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Sunday, May 19, 2002

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

WILLIAMSBURG, Pa. -- On the bright side, this Blair County farm town shouldn't have much of a mouse problem.

For that, thank the cat problem.

	This condemned building on First Street in Williamsburg, Blair County, is known as a "wild cat house" to residents. The community has drafted an ordinance that would allow police officers to shoot stray cats on sight. (V.W.H. Campbell Jr, Post-Gazette)

With that, though, go the woes of solving the cat problem.

Folks in this town of 1,345 people are irked about cats roaming the streets, or at least tales of cats roaming the streets, and a proposed ordinance that would let pistol-packing police drop strays right in their tiny tracks.

No, there won't be any shoot-'em-ups in the street, officials promise. But unless animal activists sway council to lift a death sentence on apprehended strays, homeless cats might want to relocate to a town where their prospects are brighter.

"They're out there. I've seen them," said retiree Marvin Miller, who tells of cats making a homeless shelter, complete with rest room, out of his little wood shop. "And I have no problem with whatever it takes, as long as they get rid of the damn things."

But what if Ed Gunnett's cat, J.C. -- short for Just Cat -- gets out and suddenly has authorities on his tail?

"If they think they're going to come and take my 17-year-old cat," said Gunnett, 72, "I'll bash their heads."

Nobody's sure how big Williamsburg's stray problem is.

Leroy Hoover, 90, says he's seen but one loose cat doing the town and that townspeople stand in greater peril of being bombed by the pigeons making a home at the old bank building.

Borough Councilman Don Zimmerman, on the other hand, figures there could be 100 strays around.

"At 8 o'clock at night, when I walk down the street, I've seen 30 to 50 strays in just two blocks," Zimmerman said as he paused from working on the engine of a jacked-up Pontiac at his service station. "The other night, I walked down the alley over here and counted 17."

Miller said, "The cats get into my wood. I put wood in my van, and then I smell cat all the way to wherever I'm going. If they keep getting into my building, a few of these cats are going to disappear, I know that."

Council President Ernie Hetrick figures the hubbub matches Williamsburg's last major set-to -- a water-rate increase four years ago.

"Lots of people are talking about this," he said as he helped install paneling at the borough building.

The Stray Cat Fray didn't start suddenly.

Retiree Mildred Price -- admittedly no animal aficionado, at least since a dog tore off her coat when she was 11 -- said strays regularly hung out at her patio/car port. For two years, she lobbied for a cat ordinance.

"I thought, 'Mildred, I don't know if I want to come down there and sit, because there's been stray cats all over everything,' " said compatriot Alfreda Hite, who tells of spreading Clorox and lime in a losing battle to dissuade cats from making a king-size litter box of an apartment parking lot she owns.

"This all started with a couple of cats," Price said. "But get a male and female, and you know what happens."

According to barber Charles Hauser, the consensus among the menfolk was that a few womenfolk are making plenty of ado about relatively little.

Council members saw enough of a problem, though, that they culled bits of ordinances from such boroughs as State College and nearby Hollidaysburg, cobbled their own proposal and now have it up for a once-over by the borough solicitor. Preliminary passage could come next month.

Among the points:

Cat licenses would be required for the first time -- $6.50 for spayed cats and $8.50 for the rest, with a $2 senior citizen discount.

Unlicensed cats are outlaws.

No caterwauling at night.

You feed it, you own it -- as much as somebody can own a creature that follows only directives issued by its stomach and sleep cycle.

But on the last of the seven handwritten pages of the proposal was the show-stopper:

"It shall be the duty of every police officer of the borough to kill any cat which does not bear a proper license tag, which is found running at large."

Put out the word on the street: Dead cats walking.

But the idea behind the ordinance isn't to have police officers separating cats from all nine lives right there on the streets, Solicitor Nathan Karn said.

"When they put it in the local paper, it looked like we were going to ride around and shoot cats right off the armrests of people's chairs," Zimmerman said. "There's not a guy on council who wants police to go out and shoot cats. But I've gotten 15 calls about this."

One came from his mother.

The draft ordinance has apprehended cats sent to a makeshift shelter at the sewage treatment plant. There, licensed cats would get a stay of execution so that registered letters could be sent to their owners, telling them to come get their pets.

Unlicensed cats would get not so much as a cigarette and a blindfold.

"People can make a fuss," Price said, "but why wait until some child's bitten, and then you don't know which cat did it?"

The very idea brought an offer from the Blair County Humane Society to trap cats, then take them back to its Altoona-area shelter to separate the adoptable animals from the ones that are diseased or untamable. Last year, the shelter found homes for one-third of its cats.

But the cost, as much as $30 a cat, could be too much for Williamsburg's cat kitty, Zimmerman said.

Borough officials came up with their own short-lived alternative a few years back, ferrying captured felines to farms to start life anew as barn cats. Alas, the animals took no shine to careers in agriculture.

"They'd take them five miles out, and the cats would be right back in town in a couple of days," Hetrick said.

In America, of course, even stray cats have their advocates.

Washington, D.C.-based Alley Cat Allies eschews dispatching cats to the hereafter and suggests instead trapping strays, sterilizing them, then -- save for tame ones that can be adopted -- returning them to the streets with other treated cats. Unable to reproduce, the population dies out.

"You can't tame them. These are wild animals," Allies National Director Becky Robinson said. "It'd be the same as doing squirrel rescue -- you and I saying we're going to trap squirrels and put them in our houses."