New Orleans Stray Cats

New Orleans is a city of secrets.  Many of them are hidden out in the open, in plain sight, part of the landscape, easily overlooked because they are just the way things are in this kaleidoscope of a city.  Here is a New Orleans secret:  New Orleans is like no other place else.  Pssst!  Here is another New Orleans secret:  There are stray cats in New Orleans.  North Johnson Street is a stray cat strut.

When Tulane University urban zoology students first noted the explosion of feral cat population on North Johnson Street, the fecundity had already been underway for a long while.  I won't bother you with the mathematical models and equations that comprised the graduate students' studies.  I'll just tell you that North Johnson Street has a lot of New Orleans stray cats.  The people who live in the neighborhood between Orleans Avenue and St. Bernard Avenue will tell you the same thing.  There are a whole lotta cats on N. Johnson Street.

There aren't any rats.  The City of New Orleans Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Control Board keeps statistics of vermin caught during regular censuses of every city block.  Since even before academics noticed that stray cats had overrun the neighborhood, the Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Control board reported no rats to be found, not even carcasses or droppings, on the Tremé length of North Johnson Street. 

You can leave a raw hotdog on the sidewalk in front of your front door when you leave for work in the morning and it will still be there, fully cooked, now, when you get home.  I wouldn't eat it but a day under the New Orleans sun will make anything well done.

How did the cats become so fecund and virile in this part of New Orleans?  Maybe there is something in the water.  There is a fire hydrant that leaks right into a pothole on North Johnson Street.  That fire hydrant started leaking after Katrina.  When the Sewerage and Water Board inspected the hydrant after Katrina, the department found it satisfactory.  Everything was status quo.

Old Man Dupre says that there is zinc in the fire hydrant.  He goes to the hydrant every morning to fill up a few plastic water bottles. "This water will keep you full of piss and vinegar," he says.  He makes gumbo with that fire hydrant water.  He swears by it.

A lot of people get their household water from the leaky fire hydrant.  All the cats in the neighborhood drink from the puddle under the leak.  

Watch the cats on North Johnson Street.  They're frisky.

At night, you'll hear the New Orleans stray cats on North Johnson Street me-e-e-e-eeee----ooooowwww.  It isn't jazz.

A sidewalk pathway on N. Johnson Street in New Orleans, LA.

The singing cats hide in the lush vegetation that lines the sidewalks of North Johnson Street.  North Johnson Street is like a jungle, a land of a different time, a street in a city that care forgot.  You never know what you'll find when you turn a corner in New Orleans.  Ever turn brings a fresh surprise.

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