Front Range animal shelters are caring for more than half the 157 cats taken last week from a home in Powell, Wyo., where feces and dried urine clung to floors.
The Dumb Friends League in Denver received 61 of the animals, and another 20 went to the Larimer Humane Society in Fort Collins.
The house in Powell, about 30 miles from the Montana border, is owned by Clifton Taylor. Most of the cats belonged to Taylor’s 63-year-old wife, Mimi, he said in a telephone interview with The Denver Post on Sunday.
“I didn’t know she had so many of them. I knew there was about 50 but never dreamed there would be so many of them. I was providing the food for them. It was about to break me,” said Taylor, 79.
“She is so soft-hearted, she couldn’t get rid of them. I loved her so much, I put up with it,” Taylor said.
Taylor’s sister-in-law, Miki Nesbit, who lives with the couple, contacted law enforcement this summer about the cats, Taylor said.
Nesbit couldn’t be reached Sunday. She told the Billings Gazette: “We were living in flies year-round. They were here in hordes, even in the refrigerator.”
Floors and other surfaces in the house were soiled with cat urine and feces, and cats were found inside furniture and above the ceiling, according to the Gazette.
Taylor said he misses some of the cats who belonged to him and a few of his wife’s as well.
“I had six or seven, and she had two or three I was really fond of. A lot of them weren’t tame,” he said.
Some of the cats will be up for adoption quickly, but others will be held for medical care and socialization, said Dumb Friends spokeswoman Sheri Tuffield.
“Some were quite emaciated,” she said.
Some have upper respiratory infections, ear mites and other conditions.
The Humane Society of the United States helped local authorities remove the animals from the home.
Under normal conditions, the Dumb Friends League on South Quebec Street wouldn’t have room for such a large number of felines during the summer.
However, adoptions have picked up since the shelter waived adoption fees for cats in late July. Since July 28, nearly 1,200 cats and kittens have been adopted, Tuffield said.
When the waiver is not in place, less than half that number are adopted in a similar period, she said.
Contact the Dumb Friends League at 303-751-5772.
