40,000 APPLY TO RUN CAT HAVEN
‘Every life is precious and worth saving,’ wrote woman who landed much-publicized job at the animal sanctuary in Greek island of Syros
It began in 2010, when a cat gave birth in Joan and Richard Bowell’s garden on the Greek island of Syros. She had two kittens and one was ill.
The Bowells took them in: Pepper was the mother, Tiny and Ninja the babies. The trio joined two cats they ’d brought from Denmark, Joan’s native country.
They now had five cats, but not so many that they couldn’t take them when their plan to move to New York, where Richard worked with the United Nations, came to pass.
But this was Greece, where cats posing against white buildings become the subjects of many postcards, but not necessarily the objects of much affection.
The Bowells kept finding felines bearing injuries and sicknesses and kittens, and soon they had a cat sanctuary they called God’s Little People. The name was not a statement about faith, they say, but about a philosophy — that cats are important as individuals, with a right to be free and cared for.
“People think animals are things that you pick up and put down, and that’s not how we thought about it,” said Richard, 66, a writer and philosopher originally from London. “So we had to make a commitment that we would never leave them or leave them in a lesser state than we kept them.”
As the cats roaming their property rose well above 60, they realized space prevented the operation from growing much more.
They wanted to make that move to New York, where Joan planned to establish another cat sanctuary outside the city. So on Aug. 5, she posted on Facebook for a modestly paid job managing God’s Little People. Within six weeks, they had nearly 40,000 applications.
Each day in August, Joan received 1,000 to 1,600 emails.
She kept updating the Facebook post, clarifying that the tiny house for the manager would not accommodate families or pets brought from home, and that the job entails scooping poop, cleaning vomit and making “heartbreaking ” decisions about gravely sick cats.
But the applications kept coming from more than 90 nations. Some were from refugees who wanted to send the pay to their families back home, and some were from women seeking to flee abusive relationships. Several were from people who’d tried to run their own cat rescues.
Although the position is in paradise and involves many cats, Joan said it is not exactly the “dream job” as many headlines declared.
There is lots of feeding, medicating and taking cats to be neutered or spayed, as well as posting cat photos to Facebook, and cobbling together donations. There’s not much time for sleep, she said.
“It has been pretty much roundthe-clock for me,” said Joan, 52, an artist. “The biggest challenge is to give each of them the attention they need.”
And then there are the rescues. Richard said his wife goes to extreme lengths to save cats, recounting a time she heard a kitten stuck inside a water tank.
The tank could not be opened, so the cat would have to come out a small pipe it had entered. Joan sat at the tank encouraging the cat for 12 hours and succeeded by broadcasting into the pipe a YouTube video of a mother cat calling her babies.
After they started the rescue, a veterinarian asked why they would bury an injured cat that was being euthanized, Richard said.
“And we said to him, ‘ Well, it’s to remind ourselves of our humanity.’ When you think you can just discard things when you’re finished with them, then you do it with everything.”
The Bowells are in talks with filmmakers about a movie. Richard said he believes the enormous response is also about humanity.
“There’s a kind of wish for people to return to some level of humanity at a time when things are degenerating into such inhumanity ... people want to see a future that can be worked toward.”
The Bowells whittled the towers of applications to a handful of finalists. Among those was 62-year-old Californian Jeffyne Telson, whose husband sent her the job ad.
For 21 years, Telson has run RESQCATS in Santa Barbara, which takes only strays. Cats like those on Greek islands, which Telson has visited three times.
“I didn’t do all the tourist stuff on the Greek islands. I separated myself from the tourists and walked up and down the streets looking for the kitties,” Telson said. “I thought, ‘There’s just so much to be done here.’”
So Telson wrote the Bowells, explaining that she’d placed 3,000 cats and kittens in homes over the decades, those too sick or anti-social to be adopted stay at her sanctuary. Currently, it has 15 residents, including four feline leukemia patients. “I believe that every life is precious and worth saving,” Telson wrote.
Her submission stood out immediately, Richard said.
An offer was made and accepted. Telson said she will leave her rescue in the care of volunteers this winter, when it shuts down for the season, and spend several months in Syros.
Other finalists will probably pick up the management after that, while the Bowells focus on their U.S. plans.
It would allow the sanctuary to expand and serve as “a centre for volunteers and an international centre to show people how to work with cats,” Richard said.