The cat’s meow for 20 years

Bordentown

transported across the world by human assistance.” And that human assistance for cats is how strays and ferals in Bordentown City find new homes, thanks to a rescue effort called Bordentown City Cats.

By SUe FerrArA

Cats have clearly been connected to humans forever. If you doubt that statement, just look up the history of the word “cat” on etymonline.com. Latin: catta, Byzantine Greek: katta, Old English: catt. Old Norse: köttr, Dutch: kat, Old High German: kazza, German: Katze, and from Late Latin: cattus.

But despite all the names, cats come from a very small genetic line. A 2007 study looked at the genomes of 979 domestic cats and concluded “cats were domesticated in the Near East, probably coincident with agricultural village development in the Fertile Crescent,” an area in the Middle East which is defined by the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers.

As the study noted, today’s domestic cats “derive from at least five founders from across this region, whose descendants were

The rescue began after an observation made by Mary Ann Kieffer after she moved to Bordentown City from Princeton.

“I was surprised by the number of friendly cats roaming around Bordentown City,” Kieffer said in an interview. “They would follow me around. They weren’t ferals, but cats that had been left behind.”

Many of the cats had been abandoned at the Bordentown City Beach, Kieffer said.

After enough residents complained about the cats, Kieffer said, the police would come and round them up and take them to a shelter to be euthanized. That’s when Kieffer decided to take action.

“I put an ad in a newspaper asking if there were people interested in addressing the cat problems,” Kieffer said.

She was surprised by the response: 17 strangers stepped up to help organize a rescue operation.

Kieffer said that the name,

See CATS, Page 6