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Our society has the teasingly cruel image of a “cat lady,” an older women, usually considered a little off-balanced, who lives alone save for the many cats with which she surrounds herself. The idea is mean and contains a worrying message about the role we still consider relationships ought to play in a woman’s life. It also seems to imply that only a woman would like cats enough to want to own many.
In fact, I think society still has a common assumption that cats are for women and dogs are for men; sure, we can think of plenty of women who love dogs too, but if a couple owns a cat and a dog, most people generally assume the dog is “his” and the cat “hers.” Well, someone should tell that to Craig Grant.
Yahoo News has Grant’s story. He started off somewhat adhering to the stereotype: he didn’t like cats, but his son did. However, his son moved out leaving his cat Pepper behind. Grant soon discovered Pepper was pregnant and before long he had five kittens and one adult cat to deal with. They started to cause a problem in the neighborhood.
By this time the cats must have grown on Grant, because otherwise he would have looked for new homes for them. Instead, Grant purchased 30 acres of a tree farm 100 miles away from his home in Jacksonville, Florida.
At first Grant just built a lone structure there for his cats, converting an old office trailer into a gigantic kitty condo with pet doors and padded perches. Grant had 11 cats by now, and in 2003 he moved out to the farm himself.
Today the cat village, known as Caboodle Ranch, is a full-blown feline paradise housing almost 700 cats, and yet it’s just beginning to use all its space. Currently only 5 of the 30 acres contain cat occupants.
This story makes me think of the many wildlife sanctuaries scattered throughout the country. Some of them even contain the larger species of the feline family. But those refuges are for wild animals rapidly losing their homes, not domesticated pets. The cats at Caboodle actually pose a potential threat to the native wildlife.
The main threat the cats pose is to the local songbird population; domesticated cats are one of the main killers of American songbirds, and having this many running free in one place almost makes them an invasive species against the birds. But so far Grant has managed to keep the cats in check, and I’m glad he has.
Because I love what Grant is doing. He’s not even running a shelter, as wonderful as that would already be. No, Caboodle Ranch is, like I alluded earlier, a domesticated cat sanctuary. The cats taken to Caboodle live there forever. All of its inhabitants couldn’t find homes, so Grant took them in and cared for them.
Grant pays for as much of the nonprofit village as he can himself, with the rest coming in from donations from the public. I really applaud what Grant has done; he started off not even thinking he liked cats, and how he runs the largest rescue, or really sanctuary, I’ve ever heard of for a domesticated pet.
For more details and pictures of Caboodle Ranch, including information on how you can donate, check out its official website here.
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*(This image by gracey is licensed under the MorgueFile License Agreement.)