Saturday, October 11th, 2008

Feline friends

Woman feeds, adopts campus kitties

Carol Mitchell found a starving cat on her walk through campus on Thanksgiving day nearly five years ago. Mitchell took the cat home and now walks on campus every day with food that she leaves for cats and birds.

By Nathan Gill

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

On Thanksgiving morning a starving cat approached Carol Mitchell on her daily walk through campus. Mitchell, a retired Shawnee teacher, returned later that day with food for the calico, which meowed and rubbed against her legs. She eventually took it home as a pet.

“She’s so sweet,” Mitchell said. “She’s a really nice cat.”

Nearly five years later Mitchell still walks campus every day, but now she carries bags of cat food and birdseed.

“If you don’t feed them they’re going to eat the birds and eventually starve to death,” Mitchell said of campus’ stray cats.

In her years as cat curator, Mitchell said she had taken six cats as pets, one of which had three legs. She found it near the old powerhouse — now the Hall Center for the Humanities — with a scraggly look and a nasty infection on its leg. She took the cat to a veterinarian, who had the leg removed. She then rehabilitated it at her home.

“They’re interesting and every one is different,” she said of the eight felines that reside in her “shelter for homeless cats.”

Mitchell feeds her beloved animals a steady diet of dry and wet cat food and fresh water, all discreetly placed in bowls around Wescoe Hall. She said that she hid the food from the other animals on campus, including skunks and opossums, and that she keeps her feeding areas free of trash.

Mitchell is not the only animal lover on campus. She said she often finds food tins that she didn’t leave in her feeding areas, and that someone had recently been leaving a half-eaten barbecue sandwich face-open near her food. After the cats and other campus animals eat the sandwich’s toppings, Mitchell said she gathered the untouched hoagie bun and fed it to birds.

“I think it’s cute,” Mitchell said of the other cat feeders. “I’m glad people care.”

Liliana Merubia, assistant in the office of the provost, said that there were no policies against feeding animals on campus and Capt. Schuyler Bailey of the KU Public Safety Office said the office of public safety did not remove animals from campus unless they posed a threat or were the subject of a complaint.

However, Midge Grinstead, executive director of the Lawrence Humane Society, said that she would prefer that people not feed wild cats. She said wild cats lived dangerous lives, made shorter by disease, harsh weather and attacks by other animals, humans and cars. Feeding cats allows them to breed more and exacerbates the wild population problem, Grinstead said.

“Two cats in 10 years can make 80 million offspring,” Grinstead said.

Rather than feed the cats, Grinstead suggests people call animal control, which brings stray animals to the humane society. There the animals will have access to healthcare and a home.

“Providing we can touch the cat, it will be adopted,” Grinstead said.

However, if the cat is suffering from an untreatable disease or is too wild to touch, the society cannot adopt it out and is required by law to euthanize it, Grinstead said.

“I applaud her for being a kind person,” Grinstead said. “So many walk by and don’t even notice.”

Mitchell said that she had not encountered any dangerous cats, but was aware that feeding them could be contributing to the stray cat population. But she said she couldn’t stop feeding them.

“When I go on vacation I hire someone to leave food because they are dependent on it,” Mitchell said. “I care about the cats.”

Kansan staff writer Nathan Gill can be contacted at ngill@kansan.com.

­— Edited by Trevan McGee

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