Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor were Pop-Tarts. It was decades after the invention of the sewing machine that it became commercially viable. So the inevitability of the device I am about to propose may not seem immediately obvious, though there is no doubt in my mind about the need for it.
My proposal is called the Robo-Coyote. It would address the fact that billions of migratory birds are killed in North America every year by cats, both feral and owner-operated. When you add to that the mega-millions killed by urban high-rises whose proprietors foolishly keep the lights on all night, it’s a wonder there’s a bird left in the skies. And, since birds are a main predator of forest insects, their dwindling is already affecting the health of our forests. As climates change and winters warm, the situation will worsen: insects will move northward in hordes, munching as they go. What’s more, the cats—millions of them—are gobbling up small rodents that are the staple fare of owls, falcons, and hawks, which may cause a further decline in those bird numbers.
What to do? No point in proposing a cat cull: the same people who love birds also love cats—I am among their number—and the animal-rights folks would be aroused in their irate thousands. Whatever is set in motion must not harm cats by a single whisker, and must be enjoyable for kittydom as well.
Hence my Robo-Coyote. With foreseen advances in robotics and 3-D soft-tissue printing, the engineering of this artificial game warden should be well within reach. The Robo-Coyote would prowl the forests, ignoring skunks, porcupines, and rabbits, attuned to feral cats alone and emitting whiffs of mating hormones and possibly some soulful howls in order to attract them. Unlike a real coyote, the Robo-Coyote would be able to shinny up trees. Once a cat had been lured close enough, the Robo-Coyote’s mouth would open wide. The cat would then enter, descend the throat, and find itself in a comfortable nook, complete with cushion and squeaky-mouse catnip toy.
Thus amused, the cat would be transported by the swiftly travelling Robo-Coyote to a cat fun fair—an enclosure within which cats would be free to chase robo-birds, robo-shrews and moles, robo-squirrels, and even robo-butterflies. A cat’s hunting and playing instincts are said to be separate from its hunger cycles, so the sequestered cats need not eat the robo-prey should they manage to catch any. Food would be supplied on a contract basis by cat-food companies eager to show the world of animal- and bird-lovers that they are doing their best to tackle the migratory-bird issue, while assuring their shareholders that they are improving their bottom line: with the Robo-Coyote deployed in full force, one need not feel guilty about “owning” a cat. And the pet-food companies could even sponsor their own Robo-Coyotes, which could have advertising banners painted on their sides.
Think of the enlivening effect that the Robo-Coyotes would have on the family stroll in the park! There would be the parents, droning on about the wonders of nature; there would be the kids, deprived fingers twitching for their iPads—when, zoom!, across the path shoots a Robo-Coyote, yowling like a lovesick tom, stinking like a moggy in heat, and as unreal in appearance as anything in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Next minute, a cat appears and is quickly inhumed. Lights flash. Beeps beep. Music sounds. What could be cooler? Something in the Museum of Failed Products, perhaps. But that is too negative a thought.
[2013]
LADY OF THE CATS
* * *
WOLCOTT GIBBS AND E. F. KINKEAD
Since 1919, Miss Rita Ross has done her best to rid the city of half a million homeless cats which the S.P.C.A. estimates roam its streets. Almost singlehanded, during that period she has turned over more than two hundred tons of cats to the Society for painless destruction. Like the Post Office ideal, Miss Ross is deterred neither by snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night on her round of deadly mercy. On Sundays and holidays, blown along by the high March wind or baked by August, in buildings rotten and sagging, through streets that crawl and smell, almost always among people who are hostile or derisive, she has followed her incomprehensible star. It is a bad day when she gets only six cats; it is a good one when she gets sixteen. Once, when the S.P.C.A. recklessly provided her with one of its wagons and a driver, she bagged fifteen hundred. She has the peculiar reputation of being able to move off under her own weight in cats.
Miss Ross, though a furious and indomitable woman, is also a small one. She is five feet two and a quarter inches tall, and without equipment she weighs only a hundred and one pounds. Her face is shrewd, her glance penetrating, with a sort of birdlike fixity, her manner self-possessed and bouncy. She talks a good deal—coyly about her cats, sardonically about the enemies she has routed on a thousand battlefields. She is around thirty-seven years old.
Every morning at seven-thirty she leaves her home, a small stucco one-family house in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, and takes the subway to the east end of Brooklyn Bridge. Here she alights and proceeds on foot over the bridge, gathering in cats as she goes. She works an average of fourteen hours a day, and she always keeps herself in first-class condition. Once, when a gang of hoodlums tried to deprive her of forty cats, she routed them decisively, wielding an ashcan with murderous effect.
Of the agility which makes a seven-foot billboard only a negligible obstacle in her course, she says, “I studied acrobatic dancing when I was a chorus girl and that comes in handy in climbing. I can beat any man in the S.P.C.A. up a tree except Johnny Joule of the Brooklyn Shelter. He used to be a tree pruner for the Park Department and he is wonderful at getting up a tree.”
This is no empty boast. Once Miss Ross was interrupted in her customary work on the third floor of a deserted Harlem tenement by a man who came in quietly and locked the door behind him. His manner was menacing and Miss Ross did not stop to question him about his intentions. She dissolved an untidy situation by scrambling through the transom.
Miss Ross’s clothes are nondescript except for an enormous cone-shaped hat, which she wears to keep cobwebs and plaster out of her hair. Her equipment is bizarre. She carries more impedimenta than the average Red Cap: a big, homemade wire trap of the cage type, an animal case, and a good-sized market basket. The trap may contain as many as ten swearing cats, the animal case up to six more. In the market basket are tins of canned salmon, catnip, tin pie plates, a can opener, a flashlight, a police whistle, a ball of twine, and five burlap sacks, used to contain an occasional overflow from the trap and the animal case. Laden with these unusual devices and proceeding at an effortless lope that eats up the miles, Miss Ross is an arresting figure. She is even more so when a vague but cheerful impulse leads her to dye her black hair red, or to wear a yellow wig.
Cat-catching on the grand scale leaves little time for other interests. Miss Ross has none of the accepted vices. She neither smokes nor drinks and if she had her choice, she says emphatically, she would rather kiss a cat than the best man who ever walked on two feet.
While Miss Ross is unquestionably the champion cat woman, there are lesser ones, and occasionally she is accompanied by a Miss Marion Kane. Miss Kane is about thirty-three, short, Celtic, and a ferocious hitter with either hand. When she and Miss Ross roam the streets of Harlem at night, prudent residents take cover, for both ladies have hasty dispositions and would not hesitate to engage an army. Most of the time, however, Miss Ross prefers to hunt alone, having, like so many gifted people, a distaste for collaboration.
Her usual hunting grounds are the bleaker, poorer parts of town. There she operates with matchless precision and technique, as relentlessly as doom. Every day she speaks to about a hundred people on the street, asking them to be on the lookout for stray cats and to communicate with her by mail when they hear of any. One ally, who modestly prefers to be known only as “The Lady from Grantwood, N.J.,” scarcely allows a day to pass without providing Miss Ross with the address of at least one underprivileged cat. Miss Ross carries the answers to these requests in her bag and they dictate roughly her course for the day. In addition, she cuts out bankruptcy notices from the papers, because small-store failures alm
ost always result in homeless or locked-in cats. The greater part of her success, however, can be laid to simple vigilance. She penetrates sewers, elevator shafts, and cellars, and climbs to roof tops. She investigates freight yards, abattoirs, bridges, and cemeteries. She never passes a deserted building without making cat sounds, and it is a hard and cynical cat that can resist Miss Ross when she mews. She never allows any animal to be maltreated in her wide and various wanderings and can be almost as indignant about a horse whose teeth aren’t clean as she can about one that is being beaten. While Miss Ross has room in her heart for the entire animal kingdom, she focusses principally on cats because she thinks they are victims of prejudice and bigotry.
“This is humiliating. Couldn’t you drop me a block from school?” (illustration credit 10.3)
“A dog has a million friends to a cat’s one,” she says. “Why, even snakes are sometimes praised!”
In a typical working day Miss Ross frequently covers between twenty-five and thirty miles, running like a flame through the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and nearer New Jersey, stopping only reluctantly for food. In restaurants and lunchrooms her mystifying burden often arouses comment, but she is not embarrassed.
“They’re just a little nervous,” she says, referring to the ghostly heave and bounce of the containers at her feet.
The people among whom Miss Ross works always regard her with amazement and sometimes even with consternation, a lady so oddly possessed being a little upsetting to the simple-minded. Once, accompanied by an admiring representative of this magazine, she entered a building at 447 Lexington Avenue to call for a cat. The building was being renovated and the only occupant was a moody Negro in spectacles, hoeing mortar in a tub. Miss Ross told him she had come for the cat.
“Whut cat?” he said. “I don’t know of no cat.”
“Listen,” said Miss Ross, and she gave her celebrated cry. They listened, and from a dark tunnel in the rear of the basement there came an answering cry, soft and dolorous.
“Why you want that cat?” asked the colored man, nervously.
Miss Ross did not reply directly. She had put on her beehive hat and prepared a mess of salmon on a tin plate. She paused at the mouth of the aperture and looked at the colored man.
“I don’t suppose you noticed whether it was a boy or girl?” she asked.
“No’m,” he replied. “I don’ recollect.”
“Well,” said Miss Ross, and disappeared, mewing softly.
When she came out, blurred with cobwebs, she was carrying a thin, exasperated cat which she thrust into her basket, already the prison of three others. Leaving the building, she spoke once more to the colored man, who had retreated behind a barrel of lime.
“If you see any more kitties, you be nice and play with them, won’t you?” she said.
The uneasiness inspired by Miss Ross is by no means confined to the humble. There is no way of telling what the cats themselves think about her, though their gratitude is probably mixed with other emotions, but the S.P.C.A., that enlightened body of humanitarians, speaks of her with horror. The day in 1926 when she brought in fifteen hundred cats is still remembered as the darkest point in the Society’s history, although Miss Ross dismisses her stupendous feat lightly. She had spotted colonies of cats around town too large to be handled by a lady on foot—there were eighty-seven in the basement of one deserted tenement—and she had dreamed of the day when she would be able to deal with them wholesale. The Society’s wagon and driver gave her her glorious opportunity and she seized it fiercely. From dawn until deep night, driven furiously from the Battery to the Bronx, delivering fifty, sixty, a hundred cats at a clip to the stupefied officials, she accomplished the miraculous. The wagon and driver were withdrawn soon afterward. Miss Ross, disappointed but by no means daunted, went back to patrolling the streets on foot, and even with this handicap continued to tax the Society’s facilities. She still does. Sydney Coleman, vice-president of the Society and not essentially a robust man, has barred his door against her in a pitiable effort to save his reason. The Society itself would like to have her restrained legally before it is engulfed in a living wave of cats. This, however, would mean a court suit and such an advertisement might easily be bad for the Society. Kindly people, unaware of the real nature of the crisis, would take Miss Ross’s side; contributions would drop off. Last year an unofficial hearing was arranged before Magistrate Louis Brodsky in West Side Court. The judge told Miss Ross that the Society had a legal right to refuse cats in such staggering abundance. Miss Ross, with a ringing eloquence that made the representatives of the Society shudder, cried that it had no moral right before God or man to close its doors to sick or suffering animals. Magistrate Brodsky, a sanguine man, said in conclusion that he was satisfied that no further trouble would come up between Miss Ross and the Society. Miss Ross continued to use the Society’s five borough shelters to deposit her cats.
The charge has arisen—and the Society would probably give its handsomest medal to the man who can prove it—that Miss Ross is indiscriminate in her choice of cats, that in the fever of the chase she has abducted cats whose home lives were by no means insupportable. One fall, a few years ago, the West End Fruit Market, the New Yorker Delicatessen Store, Schwartz Brothers Fruit Store, and other establishments on the upper West Side missed their cats after Miss Ross had passed that way, conceivably on a broomstick, but whether she had anything to do with these disappearances has never been proved. To accusations of this kind Miss Ross has a firm, invariable answer. Three kinds of cats are safe from her—well-fed cats, altered cats, and nursing mothers. The first two imply ownership, the third maternity. No one can say with certainty that she has ever violated this rule.
If nobody calls for them within forty-eight hours, the cats Miss Ross brings in to the S.P.C.A. are placed in a lethal chamber and asphyxiated in fifteen seconds. That her love is deadly, her artful miaou a siren song, does not concern Miss Ross too much. The stray cat in New York, she feels, can look forward only to a life of great suffering and anxiety, a lonely and miserable end. The alternative is euthanasia and, since he cannot make the choice himself, she does so for him, merciful beyond pity or regret. Estimating that Miss Ross has seduced an average of ten cats a day for nineteen years, she has nearly seventy thousand souls on her conscience. They weigh lightly.
“It’s a better death than most humans get,” she says.
The police have also met Miss Ross, and they look on her with distaste mixed with a sort of stunned respect. She knows that any citizen has a right to use a patrolman’s box to call the station house, and that a reported felony will bring two patrol cars; a murder, five. Several times when she has felt that things were getting a little out of hand, Miss Ross has not hesitated to shout murder.
Innocent patrolmen have occasionally made the mistake of summoning Miss Ross to court and charging her with disorderly conduct. Not one of them has done so twice. She has an imposing courtroom presence and an astonishing legal vocabulary, so her accusers are often dismayed to learn that in the eyes of the law they have been either brutal or incompetent or both. She has even been known to bring departmental charges against patrolmen who have tried to thwart her in one way or another, and this has made the force wary, since such a charge remains on a man’s record, proved or not. There are officers in New York who would not arrest Miss Ross if they caught her setting off a bomb.
Thoughtful policemen, in fact, have concluded that the best way to deal with Miss Ross is to do what she says, even if it involves situations not found in the Manual. Once she commandeered two patrolmen from the Borough Park Station in Brooklyn and took them to a deserted bakery which, she said, contained two cats. This was true. The cats were plainly visible and painfully emaciated but, as the policemen discovered when they had forced their way in, Miss Ross had forgotten to mention that they were also insane. In their delirium they mistook their rescuers for aggressors and leapt furiously about the bakery. They were marvellously light from hunger
and strain and for the better part of an hour they kept their freedom while Miss Ross and the patrolmen, all heavily floured, toiled irritably after them among the barrels. At last superior physical condition triumphed and the cats were captured and turned over to their nemesis. Miss Ross can be appreciative when the occasion seems to call for it. She wrote a letter of commendation to the Police Commissioner himself.
Probably the most striking example of the influence Miss Ross has with the police occurred some time ago in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. She was chased into the subway by a gang of boys trying to rescue a rather unwieldy dog which she had been given by one of their mothers and now carried under her arm. It was her plan to conceal the dog in the ladies’ room until the excitement blew over, but she was thwarted by an officious guard. Undaunted, Miss Ross reversed her field, ran up another flight of stairs, and swung down the street to a stationery store. Once inside, to the owner’s amazement she slammed the door and locked it.
“Don’t open that door,” she said sharply as he came from behind the counter.
“But Madam, this is a place of business.”
“Don’t open that door,” repeated Miss Ross, and gave him the dog to hold. While he held the dog uncertainly, she went to the telephone and put in a murder call. Inside thirty seconds, five radio patrol cars, commanded by a Sergeant Kelly of the Canarsie Station, had rushed to the scene. The police dispersed the crowd, and Miss Ross emerged triumphantly with the dog.
“I demand protection against these ruffians,” she said, and rode majestically in Sergeant Kelly’s car to the nearest police station, where she left an order for an S.P.C.A. truck to come and pick up the dog. Then, as calmly as if such stirring things happened every day, she went out cat-gathering.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 19
