CALEDONIA — Caring for a family of 300 isn’t easy, especially when they act like a bunch of animals. But that’s life for Kay McElroy. The 66-year-old is the owner of Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary, an organization that rescues abused animals.
Although Cedarhill was founded in 1990, the story really began a few years earlier. In 1987, McElroy read an advertisement in the newspaper for a six-month-old cougar cub. The seller wanted $1,000. Curious, she went to visit and found a malnourished animal in a small kennel intended for dogs. The man had been feeding the cub canned cat food from the grocery store, and McElroy could see its ribs. It had been passed around from owner to owner, and its paws were infected from someone’s attempts to remove its claws. She offered the man a 1947 Farmall D tractor, but he was only interested in money. Two weeks later, however, he showed up at her house with a trailer for the tractor. The cougar was chained in the front seat of his truck.
“I either had to have him euthanized or build an enclosure,” she said.
For her, the choice was easy. The cub, whom she named Zack, became the cornerstone of Cedarhill. What started with one sick cougar bloomed into a major operation, and with around 300 animals, the sanctuary has put out its “no vacancy” sign.
“I turned down three tigers Friday morning, and I’ve got domestic cats out the yazoo,” McElroy said.
Her 220 kitties have their own house, equipped with scratching posts, pillows, a sofa and a full-sized bed. There are also dogs, horses, wolves, lions, cougars and tigers. High chain link fences keep the bigger cats separate from each other. The grass is cut, and all the tools are in their places. The 20-acre compound is immaculate.
Since she started the organization, McElroy has never been to a zoo or another sanctuary. She rarely leaves Cedarhill at all. She only goes to town for monthly visits to the doctor, and she can count on one hand the number of movies she has seen. She sends an employee for groceries. She’s an intensely private person, and she spends most of her waking hours socializing with the animals and using everything at her disposal to improve their lives.
“There is no place outside this sanctuary that can give me the peace of mind I get out here,” McElroy said. “I’ve always related to animals better than people.”
Still, she willingly gives up her closely guarded privacy because raising awareness about the atrocities of animal abuse is far more important to her.
She has been interviewed by CNN, and a writer from More Magazine spent four days with her last year. Shortly after the article appeared, a representative from the TV network Animal Planet called her because her sanctuary is the only one in the United States with such a high number of domestic and exotic cats. On Sunday, a five-man crew from Animal Planet filmed her for a six-part series the network is doing called “Must Love Cats,” which will air in January or February 2011.
In a way, she needs the media outlet to spread the word about abused animals because Cedarhill is, in no uncertain terms, closed to the public. In the past, volunteers have come not to help but to witness the novelty of the exotic animals. Other times, visitors have reminded the animals of the people who abused them.
“Sanctuaries are for animals,” she said. “Zoos are for people.”
The details of how many of the animals came to McElroy are usually ugly. She has stories that would make most people’s hair curl.
“I don’t know how people can do those things,” she said. “I’ve got stories you don’t want to hear.”
She talked about events like “canned hunts” in Texas where would-be big-game hunters walk down a row of cages picking what kind of exotic animals they want to shoot. The animals are released, and if they don’t run, they’re chased by dogs.
She said none of her 300 animals were abused by women and that animal abuse is often a sign of domestic abuse. She also said that some people are drawn to work with animals because of violence they have experienced in their own lives.
“I can only speak from my experience,” she said. “It’s in the past, and it’s gone. I choose not to let my yesterdays ruin my todays, and it takes a long time to do that.”
Now, McElroy’s main concern is righting the wrongs of those abusers.
“I have to make it up to (the animals),” she said. “I just learned I couldn’t punish people for what they’d done to the animals.”
Unlike so many of the animals’ previous owners, she doesn’t care about making a quick buck.
“I’ve had a Mercedes, a Porsche — blah, blah, blah,” she said. “I have a real keen sense of business, but money does not make me happy. It’s this right here.”
Each animal has a story. Like Lobo, the first wolf anyone has ever rescued from Alaska.
“I just said he was a German Shepherd,” McElroy laughed. “That’s how I got him across the state line.”
Or four of her tigers, Oscar, Lady, Snow White and Cinderella, who were named by a little girl with multiple sclerosis at a gas station when the man who was transporting them stopped to fill up.
“He said to her, ‘Little girl, I’m going to make your day,'” McElroy said. “I kept the names.”
When you spend your days in the company of exotic beasts, you pick up trivia tidbits along the way, such as the perfect crime in India: chopped-up tiger whiskers in someone’s drink.
“Your body will dissolve them, but not before they tear up your intestines,” McElroy said.
But none of the animals’ stories are quite as interesting as McElroy’s.
She grew up on a small farm in Adair, Okla. Her graduating class had 17 students in it. After high school, she earned her degree in education and shipped off to California to work with students in Watts, Calif., the site of brutal riots in 1965 and 1992.
“I worked with some of the roughest, toughest kids Watts produced,” she said. “I loved those kids with all my heart.”
After more than a decade of being a teacher, she transitioned to working with animals. Many people have been quick to make a link between the students and the animals, but McElroy doesn’t see it that way.
“Those tigers are a lot easier to be around than those kids,” she laughed. “With an animal, what you see is what you get. They’re the only beings in the world that have unconditional love.”
McElroy’s own love for her animals is apparent even in the way she talks about them. She narrated in a sing-song voice while one tiger snuck up on the other and explained some of the basics of how Cedarhill is run. The tigers get 300 pounds of meat a day, which is trucked in from across the country. She gets beef from New Jersey, chicken from Florida, and the occasional deer carcass dropped off by a hunter.
“They like nothing better than to have a rib cage,” McElroy laughed. “They walk around like, ‘I killed that.'”
But no matter how much she loves them, McElroy learned quickly to deal with the exotic cats only from the other side of a fence.
Once, early in Cedarhill’s history, she was holding a cougar by its collar while a man came in the pen to clean it. Before McElroy had rescued the cat, its owners had taken a weed-eater and shredded its face and front legs. Holding the cat’s collar reawakened the latent memory.
“He thought I was holding him to be beaten,” McElroy said. “He was trying to protect himself, not kill me. I sensed it before he did it, and I told the man, ‘Get out! Get out!'”
The mauling resulted in 200 stitches down the length of her arm, and she almost lost the pinky finger on her right hand. After that, she stopped going in the cages with the big cats. However, her outside-the-fence relationship with her exotic animals is a sight to behold. She put her hand up to the chain link fence and let a cougar named Katie lick it. Katie purred and rubbed her body like an oversized house cat along the length of the fence, nuzzling the spot where McElroy’s hand was.
“I’m the only person she does this with,” McElroy said. “We just love each other.”
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