Cats of Cambridge village: Long-operating cat colony gets community support

Sightings of the poor cat in Cambridge village led to the involvement of Melissa Mitchell. Cambridge’s former animal control officer, Mitchell is a prototypical fighter for anything furry, four-legged and occasionally scaly. Her personality is as bubbly and radiant as her rainbow-dyed hair, her enthusiasm for the animal kingdom remarkably all-encompassing and unavoidably infectious.

Cambridge, like most Vermont towns, only has an ordinance to regulate dogs. Problems involving other creatures, including cats, are left to the police. Mitchell responded to community concerns about Ear in particular, but in doing so unearthed a well-established cat colony that has had run of the village for at least the last half-century.

For as long as there has been a farm on the land that the Gates family currently occupies on Lower Pleasant Valley Road, there has likely always been a colony of cats. For time immemorial, cats have occupied a key place within the ecosystem of farms as the foremost eradicators of vermin in a place that, because of the amount of animal feed stored there, is always rife with them.

Over the last few years, however, the longstanding cat colony at the Gates farm has seen some disruption. A move away from decades of dairy production toward beef cattle was a seismic one for the cats. Last year’s floods, primarily the one in July but also the water that inundated the fields in December, caused further chaos.

While the colony has always been based at the farm, outdoor cats will typically range over distances of 2 to 5 miles away from their home base, according to Mitchell, so they could more accurately be considered the cats of Cambridge village. They also have long maintained a sort of satellite colony at Cambridge Village Market across the road from the farm, and where sightings of Ear first came to Mitchell’s attention.

Mitchell wanted to help the cats, but wanted to make sure she did it the right way. She quickly discovered that this was not just a pack of feral cats and established a relationship with the Gates family. She also turned to the Cat Crusaders of Franklin County for assistance.

“Part of my goal when I started this project was that I wanted people to be able to have a place they could ask: ‘What am I supposed to do? What’s happening here?’” Mitchell said.

With the help of the crusaders, Mitchell was able to rescue Ear, whose wounds proved too pervasive, and he soon died. Along with other volunteers, she set about rounding up as many of the cats as she could get her hands on and getting them spayed or neutered; cats can breed at the same rate as rabbits, and the arrival of one tomcat can throw a colony’s reproductive equilibrium into overdrive.

Mitchell also began assisting the Gates family in reducing the size of its colony, which at over 30 cats was far more than necessary for the mousing needs of the farm. It didn’t help that the farm had developed a reputation as a place where cats live, leading some to abandon their unwanted felines nearby, something that Mitchell witnessed as recently as December.

Some of the cats went home with Mitchell, joining a home with an existing clowder of cats, a bearded dragon lizard and a carnivorous Oscar fish. Mitchell also runs a nonprofit rescue specifically for Great Danes.

She also rehomed some of the cats, drawing the colony down to just over 10 cats.

Some of the rescues from the farm have lived while others have succumbed to an unpredictable genetic disease. Because of the Gates farm’s semi-contained breeding system, the cats are prone to inbreeding. The central cat family is identifiable by its white and gray coloring and prevelance of polydactylism, or extra toes.

Cambridge Community Cats was established by Mitchell to continue to support farmers like the Gates, collecting funds from a donation jar at Cambridge Village Market to fund the feeding and medical needs of the cats. A local resident built a cat cubby that has been installed next to Wilson, a gregarious bull who lives in the lower level of the massive barn where the beef cattle live when they’re not grazing and fitted with electric blankets to help them stay warm through the winter.

The queen of the barn is clearly Gray Baby, a nuzzling cat with an overcast mane and a saggy pouch leftover from a nasty wound that required emergency surgery.

A flood-damaged shed where many cats lived behind the market was torn down at the beginning of February. Now Mitchell is in the process of transitioning most of the colony back to the farm, though she plans to establish another warming center for the cats on the property.

Some, like LBK — short for Little Baby cat, an aging female clearly marked as a Gates cat by her gray and white coat — was still lingering around the bottle return building the week after the shed’s demolition, warming herself under a vent spewing heating system exhaust.

These are Mitchell’s wards and ensuring their safety is part of the mission of Cambridge Community Cats, but so is supporting the Gates so they can care for the cats on their own terms, and so is educating the community on the best way to care for the cats.

Though some of the cats can be considered feral and many roam around the village, they are in no way neglected.

“They’ve been outside, they know what’s going on. They don’t need to be moved, they can survive,” Mitchell said. “One of the things that I was glad I was able to eliminate was the misunderstanding that nobody took care of the cats, that they were just left on their own. They’ve always had a caretaker, and it was nice to allow the community to gain that understanding.”