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Cats at Hemingway Museum Draw Tourists, and a Legal Battle
http://nyti.ms/XZuDSd
http://nyti.ms/VWfwaG
Cats at Hemingway Museum Draw Tourists, and a Legal Battle
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
KEY WEST, Fla. — As any visitor to Ernest Hemingway’s house knows, the grounds here boast more than just Papa’s typewriter, his white iron-framed bed and the oft-used urinal he brought home from Sloppy Joe’s bar.
The place teems with six-toed cats — the so-called Hemingway cats — who for generations have stretched out on Hemingway’s couch, curled up on his pillow and mugged for the Papa-razzi. Tour guides recount over and over how the gypsy cats descend from Snowball, a fluffy white cat who was a gift to the Hemingways. Seafaring legend has it that polydactyl cats (those with extra toes) bring a bounty of luck, which certainly explains their own pampered good fortune.
But it seems the charms of even 45 celebrated six-toed cats have proved powerless against one implacable foe: federal regulators.
The museum’s nine-year bid to keep the cats beyond the reach of the Department of Agriculture ended in failure this month. The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that the agency has the power to regulate the cats under the Animal Welfare Act, which applies to zoo and traveling circus animals, because the museum uses them in advertisements, sells cat-related merchandise online and makes them available to paying tourists.
In other words, the cats are a living, breathing exhibit and require a federal license.
“The most ludicrous part of the whole thing is that if we were really dealing with the health and welfare of the cats, this would have never been an issue,” said Michael A. Marowski, the great-nephew of the woman who bought the Hemingway house in 1961, the year Hemingway died, and opened it as a museum in 1964.
“These cats are so well taken care of,” he said, “but because there is a book, and this book tells us that exhibited animals need to be kept this way, we have been put through this.”
Mr. Marowski is pondering whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.
In his view, the tale of the Hemingway cats is nothing more than federal regulation run roughshod over the myriad local and state laws that govern domesticated animals. The cats, most of which bear the names of famous people, have long received weekly veterinarian visits, and a vast majority are spayed or neutered.
The cats eat well, are free to lounge on Hemingway’s furniture (because it is also their house), and even have their own cemetery near the garden, where Frank Sinatra lies buried within arms’ reach of Zsa Zsa Gabor and where Marilyn Monroe is one sultry glance from Mr. Bette Davis (it is Key West, after all).
In fact, when the Agriculture Department sent People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to assess the situation in 2005, the group’s investigator concluded: “What I found was a bunch of fat, happy and relaxed cats. God save the cats.”
The appellate court agreed that “the museum has always kept, fed and provided weekly veterinary care for the Hemingway cats.” In their ruling, the three judges even injected a dose of understanding.
“We appreciate the museum’s somewhat unique situation, and we sympathize with its frustration,” the ruling states. “Nevertheless, it is not the court’s role to evaluate the wisdom of federal regulations.”
At the moment, the museum is unaffected by the ruling. That is because it reached a settlement with the department in 2008 that granted the museum an exhibitors’ license so long as it extended the height of the fence, added a few special bowls designed to drown bugs and upgraded its cat shelters.
But Mr. Marowski said that did not mean the fight was over. The museum, he said, would be subject to any changes in regulation, any one of which could upend the museum and the cats.
“We are now at the whim of the agency,” said his lawyer, Cara Higgins.
David Sacks, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, said the agency was simply following the law, which also covers team mascots, for example, and is meant to ensure proper daily care. Cruelty is not the threshold, he said. The agency must also track things like toxic peeling paint or rodent infestation.
“If the animal is covered by the act, we don’t draw distinctions,” he said. “We regulate them.”
The dispute began in 2003 after a museum volunteer and cat lover filed a complaint with the department after an aggressive cat wandered from the property. The agency concluded that the museum needed to follow federal regulations on exhibiting animals. But the museum argued that the cats are born and bred at the house, that they seldom wander beyond the grounds and that it is Mr. Hemingway’s legacy — not the cats — that serve as the main attraction.
“If we had a six-toed cat zoo, we wouldn’t get those numbers,” Ms. Higgins said.
But the agency disagreed. It sent in an animal behavioral specialist to index the cats and analyze the situation. Undercover agents were then sent in 2005 and 2006 to observe the cats and surreptitiously photograph their movements. One photo shows a gray cat sitting on the pavement. It carries the caption: “Picture of six-toed cat taken in restaurant/bar at end of Whalton Lane and Duval. May or may not be a Hemingway Home and Museum cat.”
“It’s silliness; it just got insane,” Ms. Higgins said. “This is what your tax dollars are paying for. The agents are coming down here on vacation, going to bars and taking pictures of cats.”
At one point, the agency recommended a night watchman for the cats. It later threatened to confiscate them. A federal judge in the case even led an impromptu field trip to the museum; federal marshals cleared a path of tourists for the suit-wearing contingent. The legal back-and-forth filled six boxes.
The rumpus has caused no consternation in the lives of the Hemingway cats (and there is a question as to whether Hemingway ever even owned a six-toed cat, but that is another story).
One recent afternoon, a furry Lionel Barrymore nibbled on kibble then hopped off a rock and sauntered away. Hairy Truman sprawled languorously on the patio table, soaking up rubs. And Francis, named for a 2004 hurricane that hit Key West, nestled comfortably on Papa’s pillow as guests oohed and aahed.
Some took as much delight in the Hemingway cats as they did in Hemingway lore.
“Hemingway gets you here the first time,” said Elizabeth Zettler, 28, who visits every year from Jacksonville, Fla., as she zoomed her lens in tight on Francis. “But the cats keep us coming back.”
300 Cats, Yes. Craziness, No.
http://nyti.ms/WPpivU
http://nyti.ms/Vsio0F
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 of the republic before he died in 2007.)
“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.”
For Feral Cats, a Few New Places to Call Home
http://nyti.ms/10mH0yG
http://nyti.ms/TNA6NM
EIGHT New York City architects and designers proudly displayed their new low-cost houses at a show in Manhattan on Thursday, and not a single client was present. Feral cats are like that.
No matter, like all good designers, the ones whose work was on display at “Architects for Animals: Giving Shelter,” a daylong event at the Steelcase showroom in Midtown Manhattan, had taken pains to address the needs of the users.
Consider, for example, the Tin Hut, a structure designed by Kathryn Walton, 42, an architectural project manager and the founder of a nonprofit cat-rescue organization in Brooklyn called the American Street Cat. Ms. Walton’s shelter — which, like the rest, will eventually be placed in an area of the city that is home to a colony of feral cats — consists of 300 recycled aluminum cat-food containers insulated with recycled denim. The base is raised four inches off the ground, to keep the cats high and dry in case of snowdrifts; the mat is springy vinyl. The interior, which has a sort of figure-eight shape, is divided in two.
“We don’t know who sleeps with who,” Ms. Walton said. “But there are some bonded pairs, and this can accommodate up to four cats.”
Humans are always carrying on about wanting more light in their homes. Do cats like lots of light as well?
“Cats like to find the darkest places to sleep,” Ms. Walton said. “They don’t want to be exposed to foot traffic or vehicular traffic. And if it’s 50 degrees or so, for sure they will be on top of the shelter.”
Very client-friendly and yet, what with all those tin cans, won’t the kitties be likely to cook in the summer?
“Yeah,” said Ms. Walton, who has three cats of her own and frequently cares for foster cats, as well as the feral cats in her backyard. “But when I see it getting hot, they don’t need the shelter and I pull it inside.”
The number of feral cats in New York City is anyone’s guess. Steve Gruber, the spokesman for the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, the nonprofit group that sponsored the fund-raiser, estimates that it is in the hundreds of thousands — or maybe even a million. Regardless, the Alliance, which is not part of the city government, is committed to reducing the number through what it calls TNR: Trap, Neuter, Return.
The Architects for Animals project is part of that effort. It was started three years ago by Leslie Farrell, who works for an architecture firm called Francis Cauffman, with the goals of bringing attention to the plight of feral cats and recruiting architects to create shelters that are warm, portable, safe, easy to clean and affordable.
Unlike most proud architects, however, those who participated in this project couldn’t tell anyone where their buildings would be.
“We can’t divulge location because we don’t want to advertise to people the best place to dump your cat,” said Mike Phillips, a veterinarian technician who is a community outreach coordinator for the NYC Feral Cat Initiative, a program sponsored by the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals. “And a feral cat colony will not welcome a new cat. It will be chased off.”
For those who are concerned about having feral cats nearby, Mr. Phillips said that once cats are neutered, annoying behavior like marking territory and night yowling comes to an end. And cats, he added, which feed on mice and rats, might actually benefit a neighborhood. He and Ms. Farrell also stressed that it is possible to build humane shelters inexpensively.
That certainly seemed to be the case with the shelters at the show. Adam and Sofia Zimmerman, of Zimmerman Workshop Architecture + Design, in Brooklyn, made theirs out of a moss-enclosed cooler with a hole cut in the side. They estimated the cost, which included two layers of moss secured with chicken wire, at about $80.
Sara Silvestri, an architect and designer at H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, in Manhattan, made a shelter out of a plastic box set in a cube of PVC pipes, with an entry hole covered in a rubbery circle of window insulation. It cost about $30 to build.
Scott Francisco, the founder of Pilot Projects in Lower Manhattan, worked with Anne Chen to design a thatched cat tepee out of branches and brush, which he called the DIY NYC Cat Fort. (Plans are available at pilot-projects.org.) But how does a tepee address the needs of the client?
The aesthetic is “matched with the cat to feel wild,” Mr. Francisco explained. “I was very influenced by the book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ as a kid.”
http://nyti.ms/XZuDSd
http://nyti.ms/VWfwaG
Cats at Hemingway Museum Draw Tourists, and a Legal Battle
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
KEY WEST, Fla. — As any visitor to Ernest Hemingway’s house knows, the grounds here boast more than just Papa’s typewriter, his white iron-framed bed and the oft-used urinal he brought home from Sloppy Joe’s bar.
The place teems with six-toed cats — the so-called Hemingway cats — who for generations have stretched out on Hemingway’s couch, curled up on his pillow and mugged for the Papa-razzi. Tour guides recount over and over how the gypsy cats descend from Snowball, a fluffy white cat who was a gift to the Hemingways. Seafaring legend has it that polydactyl cats (those with extra toes) bring a bounty of luck, which certainly explains their own pampered good fortune.
But it seems the charms of even 45 celebrated six-toed cats have proved powerless against one implacable foe: federal regulators.
The museum’s nine-year bid to keep the cats beyond the reach of the Department of Agriculture ended in failure this month. The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that the agency has the power to regulate the cats under the Animal Welfare Act, which applies to zoo and traveling circus animals, because the museum uses them in advertisements, sells cat-related merchandise online and makes them available to paying tourists.
In other words, the cats are a living, breathing exhibit and require a federal license.
“The most ludicrous part of the whole thing is that if we were really dealing with the health and welfare of the cats, this would have never been an issue,” said Michael A. Marowski, the great-nephew of the woman who bought the Hemingway house in 1961, the year Hemingway died, and opened it as a museum in 1964.
“These cats are so well taken care of,” he said, “but because there is a book, and this book tells us that exhibited animals need to be kept this way, we have been put through this.”
Mr. Marowski is pondering whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.
In his view, the tale of the Hemingway cats is nothing more than federal regulation run roughshod over the myriad local and state laws that govern domesticated animals. The cats, most of which bear the names of famous people, have long received weekly veterinarian visits, and a vast majority are spayed or neutered.
The cats eat well, are free to lounge on Hemingway’s furniture (because it is also their house), and even have their own cemetery near the garden, where Frank Sinatra lies buried within arms’ reach of Zsa Zsa Gabor and where Marilyn Monroe is one sultry glance from Mr. Bette Davis (it is Key West, after all).
In fact, when the Agriculture Department sent People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to assess the situation in 2005, the group’s investigator concluded: “What I found was a bunch of fat, happy and relaxed cats. God save the cats.”
The appellate court agreed that “the museum has always kept, fed and provided weekly veterinary care for the Hemingway cats.” In their ruling, the three judges even injected a dose of understanding.
“We appreciate the museum’s somewhat unique situation, and we sympathize with its frustration,” the ruling states. “Nevertheless, it is not the court’s role to evaluate the wisdom of federal regulations.”
At the moment, the museum is unaffected by the ruling. That is because it reached a settlement with the department in 2008 that granted the museum an exhibitors’ license so long as it extended the height of the fence, added a few special bowls designed to drown bugs and upgraded its cat shelters.
But Mr. Marowski said that did not mean the fight was over. The museum, he said, would be subject to any changes in regulation, any one of which could upend the museum and the cats.
“We are now at the whim of the agency,” said his lawyer, Cara Higgins.
David Sacks, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, said the agency was simply following the law, which also covers team mascots, for example, and is meant to ensure proper daily care. Cruelty is not the threshold, he said. The agency must also track things like toxic peeling paint or rodent infestation.
“If the animal is covered by the act, we don’t draw distinctions,” he said. “We regulate them.”
The dispute began in 2003 after a museum volunteer and cat lover filed a complaint with the department after an aggressive cat wandered from the property. The agency concluded that the museum needed to follow federal regulations on exhibiting animals. But the museum argued that the cats are born and bred at the house, that they seldom wander beyond the grounds and that it is Mr. Hemingway’s legacy — not the cats — that serve as the main attraction.
“If we had a six-toed cat zoo, we wouldn’t get those numbers,” Ms. Higgins said.
But the agency disagreed. It sent in an animal behavioral specialist to index the cats and analyze the situation. Undercover agents were then sent in 2005 and 2006 to observe the cats and surreptitiously photograph their movements. One photo shows a gray cat sitting on the pavement. It carries the caption: “Picture of six-toed cat taken in restaurant/bar at end of Whalton Lane and Duval. May or may not be a Hemingway Home and Museum cat.”
“It’s silliness; it just got insane,” Ms. Higgins said. “This is what your tax dollars are paying for. The agents are coming down here on vacation, going to bars and taking pictures of cats.”
At one point, the agency recommended a night watchman for the cats. It later threatened to confiscate them. A federal judge in the case even led an impromptu field trip to the museum; federal marshals cleared a path of tourists for the suit-wearing contingent. The legal back-and-forth filled six boxes.
The rumpus has caused no consternation in the lives of the Hemingway cats (and there is a question as to whether Hemingway ever even owned a six-toed cat, but that is another story).
One recent afternoon, a furry Lionel Barrymore nibbled on kibble then hopped off a rock and sauntered away. Hairy Truman sprawled languorously on the patio table, soaking up rubs. And Francis, named for a 2004 hurricane that hit Key West, nestled comfortably on Papa’s pillow as guests oohed and aahed.
Some took as much delight in the Hemingway cats as they did in Hemingway lore.
“Hemingway gets you here the first time,” said Elizabeth Zettler, 28, who visits every year from Jacksonville, Fla., as she zoomed her lens in tight on Francis. “But the cats keep us coming back.”
300 Cats, Yes. Craziness, No.
http://nyti.ms/WPpivU
http://nyti.ms/Vsio0F
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 of the republic before he died in 2007.)
“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.”
For Feral Cats, a Few New Places to Call Home
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EIGHT New York City architects and designers proudly displayed their new low-cost houses at a show in Manhattan on Thursday, and not a single client was present. Feral cats are like that.
No matter, like all good designers, the ones whose work was on display at “Architects for Animals: Giving Shelter,” a daylong event at the Steelcase showroom in Midtown Manhattan, had taken pains to address the needs of the users.
Consider, for example, the Tin Hut, a structure designed by Kathryn Walton, 42, an architectural project manager and the founder of a nonprofit cat-rescue organization in Brooklyn called the American Street Cat. Ms. Walton’s shelter — which, like the rest, will eventually be placed in an area of the city that is home to a colony of feral cats — consists of 300 recycled aluminum cat-food containers insulated with recycled denim. The base is raised four inches off the ground, to keep the cats high and dry in case of snowdrifts; the mat is springy vinyl. The interior, which has a sort of figure-eight shape, is divided in two.
“We don’t know who sleeps with who,” Ms. Walton said. “But there are some bonded pairs, and this can accommodate up to four cats.”
Humans are always carrying on about wanting more light in their homes. Do cats like lots of light as well?
“Cats like to find the darkest places to sleep,” Ms. Walton said. “They don’t want to be exposed to foot traffic or vehicular traffic. And if it’s 50 degrees or so, for sure they will be on top of the shelter.”
Very client-friendly and yet, what with all those tin cans, won’t the kitties be likely to cook in the summer?
“Yeah,” said Ms. Walton, who has three cats of her own and frequently cares for foster cats, as well as the feral cats in her backyard. “But when I see it getting hot, they don’t need the shelter and I pull it inside.”
The number of feral cats in New York City is anyone’s guess. Steve Gruber, the spokesman for the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, the nonprofit group that sponsored the fund-raiser, estimates that it is in the hundreds of thousands — or maybe even a million. Regardless, the Alliance, which is not part of the city government, is committed to reducing the number through what it calls TNR: Trap, Neuter, Return.
The Architects for Animals project is part of that effort. It was started three years ago by Leslie Farrell, who works for an architecture firm called Francis Cauffman, with the goals of bringing attention to the plight of feral cats and recruiting architects to create shelters that are warm, portable, safe, easy to clean and affordable.
Unlike most proud architects, however, those who participated in this project couldn’t tell anyone where their buildings would be.
“We can’t divulge location because we don’t want to advertise to people the best place to dump your cat,” said Mike Phillips, a veterinarian technician who is a community outreach coordinator for the NYC Feral Cat Initiative, a program sponsored by the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals. “And a feral cat colony will not welcome a new cat. It will be chased off.”
For those who are concerned about having feral cats nearby, Mr. Phillips said that once cats are neutered, annoying behavior like marking territory and night yowling comes to an end. And cats, he added, which feed on mice and rats, might actually benefit a neighborhood. He and Ms. Farrell also stressed that it is possible to build humane shelters inexpensively.
That certainly seemed to be the case with the shelters at the show. Adam and Sofia Zimmerman, of Zimmerman Workshop Architecture + Design, in Brooklyn, made theirs out of a moss-enclosed cooler with a hole cut in the side. They estimated the cost, which included two layers of moss secured with chicken wire, at about $80.
Sara Silvestri, an architect and designer at H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, in Manhattan, made a shelter out of a plastic box set in a cube of PVC pipes, with an entry hole covered in a rubbery circle of window insulation. It cost about $30 to build.
Scott Francisco, the founder of Pilot Projects in Lower Manhattan, worked with Anne Chen to design a thatched cat tepee out of branches and brush, which he called the DIY NYC Cat Fort. (Plans are available at pilot-projects.org.) But how does a tepee address the needs of the client?
The aesthetic is “matched with the cat to feel wild,” Mr. Francisco explained. “I was very influenced by the book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ as a kid.”