Around midnight, Louise Hindle gets a call. A cat has been pelted with paintballs and doused in kerosene by a gang of kids, but somehow escaped the match. The cat’s rescuer can’t reach the humane society this late at night, and the municipality doesn’t pick up cats.
She needs help.
Luckily, Hindle is there.
In 1999, Hindle left her position as executive director of the Ottawa Humane Society to establish the Cat Rescue Network, a string of volunteers working to rescue cats overlooked by the city’s animal welfare services.
Hindle says the humane society only has resources to spend time on cats with a good chance of adoption – the healthy, sociable ones. The other ‘un-adoptable’ cats are often sent to their death.
But Hindle says some cats headed for euthanasia, given the opportunity, can be transformed into loveable, domestic pets.
“With a few days of extra care, that cat won’t cringe in the back of the cage because it won’t be in a cage at all. It will be in a home,” she says. “The bigger places make the decision to ‘keep the best, discard the rest.’ Well, we want to have the ones that were discarded.”
Hindle, 62, is technically retired, but she has never been busier since becoming a self-proclaimed cat lady. She works tirelessly, offering a hand to anyone – or any cat – who needs it.
“Cats are really being victimized. You hear sayings like ‘another kick at the cat,’ and it becomes almost funny to be cruel to cats. Cats are like the lowest of the low as pets,” she says. “It’s not only the beautiful, domestic, friendly cats who deserve a break. These other ones have been abused, abandoned, really mistreated. It’s about time they got a break, too.”
Darrell Graham, owner of Darrell Thomas Textiles on Bank Street, met Hindle three years ago when he adopted his cat, Alex, from Critter Jungle, a pet store which fosters cats for the network.
Graham says Hindle’s kindness and generosity inspired him to begin the Alex Fund, which raises money for the network. Sales from fabric samples are crammed into a purple box behind the counter, where toonies and loonies add up to about $1,000 a year.
He made the decision to support Hindle after she refused to let him pay for Alex’s enormous vet bills, despite her ever-growing need for funds.
“She told me I couldn’t pay, because she rescues and I adopt. So I decided I needed to help this woman,” he says with admiration.
Graham says Hindle’s humble heart shines through her rough exterior.
“When you first meet her you might think, ‘you’re kind of rough around the edges, you’re a cat woman, there’s not a lot of emotion coming out of you.’ But what she goes through and what she sees, she has to be like that,” Graham explains. “A lot of doctors don’t cry when they see a patient die, because they’re accustomed to it. I know that deep down she does this because she loves it.”
Hindle takes emergency calls at any hour of the day. She has watched victimized cats pass away, and other cats give birth to new life.
More than a few litters of kittens have been born in her garage.
One particular kitten, a wild brown tabby born in a litter of white “Cottonelle” cats, has since become her soul mate.
Smiling over a cup of coffee, she explains that Jake was almost adopted twice: once, Hindle cancelled the adoption because the person just wanted him as a mouser. The second time, he was so incorrigible the family gave him back.
“He was such a wild and crazy character that at night he would knock all their things off their dresser. So they would put all their stuff in their drawers, and he would open the drawer and knock everything out. He was a real Houdini,” she says, laughing.
Drawn to his unusual ability to open doors, drawers and windows, she decided to keep him.
“Just because he’s bad to the bone, I like him,” she says with a grin.
Her first pet was also a rambunctious cat, found in the woods behind her Quebec City home. She was only in preschool, but she managed to carry the feral cat all the way home, where it promptly tore the curtains and climbed the walls with its claws. They named him Jinglebells, and he lived to be a senior.
As an adult, Hindle couldn’t have cats in her home because both her children were allergic. They had dogs instead, and her volunteer work was geared toward dog welfare.
It wasn’t until she became the executive director of Ottawa’s humane society that she realized how poorly cats are treated.
Her decision to create the Cat Rescue Network is hardly a stretch, considering her checkered past of volunteer work.
Since her nursing days in Montreal, Hindle’s volunteering has ranged from helping abused children, to rescuing dogs, to acting as the executive director of Planned Parenthood Ottawa-Carleton, a sexual health advocacy group. On top of that, she has four post-secondary degrees: nursing, computer science, commerce and a master’s degree in business administration.
She raised two children while moving around as a military wife, and is now a grandmother..
Marlene Weintrager, Hindle’s friend since they trained together at the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1964, says Hindle has always been a very caring person, with animals and humans alike.
“She can feel for the underdog, and she feels that she can help these cats, at the very least,” Weintrager explains. “She’s just a very humane, loving person.”
Hindle’s efforts to rescue cats are seldom easy, and she cites money as one of her biggest obstacles.
It can cost up to $1,000 to send a cat to the hospital for treatment, and the money usually comes out of her own pocket. Often she pays $500 per cat, but she says occasionally she can ask a volunteer to come through with the money.
“We don’t adopt them out unless they’re spayed, neutered and vaccinated. And the day I can’t afford to do that is the day I’m out of rescuing,” she says.
The only income the network makes, other than donations, is a $20 profit from adoption fees. The money pays vet bills for injured cats, but it’s never enough.
But Hindle keeps a sense of humour despite the network’s financial woes.
“At one point, my foster homes told me that I would have to reduce the price for cats because everyone wanted kittens. So, I raised the price of kittens,” she says with a laugh.
Although she only has two cats of her own, she gets her “animal fix” from working with the network.
She says she has no problem being a cat lady.
“I’m proud of it,” she laughs. “I want to be a little bit eccentric, you know? And why not? The people who count are going to judge you for who you are. And I love eccentric people.”