Fancy that! Show with eight hurricane-surviving kitties

Among the hundreds of pretty kitties coming to Newport News this weekend will be eight with some pretty harrowing stories, and maybe only eight of their nine lives left.

Martin, Gypsy, Gadget, Sylvester, Miss Hatteras, Bootsie, Betsy and Riley were all rescued on Hatteras Island after Hurricane Irene, and they are looking for new homes.

“All of these cats were outside in the hurricane, except for Riley, who was in a house that got flooded,” said Judy Swartwood of Buxton, N.C., who has been caring for hurricane cats since the September storm that devastated the island and cut it off from the mainland for weeks.

Four of the rescues will compete Saturday in the household pet division of the local Cat Fanciers’ Association show. The other four will be available for visitors to admire, and all eight will be up for adoption.

(Heritage Humane of Williamsburg also will have adoptable cats at the show.)

The annual cat show features familiar breeds such as Siamese and Persian, along with more unusual cats – Norwegian Forest Cats, for example, and Orientals. Six judging rings will be active throughout the day, and visitors are free to wander through the staging area where cat owners will display their kitties and happily answer questions.

While some pedigreed kittens may be for sale at the show, Swartwood hopes that the rescues also find homes. Shelters and foster homes in coastal North Carolina are full of hurricane cats, she said, and many pet owners lost their homes and businesses, have moved away or simply have no way to care for animals.

Swartwood, who helped with animal rescues in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Florida after Hurricane Charley, said the aftermath of Irene is similar to those storms.

“A lot of people have left,” she said. “They lost everything. They’ve just gone.”

Firefighters in the town of Avon found a kitten with a broken jaw clinging to an outdoor shower, the only survivor from a litter of five. Among other rescues were cats with a severed tail or a broken toe, and pets that were dumped or lost.

Lack of food, litter and medicines compounded the problem on the island, because the highway was washed out in two places, and emergency ferry service was limited, Swartwood said.

Some of the rescued cats have been transferred to other states for adoption.

“It’s not like the people don’t care about the cats,” Swartwood said. “It’s been a lot of heartbreak down here.”

The four rescues that will compete in the show are Gypsy (female, white with brown tabby patches), Martin (male, gray tabby with white), Sylvester (male, mostly black, adopted for a month then dumped in a feral colony) and Gadget (female, tortoiseshell, found on the engine of a car).

Not competing but also available for adoption are Riley, whose owner left Hatteras Island trying to find work, brother and sister combo Bootsie and Betsy, and Miss Hatteras, a female blue and white tabby found by Swartwood on the side of the road, hungry and looking for people.

In addition to finding homes for the rescued cats, Swartwood – along with organizations such as the Friends of Felines on Hatteras – wants to get more feral cats on Hatteras spayed or neutered so they don’t create more kittens that will need rescuing.

The Roanoke Island Animal Clinic gives discounts to her, but, still, it’s expensive. A rescue group in Northern Virginia called the Kevin Memorial Foundation sponsored the cats Swartwood will bring to Newport News, where they will strut the catwalk, so to speak, and try to look appealing enough to get adopted.

Seeing her eight charges go home with new families is what Swartwood looks forward to.

“The things I saw with cats on this island and the things I saw in New Orleans,” Swartwood said, “I don’t want to see those things happen again.”

Diane Tennant, 757-446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com