozy that the windows and doors are open, so the cats (42 at last count) and dogs (seven) can come and go as they please.Roger Manley, the curator of the Gregg Museum at North Carolina State University, where Ms. Scarpa’s ceramic art will be exhibited next fall, calls her “the Mother Teresa of animals” and compares her to Albert Schweitzer, “taking care of everybody, out in the woods.”

And her home, he said, is “so calm and serene — like a spa for cats.” It is a paradise for birds, too, which fly in and out of the feeders hanging overhead from cables strung between the trees. Each one has a screen to keep birdseed from falling to the ground, where the birds would try to eat it — and be eaten by the cats instead.“I didn’t want the cats to kill the birds, and if I just hung the feeders from the trees, they could climb the tree and catch them,” Ms. Scarpa said. She showed how she lowers and raises the feeders, using cords tied to pulleys above and a fence post or tree below. A fat cardinal stood on one of the screens beneath a feeder 20 feet up, eating seed. Black-capped chickadees zoomed in and out of another. IT was a tiny kitten, nearly drowned in a storm, that changed the course of Ms. Scarpa’s life when she was 7.“ I think I was a little autistic, but they didn’t have a name for it then,” she said. 

Maybe it was the sound of the bombers over her family’s house in northwest Italy during World War II, or hiding from the Gestapo, which was chasing her father, Sergio. (Mr. Scarpa helped draft the constitution of the Italian Republic, was a member of the Italian Parliament and was honored with an order of merit by the president). “I always felt that people were not seeing me,” she said. “That they were talking, but never to me.” Then one night, after she was in bed, her father brought her a tiny gray tabby. “He lifted up the blanket and put this little frozen thing on my chest,” she said. “I held that kitty with such love. He changed my loneliness. I could understand everything he wanted and he could understand me.” That was when she really started talking. “I had to explain to my mother what the cat was saying,” she said. Never one for school, she apprenticed herself to a ceramics artist at 16. By the 1970s, she was teaching at her own studio in Rome. Eventually, she moved to New York, where she taught at Greenwich House Pottery in Manhattan and the Garrison Art Center in Putnam County. “But I was sick and tired of life in the city,” she said. “And it was too cold in Garrison.”On a visit to Central North Carolina in 1995, she fell in love with the balmy climate and the people.“It feels more like Italy here, the weather and the vegetation,” she said. Less than a year later, she found these 16 acres in the woods, with a goat and a shed and a nondescript house she turned into an aerie. (She still owns property in Italy, which she rents out, though she hasn’t been back since moving here.)

The Goathouse Refuge takes its name from a goat that came with the property and two others who live in a pasture here now. But it is actually a no-kill shelter for cats that roam cage-free on an acre and a half of fenced woodland. 

The refuge’s low-slung building used to be Ms. Scarpa’s ceramics studio, before word got out that she loved animals. Litters of kittens started showing up at her door. A rescue group sent six cats from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; another group, in New York, asked her to take 19 cats when their owner died.

So Ms. Scarpa enclosed the woods around her studio, started a nonprofit group and began fund-raising to support the growing cat population. Now she has a staff of five and about 15 regular volunteers, including vet technicians and a handful of veterinarians who work for reduced fees, tending more than 250 cats awaiting adoption. But veterinary bills, even cut-rate, are high for animals that need surgery for tumors, gum disease and other illnesses. Dr. Bonnie Ammerman, a veterinarian who often makes house calls here, said: “She goes above and beyond what a lot of people would do for her personal pets. Many of these cats are feral, so they are not adoptable, but Siglinda does everything she can to socialize them.” Dr. Ammerman, who owns a number of Ms. Scarpa’s pots and artworks, was astounded by the harmony Ms. Scarpa has created between so many species — even a bunny hopping about the yard. “They all pretty much run around together happily,” she said. “Siglinda provides a feeling of safekeeping.” Many are from county shelters that still use gas chambers filled with carbon monoxide to kill unwanted dogs and cats. The practice has been banned in more than a dozen states. But though the American Veterinary Medical Association and other groups recommend barbiturates as a more humane form of euthanasia, gassing is still widespread.

She takes as many animals as she can from such shelters, but there is a limit. And she worries about who will take her place when she can no longer care for them. But who else would have such an uncanny way with the animals? 

Ms. Scarpa knows every cat’s name and story, be it a new arrival or one of the lucky ones napping on her couch. Rosa has asthma and takes medication. Walter is recovering from mouth surgery. Tigger, who is deaf, has trust issues. “The guy who had him fell in love with a lady who didn’t want the cat, so he threw him away,” Ms. Scarpa said. Alex, just rescued from a kill shelter, hides beneath a blanket, with sad eyes. “Some of them grieve for the families that abandon them,” Ms. Scarpa said. “I have to force-feed them, or they would die.” Gibson was found cuddled next to the musician who loved him, who had died in his trailer.“ Gibson always comes up to the back porch when music is on the radio,” Ms. Scarpa said.

Dr. James Floyd, a veterinarian and former head of the department of farm animal health and resource management at North Carolina State, met Ms. Scarpa years ago, when she called his office about a sick goat. He also helped her with a chicken that had a tumor and a leg that had to be amputated. “I’d never amputated the leg of a chicken,” he said. (They aren’t usually deemed worth the effort.) “Coccolona was its name, and that darned chicken lived another 18 months in Siglinda’s studio,” he said. “Siglinda bonded with that chicken, and I can’t swear that I don’t think that it knew who she was and responded to her.”

Ms. Scarpa said she plans to be buried under the oak tree where the animals are buried. “This is my home,” she said. “These are my babies.”

A Cat’s 200-Mile Trek Home Leaves Scientists Guessing

 source: New York Times, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/one-cats-incredible-journey/?ref=cats

 

 

Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times Jacob Richter, 70, left, and Bonnie Richter, 63, flank Holly, the cat that traveled 190 miles to find her way home.

Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor house cat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown. Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach. “Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.” But Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her. “I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”

There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun. Scientists say it is more common, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves’ ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way. Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, Dr. Bradshaw said.

Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Bateson said.
Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if Holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”
But, he said, “nobody’s going to do an experiment and take a bunch of cats in different directions and see which ones get home.”

The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany in which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away. New research by the National Geographic and University of Georgia’s Kitty Cams Project, using video footage from 55 pet cats wearing video cameras on their collars, suggests cat behavior is exceedingly complex. For example, the Kitty Cams study found that four of the cats were two-timing their owners, visiting other homes for food and affection. Not every cat, it seems, shares Holly’s loyalty. KittyCams also showed most of the cats engaging in risky behavior, including crossing roads and “eating and drinking substances away from home,” risks Holly undoubtedly experienced and seems lucky to have survived.

But there have been other cats who made unexpected comebacks.“It’s actually happened to me,” said Jackson Galaxy, a cat behaviorist who hosts “My Cat From Hell” on Animal Planet. While living in Boulder, Colo., he moved across town, whereupon his indoor cat, Rabbi, fled and appeared 10 days later at the previous house, “walking five miles through an area he had never been before,” Mr. Galaxy said.
Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.

Professor Tabor also said a Siamese in the English village of Black Notley repeatedly hopped a train, disembarked at White Notley, and walked several miles back to Black Notley. Still, explaining such journeys is not black and white. In the Florida case, one glimpse through the factual fog comes on the little cat’s feet. While Dr. Bradshaw speculated Holly might have gotten a lift, perhaps sneaking under the hood of a truck heading down I-95, her paws suggest she was not driven all the way, nor did Holly go lightly. “Her pads on her feet were bleeding,” Ms. Richter said. “Her claws are worn weird. The front ones are really sharp, the back ones worn down to nothing.”Scientists say that is consistent with a long walk, since back feet provide propulsion, while front claws engage in activities like tearing. The Richters also said Holly had gone from 13.5 to 7 pounds.

The New York Times Holly fled a vacation with her owners, the Richters, in Daytona Beach, Fla. Two months later, a family not far from the Richters’ home in West Palm Beach found her, weak and thin, in their yard. Holly hardly seemed an adventurous wanderer, though her background might have given her a genetic advantage. Her mother was a feral cat roaming the Richters’ mobile home park, and Holly was born inside somebody’s air-conditioner, Ms. Richter said. When, at about six weeks old, Holly padded into their carport and jumped into the lap of Mr. Richter’s mother, there were “scars on her belly from when the air conditioner was turned on,” Ms. Richter said. Scientists say that such early experience was too brief to explain how Holly might have been comfortable in the wild — after all, she spent most of her life as an indoor cat, except for occasionally running outside to chase lizards. But it might imply innate personality traits like nimbleness or toughness. “You’ve got these real variations in temperament,” Dr. Bekoff said. “Fish can be shy or bold; there seem to be shy and bold spiders. This cat, it could be she has the personality of a survivor.” He said being an indoor cat would not extinguish survivalist behaviors, like hunting mice or being aware of the sun’s orientation. 

The Richters — Bonnie, 63, a retired nurse, and Jacob, 70, a retired airline mechanics’ supervisor and accomplished bowler — began traveling with Holly only last year, and she easily tolerated a hotel, a cabin or the R.V. But during the Good Sam R.V. Rally in Daytona, when they were camping near the speedway with 3,000 other motor homes, Holly bolted when Ms. Richter’s mother opened the door one night. Fireworks the next day may have further spooked her, and, after searching for days, alerting animal agencies and posting fliers, the Richters returned home catless. Two weeks later, an animal rescue worker called the Richters to say a cat resembling Holly had been spotted eating behind the Daytona franchise of Hooters, where employees put out food for feral cats. Then, on New Year’s Eve, Barb Mazzola, a 52-year-old university executive assistant, noticed a cat “barely standing” in her backyard in West Palm Beach, struggling even to meow. Over six days, Ms. Mazzola and her children cared for the cat, putting out food, including special milk for cats, and eventually the cat came inside. They named her Cosette after the orphan in Les Misérables, and took her to a veterinarian, Dr. Sara Beg at Paws2Help. Dr. Beg said the cat was underweight and dehydrated, had “back claws and nail beds worn down, probably from all that walking on pavement,” but was “bright and alert” and had no parasites, heartworm or viruses. “She was hesitant and scared around people she didn’t know, so I don’t think she went up to people and got a lift,” Dr. Beg said. “I think she made the journey on her own.” At Paws2Help, Ms. Mazzola said, “I almost didn’t want to ask, because I wanted to keep her, but I said, ‘Just check and make sure she doesn’t have a microchip.’” When told the cat did, “I just cried.” The Richters cried, too upon seeing Holly, who instantly relaxed when placed on Mr. Richter’s shoulder. Re-entry is proceeding well, but the mystery persists.

“We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/20/2013, on page A19 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Cat’s 200-Mile Trek Home Leaves Scientists Guessing.