Cats House: Houston Residence Becomes Home for Felines
Cats House: Houston Residence Becomes Home for Felines
HOUSTON - Tucked amid the townhouses of Upper Kirby in Houston, the plain brick building draws little attention. Its lawn is neat, its stairs swept. Occasionally, hissing erupts inside. But that's to be expected. All the residents are cats.
The Houston Chronicle reports the home with the four-legged occupants and chic Houston ZIP code belongs to Save a Purrfect Cat Rescue, a pet adoption nonprofit. Because the group believes that cats are happiest in human environments, nearly every detail of its facilities - from daybeds to bookshelves to paintings on the walls - would fit inside a tasteful human home.
It's an unusual bit of real estate by any measure. The owner, former Houstonian Patti Thomas, lives in Ghana. Her best friend, an expert cat rescuer, leads a clutch of volunteers in Houston who run a showroom where fostered cats are presented to would-be adopters. And at key moments every day, a select few volunteers tend to the nearby house of cats. Snubbed by adopters for their quirks or ailments, the dozen or so cats in this building will likely never find homes.
Which is why Thomas gave them hers.
Inside Thomas' old home, clean floorboards gleam in the sun. A TV screens "Hogan's Heroes. And every bookshelf bears a snoozing cat.
"Cats are 3D, one volunteer explains. "Dogs and cats both like to move horizontally, but cats also elevate.
He points to a giant artificial tree trunk, where an orange tabby sleeps on one bough.
"This is Newman, the volunteer says. "And this, he adds, motioning toward a sleek Bengal cat whose paw touches Newman's back, "is Princess. She's in love.
What kind of person, with real estate worth more than $600,000, gives it up to cats? If you're not a cat lover, it's tempting to come up with a profile: Someone unsuccessful at friendship or love; someone blind to all the humans who are hungry and homeless. That profile would be wrong.
Raised in Illinois farm country, Patti Thomas, 71, is tall and talkative, with the air of a pioneer woman able to vanquish any obstacle on the trail. In a sense, she has.
As a student at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, she met Len Thomas, her future husband, and followed him to the Peace Corps in Ghana. After heading to New York and New Orleans to complete their studies, they returned to Ghana, where Len worked as a physician in a hospital and Patti did doctoral research in parasitology. There, they adopted their first pet, a fierce street kitten that caught flies between its paws. Finally returning to New Orleans, the couple happily raised two children and continued their social service work.
Then in 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina descended, Len was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. Fleeing to Houston, the family found shelter with Cambodian refugees whom they had sponsored years before. When Len died, Thomas' daughter, then earning a statistics doctorate at Rice University, persuaded her bereft mother to buy a small vintage building near the campus
