As Hinata Sato opens the gates to an overgrown lot at the Columbia Street Waterfront, dozens of cats emerge from makeshift shelters, discarded wooden pallets, and traffic barrels. A colony of more than 30 feral felines has called the patch near the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey piers their home for some two decades, drawn by the nooks and crannies among stacked containers and idle trucks, and local animal lovers have taken care of the roaming furballs ever since. “It’s like a special spell from the cats that I’m under. I picture cats eating and it just brings me joy,” says Sato, a local restaurant manager who, along with about half a dozen other volunteers, is part…
Cats In Covid Crisis
Since mid-March, I’ve been delivering cats.Not in the “giving birth” kind of delivery, but in the “ordering delivery” sense, when someone wants/needs something and someone else brings it to their door.As people began working from home, they wanted a furry companion beside them, or they had the time to devote to a new pet, or they wanted to do something good at a time when everything felt awful.So our beloved Cat Cafe was flooded with requests to foster cats and kittens, and I had the absolute pleasure of delivering the coveted felines to their humans.Now, four months into our bizarre new world, the consequences of Covid are less pleasant.In March, the ASPCA …