Stray Cat Hunt For JFK Cats

Hey man, that’s that — the Port Authority plays the role of the shoe-throwing mean old man and leaves it to the imagination who the “proper authorities” may be:

To the alarm of cat rescue groups, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has started rounding up feral cats that live in a colony deep in the secured cargo areas of Kennedy International Airport. The several dozen cats have been tended for years by sympathetic airport employees.

The cats sleep in makeshift cubicles made of plastic packing containers nestled in cargo carts that once carried transcontinental luggage but have been long retired from Kennedy’s runways. They gather under and around a rusted old fuel tanker truck.

“It’s just a happy cat camp,” said Ashot Karamian, president of the Urban Cat League, which specializes in rescuing stray cats in New York and whose members had visited the site in the past.

But now the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages the airport, has blocked cat rescue groups from approaching the cats.

“The cats are being rounded up in the coming days, and will be held in a safe place until they’re turned over to the proper authorities,” Pasquale DiFulco, an authority spokesman, said yesterday.

. . .

Yesterday morning, there were piles of food on foam plates held down with stones next to an old British Airways cargo crane. Jet engines roared nearby and the AirTrain glided silently by.

A woman in an airline uniform appeared and began opening cans of food and dumping the contents onto paper plates. She refused to be photographed or to discuss the cats for fear of causing problems with her employer.

Scruffy cats dashed out of old cargo equipment, rusted snowplows and underbrush to eat the food.

Each year scores of dogs and cats are lost and found on Kennedy’s 5,000 acres. Some pets that are being transported may get loose. Also, people who live locally can easily drive onto airport property and get rid of their pets, and travelers facing exorbitant kennel costs may opt to simply abandon their pets before catching their planes. Some animals wander in from nearby.

Mr. Karamian, 49, estimated that there were hundreds of feral cats across the airport. He said volunteers from his group had trapped and then spayed or neutered perhaps 30 cats from the colony in the past few months, but lately had been told they must stay off airport property.

“These cats reproduce and kill rodents,” he said. “But someone keeps trapping and killing them. We want to stop the slaughter.”

Buried lede: people actually abandon their cat at the airport before that big trip to Bermuda . . . wow.

Location Scout: JFK.