NEW YORK – “Grandpa” and his brothers have disappeared, and soon the bulldozers will arrive and it could be their end. For two weeks, teams of volunteers have been trying to find seven cats that lived there for years Tropicanathe third oldest casino in Las VegasNevada, which will be torn down to make way for a new baseball stadium.
(reuters)
This is the place where Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Sammy Davis Jr lived and where James Bond stayed in a suite in the 1971 film “Diamonds Falling for Diamonds”. With the casino closed, employees scrambled to retrieve all items from the hotel. Two bartenders, Kathy Love and Pat Stubson, decided to rescue all of the resident cats Tropicana and take them to a shelter before the demolition begins. “All of us – explained Love – from the cleaners to the restaurant workers fed them every day. We know them one by one. And they know us. From the noise of our cars, they recognized us and came towards us.” “I have been feeding them for twelve years, maybe fifteen – added Stubson – I don’t know if they are able to get out of the fences or if they are used to being fed by strangers”.
Traps have been set up to catch them in the last two weeks, but it was all in vain. Volunteers continue to inspect the entire area, day and night. The cats were so at home in the casino that it was not uncommon to see one fall from the ceiling and end up behind the cashier. Along the Las Vegas strip, the casino street, there are three hundred thousand stray cats. According to research by animal protection associations, there are at least 482 cat colonies. The boom dates back to the 1970s, when the Nevada city brought in thousands of cats to get rid of rats that risked driving away customers.
The Tropicana cat colony has become the most popular but only because it is now seriously at risk. Eleven have been found so far. Seven are missing, including a kitten and the oldest of the pack, called “Grandpa”, the grandfather, the most exuberant of the group but also with some ailments. Stubson has built a wooden house in his garden as a temporary home for the cats and hopes to soon be able to house “Grandpa” too. “But due to his distrustful character – he explained – he could try to evade us, and this puts him at risk”. The bulldozers will go into action from October but in the next few weeks the whole area will be fenced off and at that point it will be impossible to try to save them.