Hemingway’s Horny Housecats
There is trouble brewing down in Key West, Florida. The Hemingway House, where novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote the novel “A Farewell to Arms” is famous for its lineage of cats, each of which have six toes. All of the cats are descended from Hemingway’s cat Snowball. A neighbor down the street from the Hemingway House and museum became upset when one of the six-toed Tomcats started mating with her own cats. So she called the Federal government to do something about the Hemingway cats. If the Museum loses, there could be fines and the cats could be confiscated.
Here is a picture of Ivan, the orange Tomcat who is getting aggressive with the other kitties.
From USA Today here:
The legendary American novelist Ernest Hemingway lived in Key West for a decade in the 1930s, in a stone mansion on Whitehead Street with his wife, Pauline, and a six-toed cat named Snowball.
Hemingway divorced Pauline in 1939, but Snowball stayed on. Today, about 50 of Snowball’s descendants roam the grounds, to the delight of many tourists who visit the Hemingway Home and Museum. But the cats won’t be roaming much longer, if the federal government has its way.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has cited the museum for violating a 1966 federal animal welfare law, and has threatened to impose stiff fines or confiscate the cats if the Hemingway Home does not do more to control the felines.
The cats “are born and raised and live their lives in Key West,” she says. “They’ve been doing so for over 40 years.
The dispute began when a USDA inspector showed up at the museum in October 2003 in response to a complaint about the cats.
Much of the dispute revolves around the wanderings of Ivan, an orange tomcat born in 2004, the year Hurricane Ivan killed dozens of people in the Caribbean and the USA.
“I saw Ivan many times loose,” she says. “Ivan is a very unneutered, very macho male cat, and in each case, he had one of the street cats pinned down,” she says. “We have an ordinance that says a nuisance cat can be removed.”
I don’t know why the Feds are even involved. A city ordinance could easily clear all of this up. If you want to go the official site of the six-toed cats, click here.
Cindi,
Thanks for writing.
There are so many jokes I could make about lonely single women who have
too many cats, however, this could also be looked at as two cat lovers who
have completely differing opinions on what is best for the animals.
What is really bad is that now that the Feds are on the case, this will
likely never go away completely.
Another solution in my opinion is to keep the breeding animals in another
part of the state. If they are really concerned about preserving the
lineage of the animals, they should do that anyways. One good hurricane
would wipe out the whole area and all of the cats.
From Cindi:
Being a lover of cats I think this is OUTRAGEOUS!! — Hang the BITCH that
had the “Feds” come in the Hemingway cats — they are part of history and
delight — I have visited Key West and the cats for every year since
1976!!!
If the neighbor is upset about the “tom” coming over – why wasn’t her cat
inside? They are animals looking for love!!
Anyway – I think this is a crock and if they have to pay the fines – that
is LUDICRIOUS!! Don’t the Feds have something more important to do??!! —
The cats are well fed and cared for — not abused — what I is the problem? Anyway — I hope they survive — Cindi (now in Canada but from Florida for 30 yrs!)