“Wall to wall cats; floors, walls, furniture rotting and coated in cat urine, cat fur and cat feces. The smell was literally overpowering,” a judge said Thursday. “The first officer on the scene thought there might be a dead body inside the house.”
Hours later, as OSPCA staff in haz-mat gear were in the process of removing a feral colony of 107 cats from the home, homeowner Diane Way returned with a pull-cart full of cat food.
“This was a sad case,” Ontario Court Justice William B. Horkins told the court Thursday, after a 23-day trial.
“With apologies to Shakespeare, Diane Way loved her cats ‘not wisely, but too well’ and as with Othello, there were tragic results.”
Horkins found Way, 67, guilty of cruelty to animals and causing or permitting unnecessary suffering to animals.
In the judge’s decision, cat after cat is described as being aggressive, crusted in fecal matter and suffering from eye and lung infections, emotional distress, chemical burns from urine, genetic defects from inbreeding, dehydration, dental problems, alopecia and malnutrition.
Every time a veterinarian walked into the trailer where the cats were being housed, not a single one meowed. “It was spooky,” the vet testified.
All but one of the cats was euthanized.
The Crown did not need to prove Way intended to be cruel to the cats or for the cats to suffer, only that a reasonable person would have foreseen that Way’s conduct would lead to the cats suffering, court heard.
“Way is not a mean person and she had great affection for her cats,” Horkins said. “However, she allowed her population of cats to get totally out of control.”
Things began to get out of hand in 2009 when Way took in several stray cats in addition to her three kittens, Way testified.
When she stopped sterilizing the cats and taking them to the vet, the population grew from 19 in 2009 to 107 two years later. She testified she had lost track of how many cats there were by then, estimating the number at 60.
The house near Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave., fell into horrifying disrepair. Firefighters testified the wood floors were so soggy from urine that they feared they might give way. What looked like mud, as one would see after a flood, turned out to be feces.
Way said she turned off her water after a pipe sprung a leak, too embarrassed to call a plumber.
She said she slept on a couch in the living room, and would “wake up in a sea of cats,” Horkins said.
Way testified that she tried to give some of the cats away through friends and called the Humane Society and the OSPCA with no success.
Overwhelmed and overworked with two teaching jobs including as a professor at George Brown College, Way said she tried to feed and care for the cats as best she could, bringing home as much cat food and cat litter as she could carry — there were four litter boxes in the home.
Prosecutor Corie Langdon argued she was spending about the same amount of money on the cats in 2009 as she was in 2011 despite having the financial resources to do more.
The defence argued Way’s behaviour was not criminal because she honestly but mistakenly believed that cats were not suffering.
Way testified she never saw signs of illness among the cats and that they were peaceful. She said she was shocked to learn one of them was blind.
Horkins said that a person would have to be delusional not to realize the situation for what it was.
“To be blunt, no one in their right mind could possibly have misunderstood these cats were suffering, that the situation was extreme,” he said.
Horkins said he is aware, through his own general knowledge, of a “cat lady” syndrome or disorder similar to obsessive hoarding and found a “note of compulsion” in Way’s testimony about why she continued to live in the home and try to care for the cats.
But there was no evidence presented at trial to suggest Way was not able to understand the consequences of her conduct “apart from wondering as a lay person how any reasonable person would have allowed the intolerable situation to develop and linger,” Horkins said.
He found that Way understood there was a problem, since she tried to give cats away to friends and co-workers, and failed to deal with it. She must have known she was not providing adequate care for the cats, likely an impossible task for anyone in the circumstances, he said.
Way’s lawyer Walter Fox said following the verdict that they were disappointed in the decision and will be looking it over carefully as they consider their next steps.
A sentencing hearing is scheduled for May.
(Toronto Star - March 10, 2016)
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