FOR THE LOVE OF PETS
After a resident of a rooming house on Eccles Street was killed, area residents set about making sure that the stray cats he'd cared for weren't left out in the cold.
Homicide leaves victims, on two legs and four.
When Jonathan Hammell, 42, was slain outside his rooming house on Eccles Street on Nov. 11 — and an upstairs tenant taken into custody — it orphaned a dog named Dozer and a slew of stray cats who hung out in the backyard. Within hours, the cats were hungry, but Hammell — hardly a rich man — was not there to feed them, as had become his habit in the spacious yard on the edge of Chinatown.
And there begins a remarkable story. Arden Gionet, an employee at Pet Circus on Bank Street for 13 years, was walking home that warm evening when she spotted the police cars on Eccles, a street in her neighbourhood.
She had known Dozer, a boxer/ mastiff mix, since he was a puppy. Now his second owner, Kevin Richer, 44, was being hauled off to jail, charged with second-degree murder. And she had often seen Hammell, the victim, caring for “his” cats on the front stoop.
Ottawa has an underground pet network, especially for endangered cats and dogs. And didn't it swing into action?
Pretty soon, Marna Nightingale, 50, and her partner, Lorayne Katz, 53, neighbours on Rochester Street, were on the case. They spent years dealing with a colony of stray and feral cats in their own backyard. So they knew the drill.
“There are a lot of crazy cat people in Centretown,” Nightingale said. “We kind of all club in together.”
Within days, they began dropping off cat food to the rooming house, so other tenants could fill the gap. Gionet, too, came by with food and cat litter from the store. Inquiries were made about Dozer, who was in the care of the humane society and in a holding pattern.
A couple of calls later, Nightingale says Richer himself, from jail, agreed to send Dozer to a new home.
“Dozer is now in the loveliest home you can imagine, with a big yard,” Gionet said. “It's like a Cinderella story for Dozer.”
As for the cats, a number of the kittens were adopted by residents of the rooming house. Nightingale, meanwhile, took the more docile ones home and began humanely trapping the strays. A friend started a spreadsheet so that the particulars of each cat could be tracked, and a GoFundMe campaign began.
The couple's plan is to have each cat assessed by a veterinarian, get the basic shots done, arrange for spaying and neutering, then adopt the cats out to willing owners.
“It's a genuinely enormous operation,” Nightingale said. “It's not one or two people doing this, it's more like 10.”
Katz — and what else could her name be? — spends a good deal of time trying to socialize the animals. As she feeds them, they come to associate her with “good things” and, gradually, she is able to pet and soothe them. The ones that Hammell handled, she says, are the easiest to deal with.
On Wednesday afternoon, on her back porch, she held Karen, a cat that spent her first night “caterwauling” in her crate, her early days hiding in the house, but is now docile enough to be held.
“He loved those cats,” Nightingale said of Hammell, whom she knew in passing. “It was the centre of his life. It was a really big deal.”
And so Nightingale, as she did Wednesday morning in damp, snowy conditions, is spending hours trying to trap the remaining stray or feral animals, to at least give them a chance at a safer, domesticated life before winter hits. (Including kittens, there may be 18 cats to be re-homed, with vet bills for each in the $300 to $500 range.)
“He did a lot of work to make them feel safe and to trust again,” Katz said. All three women spoke of the everyday comfort and emotional support provided by pets, especially to those who might be poor or disadvantaged, particularly in a year that includes an isolating pandemic.
“They sometimes take better care of their pets than they do of themselves,” Nightingale said.
And they all feel they're honouring Hammell's memory by taking up his cause.
“It's knowing that, in the middle of this pandemic, someone is going to come and get a cat, and that cat is going to have a good home, and that person is going to have comfort in the middle of this mess that is our day-to-day life of uncertainty,” Katz said.