Classical music echoes throughout a small building filled with sleeping cats. When Barbara Handal comes in, a cat rams her head against the glass door and meows loud enough to be heard over the music. When she moves closer to the door, the cat falls to the floor, sticks her paw underneath the door, and again yelps when Handal finally enters and starts petting the cat.
“How could anyone give up a cat like this in a million years?” she said while cleaning its whiskers with her thumb.
Handal, a volunteer of 15 years at Animal Humane Association of New Mexico, knows cats in ways others don’t. She can coax an abused cat from an animal carrier with crooning and meowing until the battered animal slowly sticks its head out. When this happens, she’ll gently run a comb through its matted fur, and then if it retreats, she lets it. She said cats are like that sometimes.
“We’re on cat time. Their time,” she said, while picking up another cat and checking his eyes for mucus. “It might take 10 minutes or a few days.”
And she’s on cat time now. Handal, a retiree and former teacher, is working in the new cattery, a building with four separate rooms with glass doors for the relaxed and social cats. She goes into each brightly colored room: One’s red and orange, another a royal purple overlay, the other a green wash that looks like a meadow and a final one collaged with hundreds of kitten pictures. In each room, she takes an inventory of the cats, and then proceeds to find each one, stroke its head, check its eyes and then plays with it a bit before moving onto the next one. Some cats hang around in the rafters and she lets them be — they want their privacy. She said she has loved animals ever since her first pets — a dalmatian that her parents would take sailing and a couple of angora goats.
“What you grow up with, that’s what you go back to,” she said while combing a purring cat. “You revert back to your childhood.”
Notably, the rooms have a pervasive smell of cat litter and waste, and if Handal is bothered by it, she gives no indication. Her clothes are covered in mélange of multi-colored cat hair. She’s here for the cats, and it shows every time she walks into the room and two or three cats radiate toward her.
“I like these animals,” Handal said. “Just to work with them, even if there’s no one around. I just like to pet them, talk to them and make them more sociable. I think it’s the idea that you are counteracting all the bad stuff that goes on out there. You know, the people giving them up all the time, losing them, dropping them off in the mountains because they can’t take care of (their) dog anymore. It just makes me feel like I am doing something that’s really helpful. Plus, I like them, anyway, so it’s an excuse to play with the animals.”
After an hour so, Handal moves to the cat condos, a place where cats are kept in tall rectangular glass and wooden boxes. These housings are for the newly arrived cats, the less social and the “red zone” animals that have been abused in the past.
“We do what we can to help them,” she said while opening up a box containing a “red zone” cat.
The animal’s been declawed, Handal explains, while picking up the cats who’ve fallen off the shelf. These cats tend to be the most trouble because they bite more. Bites get infected quickly, so the volunteers are wary of these cats.
In minutes, Handal’s got the cat in her arms purring. She sets it back in the box where it meows once, and then lays down to sleep. Handal then tells another volunteer on duty that this cat isn’t a “red zone” cat and that her status should be changed on the chart.
While playing with a few more cats in the condos, Handal describes a couple of other rules regarding the cats. No “s” sounds because they sound too much like hissing. Don’t stare the cat in the eyes. Don’t move suddenly, and, most importantly, don’t pet a cat you don’t know on the stomach.
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“You know what happens when you put your hand on a cat’s tummy?” she said. “They have four sets of claws. You’ll get about 5,000 wounds.”
After her rounds in the condos, Handal returns to the cattery to spend more time with the cats in the greatest need of attention. She sits on the floor and motions for a 1-year-old orange cat to come out of a cubby hole where he’s been hiding. She said that on busier days she’d be showing would-be adopters around, and introducing them to the cats.
“There are people out there for every animal,” she said while the cat slinks from his hiding place.
Ultimately, that’s her main goal. Despite the time she spends codling and caring for the cats, she wants them to have homes. The first thing she does when she arrives at the shelter is to check a giant white board colored with green and purple markers to see which animals were adopted in her absence.
“We all get excited,” she said. “We’ll say, ‘Oh did you see, Shiloh got adopted!’ We’ve had some that have been here (for) four or six months. We don’t want them to be here that long. We want them to get out and get a home. So we get really excited. It makes my day.”
Handal said that while playing with the cats brightens her days, she never regrets seeing them go to a good family.
“I have never felt that way,” she said while lowering the orange cat to ground. “I am always glad to see them go. I can’t ever say that I liked petting that cat and it was so much fun. I wish he was still here. Never have I felt that way. It’s about getting them homes. Now, once in a while, you’ll think, ‘I love that cat, and if I didn’t have two already, I’d be taking him home.’”
She says the orange cat will be adopted before the week’s through. She stands and leaves the room, washing her hands before entering another room to croon the cats some more.
