Cat Lake City, Cat Louis, Cat Orleans
"The history of a place is the history of its cats"
This Sunday, on the feast day of St. Gertrude of Nivelles — “cat lady of the Catholic church” — Bywater Crazy Cat Ladies and Gents Krewe will hold a bar bounce from J&Js to Vaughns to BJ’s.
Julie Nevius, owner of J&J’s and caretaker of 20-plus cats on her block, will be crowned 2023 “Grand Meowshal.” The krewe’s only a year old, but it’s already established some traditions: wearing fuzzy bathrobes, cat T-shirts and sometimes full-on cat costumes, and using cans of treats like samba shakers, which then get popped open so cat crunchies can be distributed along the route. Which is not a parade route, by the way.
As one of the organizers, Jennifer Callen, said, “We are a bar crawl, not a parade. The only thing we throw is Temptations.”
Even if you are a human dressed as a cat for the day, Temptations are probably not your idea of a treat worth destroying drywall for, so there will be a pop-up taco/empanda booth at J&J’s and crawfish at BJ’s.
To Know a City by its Cats
Last year, during our first long trip to New Orleans, I couldn’t help but think of the documentary Kedi, which follows street cats who live on the streets of Istanbul. Like in that city, there are cats strolling down every street and lurking in every park in NOLA; the cats in Jackson Square even have their own Atlas Obscura entry.
A Vox review of Kedi muses that “you can read the history of a place in the history of its cats.” Istanbul, where people and cats have shared the streets for thousands of years, teems with cat breeds from all over the globe, because it’s a port town, like NOLA. The film documents how the influx of expensive apartment buildings, and the wealthier residents who live in them, has been displacing the cats as well as “the lower income people living around them and often caring for them.”
To give another example of that story, I’ll point to Salt Lake City, where Thomas and I lived last year. In January, the state Lege introduced House Bill 505, which would make it illegal to feed stray cats. It failed this round, but these sorts of bills have a way of returning during the next session.
Just based on our anecdotal strolling, Utah is not overrun with stray cats. Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, one of the oldest no-kill shelters in the country, operates a juggernaut TNR program, even finding jobs for not-so-socialized cats as barn mousers. We saw maybe three real cats during our time there; the majority of the cats we spent time with lived inside the phone app Neko Atsume.
Utah won’t be hosting any cat-themed barcrawls soon, though you can take your dog pretty much anywhere in Salt Lake, including coffee shops, bars and the downtown mall. We saw dogs in the Gap, dogs in the food court, dogs riding both the up-and-down escalators — pretty much the only place they were not welcome was inside the Apple Store. That make sense because people move there to ski and hike and camp; dogs like to do those things, too. Cats can be campers, but usually not happy ones.
When I was growing up in Salt Lake, I saw lots of outdoor cats and zero luxury pop-up apartments. Now the opposite is true. Dogs and dog parks, often cited as markers for gentification, are everywhere. Do a search for “average house price, Salt Lake City,” and you may choke on your coffee when you see the number. Caveat canem: Spot is coming for your spot.
The other city we know well — St. Louis — is a mix of these two extremes. Some neighborhoods look like Salt Lake, where the only mammal allowed on a well-tended patch of grass is a dog. Other neighborhoods are overrun with both stray cats and stray dogs, though the problem’s lessened over time (when I moved there, people told me to stay away from Forest Park because it was overrun with packs of stray dogs, including feral toy poodles).
My old street, Helen, stood a block from an abandoned house my neighbor Maryann referred to as “the cat factory.” At the end of Helen, in an abandoned mansion built by Mark Twain’s uncle, there were even more cats. When an arsonist hit the Clemens Mansion in 2017, dozens of displaced cats moved into the neighborhood, including to my backyard.
With help from St. Louis Feral Cat Outreach and Animal House, pretty much all of those cats found homes. One kitten disappeared, one female calico didn’t survive the TNR due to health reasons, and a tuxedo cat, dubbed Crookshanks by a neighbor, decided he’d rather return to the bushes and drainpipes. When I moved away in late 2021, he was the only outdoor cat left on Helen.
A Short Break for a Very Important Public Service Announcement
By the way, before we roll forward on this topic, I have a late-breaking piece of news! Thomas’s Newbie Orleans Substack is transitioning to a new concept, to be launched April 1. In the meantime, you can find him at Thomas Crone’s Memory Hall, which will have some NOLA-themed content, just cause we live here now.
New Orleans as Neko Atsume IRL
The Times-Picayune, as you might guess, writes about cats a lot. As it explained a couple of years ago, “Every block in New Orleans has its own set of cats, prowling the street, lounging on porches and occasionally letting the lucky resident give them a scratch behind the ears. Community cats are just a part of the New Orleans environment.” Those cats have a multitude of Instagram channels, including NOLA Neighborhood Cats, NOLA Catz and NOLA Meows, and even their own Krewe.
NOLA cats, catz and meows have been making cameos in the local papers for a long while. As always, that meant comments from sworn enemies like Dr. E.H. Richards of the Chicago Board of Health, who, in a 1911 Times-Democrat New Orleans article, claimed cats were the leading cause of tuberculosis. “They should all go — the backyard eloper, the spinster’s tabby and the blue ribbon winner who feasts on siroloin and lies on silk cushions. They are worst, worse and bad, and there is no health in any way. As disease disseminators they are as great a menace as the rat, and we are exterminating the rat becauset it is known to spread the bubonic plauge.” The paper added that that Japanese researchers actually found that cats, by killing rats, reduced plague numbers, and was shipping in quite a few, but Dr. Richards remained unconvinced.
Cat clickbait existed before the (computer) mouse, so the papers regularly ran stories about the throwdown between cat-lovers and cat-haters, as well as literal fluff pieces like “Concerning Cats,” which ran in the Sunday edition of the The Times in 1910:
Of course any self-respecting New Orleans cat must be an omnivore, like this sweet tooth — no word on whether or not she liked snowballs, too:
Word to 21st-century cat lovers: don’t feed gum to cats. Or ice cream, for that matter.
As much as New Orleans loves its cats, and derives part of its identity from them, it’s true that cats living on the street can suffer a lot. Just like in St. Louis, there are people out in the streets every day, volutneering their own time and money to reduce that suffering. One org is Trap Dat Cat; another is Big Easy Animal Rescue, who walk dogs around their neighborhood to introduce them to potential homes.
One of BEAR’s current rescues is Bleux, a dog who was found guarding the porch of an empty house, waiting for his people. But his people were gone, and not coming back. Bleux has a new family, but his time on the streets took a toll, as it does with cats, dogs, and people. He’s got some pretty staggering vet bills, including for his heartworm meds. So the Bywater Crazy Cat Ladies and Gents are sponsoring a 50/50 raffle this Sunday to pay for Bleux’s medical care.
There’s a long-running and vitrolic culture war between Team Cat and Team Bird, triangulated with Team Dog. This post is not the place to go creeping into that volcano of a topic. One of the more sensible takes is Margaret Atwood’s graphic novel, Angel Catbird. It follows the adventures of a scientist superhero who’s half cat, half owl, and argues against rigid, extreme views that push us to pick any side but that of life itself.
I do want to say the conversation I’ve seen so far in NOLA regarding cats, dogs and birds has been more open, less polarized and less extreme than what I’ve seen in other cities, with this fundraiser for a dog organized by cat people as just one example.
As that smart review of Kedi notes: “Our relationship with the animals around us that we can destroy casually and easily, the film suggests, is our relationship with everything.”
Or their own celebrity Catwoman?
Do either of the other two city’s have a kitty cat cafe?