Crazy Cat Lady – How many cats?!

Crazy Cat Lady – How many cats?! – by Liam Sweeny.

I got a cat. Tortoise-shell, beautiful girl. Nine years old, doesn’t look a day over two. She is a pain in my ass, greeting me every morning at three thirty a.m. (I’m already up) and hopping on my workstation looking for lovins, walking on my keyboard sometimes. It’s amazing I get anything done in the morning. And she’s just one cat. Couldn’t imagine having two. Some people have three; that’s crazy to me.

Lynea Lattanzio has eleven hundred cats. Eleven – freaking – hundred. That’s eight hundred grown cats and three hundred kittens. This is in a five-bedroom house. Now to be fair, she lets them roam outside on the property, which is twelve acres. But damn, eleven hundred cats. She lives in a mobile home. But I said a five-bedroom house, right? I did. She moved out of it because with all the cats, there wasn’t any room for her.

Okay, so let me post-preface this by saying that she’s not a lonely elderly woman. I wouldn’t write about this if that was the case. She’s older, but like, my age older. But you got to understand that she’s dedicated her life to getting cats and taking in strays. She cashed in her retirement, sold her wedding ring and any other thing of value she had. She trained as a vet to bring down the costs, but even with that, we’re talking $1.6 million a year to keep this going.

I just can’t imagine the smell. That’s what gets me. I don’t know anyone that hasn’t grown up, or been in a house that has a catbox that needs to be changed, but that is a smell that never really leaves your nose. It’s in the top six of nasty smells. And I don’t understand why she didn’t move two hundred or so cats in the mobile home to clear herself some space.

Maybe the smell got to her too. Oh, and by the way, five hundred of them are up for adoption. Three hundred are too young to adopt. Which means she definitely wants to keep two hundred cats. And yes, she admits that she is a ‘crazy cat lady.

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