Tuesday, March 02, 1999

Saving cats is her calling

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Officer rounds up feral felines - because she cares

BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Sherry Drescher catches a wild cat. | ZOOM |

        Sherry Drescher disappears for a moment behind an apartment complex Dumpster. “Bingo!” she says.

        She reappears carrying a steel live-animal trap. It contains a caterwauling gray feline that's none too happy about being caught.

        “He's extremely feral,” says Ms. Drescher, who knows to be cautious with feral, or wild, cats. Once, one sunk its teeth into her left hand, damaging the nerves. But she doesn't hold a grudge.

        The caged cat lives in a colony of 20 that Ms. Drescher found in an undeveloped ravine behind this west-side apartment complex. Some might have been dumped by owners. Some might never have been touched by humans.

        Left alone, they'll multiply, adding to a surplus of animals susceptible to disease, starvation or death by car.

        Ms. Drescher believes they deserve better. So the 38-year-old Mount Airy woman, a University of Cincinnati police officer, has come here on her day off. With permission of the property manager, she's catching cats.

        For the past three years, virtually all of Ms. Drescher's free time has been devoted to such rescues.

        She takes the cats to a veterinarian to be tested for disease, vaccinated and sterilized. She finds homes for some, and some she returns to the colonies. Ms. Drescher sees it as a humane way to gradually diminish free-roaming populations.

        “There's a lot of people who do this because we care about the animals,” she says. “And because people will not spay and neuter.” And because numbers reported by the Hamilton County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals make people like Ms. Drescher shudder.

        Last year, the SPCA took in 18,825 cats and dogs. It placed 5,427 in homes and euthanized 13,398 (including 2,657 that owners asked to be put to sleep).

        “Those are bad odds,” Ms. Drescher says.

        This time of year, there's an urgency to Ms. Drescher's work. Cats are in heat. If not sterilized, females will produce new litters soon.

        Hers is not a one-woman crusade; she knows of about 30 others doing rescue work, and she hears about more all the time.

"This is my passion'
        “I have very little personal life. Which is OK. This is what I do. This is my passion,” says Ms. Drescher. She's driving to another cat colony in a borrowed Infiniti. (She couldn't make room for a reporter in her Hyundai, which is cluttered with traps and other equipment.)

        Her brown hair is pulled into a ponytail. She's wearing jeans and a black UC jacket, modified with the words Mount Airy Animal Rescue on the back. Her glasses are in shambles. Only one lens is shaded, and the right-side temple is missing. She fell down a hill during a recent rescue, and hasn't had time to get them fixed.

        She's not married. “Don't have time,” she says. She should be finishing a master's thesis in psychology, but there isn't time for that, either.

        She works mostly with cats, sometimes dogs. At the moment, she says, her basement is serving as a temporary home for a hyperactive hound that has eaten two loads of laundry.

DEALING WITH "WILD' CATS

A seminar on dealing with feral, or wild, cats is set for 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Silverton Municipal Building, 6860 Plainfield Road.   Issues to be discussed include trapping, sterilizing and releasing feral cats; safety issues; and health-care concerns for people who care for cat colonies.   The free seminar is co-sponsored by The Scratching Post cat shelter and Mount Airy Animal Rescue. Reservations are requested: 984-6369.

        For the past three years, she has run Mount Airy Animal Rescue out of her own pocket. Food, vet bills and other expenses total about $10,000 a year, she says. “I work a lot of overtime (at UC) to make it happen,” she says. Last summer, she also worked at a T-shirt shop.

        She distinguishes between animal rescuer, which she is, and animal-rights activist, which she's not. You won't see her tossing a pie in Procter & Gamble chairman John Pepper's face (as members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have done to protest P&G's product tests on animals). She'll not throw blood on people wearing fur.

        She's too busy catching cats. In snow. In freezing rain. And often at night.

        She likes working in darkness partly because cats are more active then; and partly because she wants to avoid being seen by people who might harm the animals if they knew about them. (That's also why she asks that the location of colonies not be revealed.)

        On an October night last year, Ms. Drescher was on an unlit street in a rough neighborhood, wearing a hooded sweat shirt and gloves, crawling under a Cadillac.

        “What the (expletive) you doin'?” the car's owner, a twenty-something man, wanted to know.

        “Sir, you're not going to believe this,” Ms. Drescher said, removing the hood and gloves. “I'm here trying to catch cats.”

        She showed him the front of her sweat shirt: Mount Airy Animal Rescue. She waved to her cat-catching partner, sitting in a car nearby. Then she had an idea. She asked him to raise his right hand, and she gave him her spiel:

        “You are deputized as a member of Mount Airy Animal Rescue and the Greater Tri-State Animal Rescue and Shelter Network. Do you promise to assist animals legally and ethically whenever you can and help spread the word to spay and neuter?”

        The young man looked at her. “Yeah.”

        She handed him his free “uniform,” an animal-rescue T-shirt. And that would have been that. Except ...

        “You know,” he said, “there are some kittens behind that garage back there.”

        Ms. Drescher has found cat colonies all over Cincinnati: behind restaurants, businesses, shopping malls and apartment complexes.

        Often, she also finds one or more colony “caretakers.” They are people who visit their colony daily to feed and water the animals. Some of them create little houses for the animals, such as cardboard boxes draped with plastic.

        She swears them in as her “deputies,” and hands them a free T-shirt. It's a good way to spread the word about the importance of spaying and neutering, she says. “Raising awareness is a very important component of what I do.”

        The volunteers are important for another reason, too.

        Last year, 57 animals rescued by Ms. Drescher were adopted. But finding homes for feral cats is more difficult. So Ms. Drescher last year returned 20 sterilized animals to their colonies, after determining they were in a safe place and a caretaker was available to manage them.

        Such trap-sterilize-release programs are becoming more popular nationwide, but detractors argue that all cats should be kept indoors, and that feral cats kill birds and other wildlife.

        One thing most everyone agrees on: the number of unwanted animals would be reduced if more people embraced spaying and neutering.

        For some people, it's a bother. Or they can't or won't spend the money (at low-cost clinics, costs range from $30 to $50). Or they don't know the ramifications.

        The Humane Society of the United States says one female cat and her offspring can produce 420,000 cats in seven years.

        No one knows how many free-roaming cats inhabit Hamilton County. Ms. Drescher estimates the number of feral cats at 20,000 to 30,000.

        “It's a growing problem within communities all over the United States,” says Martha Armstrong, vice president of companion animals for the national Humane Society. “We've done a good job bringing down the unwanted dog population; we've got to do the same with cats.”

        The problem of feral cats is complicated because Ohio has no cat-control or cat-licensing laws, says Harold Dates, director of the Hamilton County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And feral cats are difficult to place in homes, he notes, unless time and effort can be spent to socialize them.

        Both Mr. Dates and Ms. Armstrong say a community-wide approach is needed to reduce the number of unwanted animals.

        Ms. Drescher, for one, has tried to do her part. In July, she formed the Greater Tri-State Animal Rescue and Shelter Network. The loose-knit coalition draws on the equipment, expertise and volunteers of several local animal rescue operations and shelters.

Too many don't care
        One of Ms. Drescher's frequent stops is Towne Square Animal Clinic in Blue Ash. This day, she drops off two cats she's caught.

        Veterinarian Zeke Zekoff says he wishes more people were like Ms. Drescher. “A lot of people don't take the responsibility,” he says. “People don't realize how prolific (the animals) are.”

        Some parents allow breeding just so their kids can watch kittens being born, he says. “If people want to witness the miracle of birth, they should rent a videotape.”

        He looks at the cats Ms. Drescher brought in. “These may never make an ideal cat for the house. But they deserve to live.”

        She doesn't have homes for them. If they are healthy, she'll return them to their colonies.

        Back in the car, heading to another colony, she says she knows some people think she's crazy. “They say, "Why do you do that? They're just animals.'”

        Her resolve doesn't waver. “I'll probably always be involved in this,” she says. “You can't turn your back on these animals out on the street.”

Spaying and neutering services
Greater Tri-State Animal Rescue and Shelter Network

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