by Tim Gilmore, 6/17/2012
Animal Control workers extract 74 cats from the warren. They expect half of them to live. Nine of the cats are dead. Someone had called Animal Control and the police about a vicious stray dog that had killed a dozen of the cats in one night.
People who live on or off Nolan Street in or around the pockets of woods in the derelict industrial area between Beaver Street and Interstate-10 call this one property the cat farm. Nobody lives at the cat farm, but a 67 year-old man named Samuel Drury, who lives elsewhere on the Westside, built the complex of more than a dozen wooden boxes and wire cages for stray cats. It’s been here for 20 years.
They find cages lined with shit, algae growing in water bowls, several cats eating a dead rat.
It takes eight to 10 hours a day to take care of that many cats. Miss a day and you’ll never catch up.
Drury says he was taking care of the cats, he was providing them shelter, he fed them and gave them water every day, and a neighbor says Drury is the sweetest, “the most loving and nurturing man” she’s ever known.
