Last chance saloon

PET SHOP: This animal lover rehomes abandoned cats - but she can't help keeping some of them, writes Michael Kelly

PET SHOP:This animal lover rehomes abandoned cats - but she can't help keeping some of them, writes Michael Kelly

LET'S FACE IT - when the chips are down, you're probably going to be either a cat person or a dog person. But not both. Dog people think that cats are smelly, aloof, sneaky, disloyal and selfish. They bemoan the fact that cats won't fetch or sit on command or save a drowning child.

Cat people, on the other hand, think dogs just slavishly desire the attention of whoever happens to be passing. Cats, they will tell you, are intelligent, don't have to be walked and are generally slobber free. Bernie Stretton claims to have no preference between the two but perhaps an inkling of where her allegiance lies is to be found in the fact that she has only three dogs. She has nine cats. "I do love kittens," she says.

The Duleek, Co Meath, resident rescues and re-homes cats on behalf of the Last Hope Animal Charity. She admits that sometimes it seems like she keeps more cats than she re-homes and the ones that she has kept seem to have been the ones with the most heart-wrenching backgrounds - the most terrified, the least wanted, the most abused.

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There's Dexter, for example, a grey and white mongrel tomcat. "I got a call to say there were six kittens left in a box in a vet's car park. I re-homed five of them but I kept Dexter - he's a grey and white mongrel pussy-cat and a big character. His legs are a little deformed so he has trouble walking properly."

Then there's Smokey, who was so poorly treated as a kitten that when she arrived at the charity she spent most of her time cowering in a corner and wouldn't let anyone touch her. Squibbly, a black and white moggie, was abandoned by her mother. "All her brothers and sisters died but she survived, I had to bottle feed her and then she got cat flu and nearly died again. I just didn't have the heart to give her away."

Some of them even get to sleep on beds in the house. Many cat lovers attest to the comforting feeling of having a warm, purring fur-ball near you while you sleep.

In addition to the nine cats and three dogs, Stretton also has a donkey and eight hens and this grand menagerie lives together in relative harmony (though Dexter sometimes chases the hens). She estimates that she has re-homed more than 300 cats and kittens in her time with the charity and is keen for me to mention that they are perennially short of money.

"Our biggest challenge is trying to educate people about neutering cats. It costs about €80 to neuter a cat and a lot of people would prefer to just drown the kittens rather than pay that kind of money. Imagine that? We found a kitten in a dustbin once that had a broken leg. It didn't get into that bin on its own, so someone obviously put it in there." See also www.lasthope.ie