Turns out my adventurous buddy Diane doesn’t just help feral and stray cats throughout Westchester, no, she travels all the way to Israel to assist with, unbeknown to me until recently, what is a big big problem with these cats over there (as if Israel didn’t have enough problems, but that’s for my colleague Gary Stern’s religion blog).

At any rate, Diane pulls her weight and pays her own freight for this three-week trip in August (ack! no Diane for Pilates!!) so I said I’d help her out here, since that’s what we do at P&C. First, before we hear from Diane, check out some of the photos she gave me of feral/stays in Israel. Oh boy, do I wanna make them New Yorkers…Mom and babies:

Three-legger (reminds me of Stanley)

Please read through, or at least skip to how you can help at the end. Now I give you Diane’s latest essay, interspersed with some more (gorgeous but heart-breaking!) photos. Take it away Diane…

Mournful Meowing in Mecca

Israel: the holiest place in the world, whose ancient relics bear testimony to miracles from eons past, yet a country filled with the most strife. A casualty in the midst of this saga is the feral/stray cat: hungry, thirsty, and homeless — a starving beggar struggling to live in the land of salvation.
It’s impossible to walk amidst the holy land and not notice the felines—as prolific as squirrels are here — timid, battered, malnourished, and suffering through their days. While in Israel last summer, I offered a thirsty cat a soda capful of water, which it gladly drank and then devoured bread crumbs from my pocket. Down the road, in an alcove just outside the old city of Jerusalem, a scrawny mama cat, with sad, luminous eyes, huddled close to her four babies, craning her neck wantonly at passersby. A black and white cat hopped on three legs towards the shade, away from the 110-degree sun. Outside our hotel, a Calico tiredly lay on the hot sidewalk, her ear torn and her coat dirty.

Fallen from the grace of having once been a household deity in the Mid-East thousands of years ago, the homeless, domestic cat is neglected and poisoned in Israel en mass. According to Adela Gertner, founder and director of Spay Israel, after the passing of the 1994 Animal Protection Law forbidding such cruelty, Israeli Veterinary Services switched from using strychnine to using alpha chloros, rationalizing their mass poisonings as protection against rabies. Israel has had only six documented cases of rabies in the last 60 years, most of which were not from cats.

Although there are some volunteer organizations that perform TNR (trap/neuter/release), there are not enough volunteers or paid employees to handle the task and care for the millions of feral/stray cats.

For every two feral/stray cats (feral = unsocialized, stray = abandoned or lost) that are not neutered/spayed, they and their offspring are responsible for spawning approximately 420,000 cats in a seven-year period. Cats who are hungry. Cats who are homeless. Cats who are fighting. Cats who are bearing kittens they can’t feed. Cats who are lucky to live a year and a half on the streets before dying from starvation, poisoning, heat stroke, feline AIDS and other maladies.
My mission in Israel this summer is to spend several weeks performing TNR and assisting with surgery in clinics to aid as many feral/stray cats as I can. With TNR, the cat is spayed/neutered, vaccinated against rabies, treated for fleas and/or ear mites as needed, any serious health issues tended to, ear tipped (a small horizontal clipping at the top of the left ear as a universal sign that the cat has been spayed/neutered) and then released back to its neighborhood.

To help fund the author’s mission in Jerusalem, donations, in the form of checks, can be made out to Diane Terezakis and sent to her at: 333 Bronx River Road, Yonkers, NY 10704. Please put on the “memo” line whether you want your donation to be public or private for reference in future articles.

Bad Editor’s note: Oy. I’ve read the story, and looked at the pictures, and not until I got the whole thing together did I stupidly, belatedly realize the cats pictures go with the essay, and should have been posted in order as such. But to be honest, it was gonna take a long time to re-do and I’m late getting this up anyway, so….sorry Di!