New York: Albany residents rescue dozens of felines from off-limits condemned house

NEW YORK -- City officials first got wind of the problem on Orange Street when a neighbor called the water department complaining of a foul odor.

But when crews arrived, they quickly concluded the stench wasn't from a sewer.

It was coming from a nearby house.

The city moved swiftly to condemn 198 Orange St., a tumbledown wood frame apartment building in Arbor Hill, on July 21 when the Department of Building and Codes determined the building was dangerously unstable, said Deputy Fire Chief Joe Toomey.

And with that, the Great Orange Street Cat Extraction began on the hush-hush. That was mostly because the mission to rescue more than 90 cats -- yes, 90 -- living in the 820-square-foot building wasn't, strictly speaking, legal.

The would-be rescuers faced a dilemma: Cats or no cats, according to the city, the building was off limits -- meaning that not even animal control could venture back inside, said Diane Metz, one of a core group of 15 to 20 volunteers who got word of the plight of the cats, and two Rottweiler dogs, living inside.

Metz said city animal control officials initially plucked about 20 of the felines -- which ranged in age from kittens to seniors -- from the filthy interior, which included large cages stacked about the living area, thickly matted cat hair and other "debris."

"The photos, I can say, do nothing to share the smell or the flies," said Metz, a veteran of the effort to corral the feral cats that took up residence in the decrepit old Wellington Hotel. "I'm a pretty hardy soul, and the flies just got to me."

Working with the cats' owner -- a woman Metz described as very helpful -- the volunteers, unaware of the scope of the task at hand, returned to the building to help her retrieve what they had been led to believe were a few stragglers.

"The former caretaker, the woman who lived there, said there were a handful left," Metz recalled. "So it wasn't until we actually went in there and started counting noses that we had any idea what we had gotten into."

What happened next was a bit like a local version of the Berlin Airlift, when the Western powers thumbed their noses at a Soviet blockade of sections of the German city under Allied control.

In defiance of the city ban, Metz and a handful of skilled cat trappers worked around the clock with other volunteers to capture, transport, photograph and log the cats.

"We trapped during the day, we trapped during the evening, we trapped early in the morning," Metz said. "We went whenever we thought we could grab a couple of cats."

The banner day was July 31, a Saturday, when the team corralled an astounding 30-plus cats, Metz said.

All together, she said, the volunteers rescued at least 72, on top of the nearly two dozen taken out by animal control. Of those, fewer than 10 were feral. The owner, she said, was able to tell the rescuers most of the animals' names and how they got them.

Now the volunteers are scrambling to find the cats foster homes and adoptive families while seeking funds to help pay for veterinary care for the respiratory, dental and other maladies the cats contracted in the filthy conditions.

The volunteers have set up a website at www.orangestreetcats.org with profiles of the rescued animals and also a hot line -- 533-5242 -- that people can call for information or to make donations.

Metz said they've already received generous assistance from the Mohawk & Hudson River Humane Society, Normanside Veterinary Clinic, Bloomingrove Veterinary Hospital and the group Animal Lovers.

The landlord, John Lamb, said he wasn't aware how many animals his tenant had and plans to heed the city's order to raze the building.

"I knew she had a bunch of them, but I didn't know she had that many," Lamb said. "I just want to get the house torn down and move on."

While Metz said this was the single largest cache of animals she's ever encountered, by threefold, she's also certain it's not the only one in the city.

"I'm sure there's hundreds of these houses throughout the city; it just happened to be the one that we found out about," she said. "I'm not a psychologist, but it clearly started from a good place. It just got out of control."

(Times Union - August 18, 2010)