Last year Craig Bullock brought us a book hailing the canine heroes and victims of Christchurch’s earthquakes. Now it’s the turn of the felines.
Chippy was found in a fish and chip shop in the earthquake-devastated area of Aranui in March 2011.
This was Red Zone territory. A woman had seen him at the shop on and off for a few days, and noticed that he was eating out of the deep fryer. She managed to coax him out, and decided to take him to Cat Help to be cared for.
Cat Help called him Chippy and discovered that not only had he been eating from the deep fryer, but he was also covered in the fat.
Cleaning a heavily oiled animal is no easy task, and there is also a risk of them becoming seriously ill if they have swallowed too much of the oil. Chippy needed to stay with Cat Help for several weeks to get him sorted out. The first two or three days were spent bathing him to remove the thick coat of fat, which smelled terrible. Chippy was only 6 months old, and he needed plenty of TLC to recover from the trauma of the quakes.
Once he was healthier, Chippy went up for adoption, as all attempts to find his previous owner had failed. This is where Inez and her son, Luka, stepped in. For some time Inez had been thinking of adopting a cat to keep her and Luka company. She was sitting in one of the cat rooms at Cat Help when "Chippy just strolled along, hopped in my lap and fell asleep". Inez immediately fell in love: "I think Chippy chose us as much as we chose him."
Three years on, Chippy is still territorial, possibly a side-effect of the quakes and the time he spent in the Red Zone along with the many other stray animals around his neighbourhood.
Chippy.
Diane and Jaemie have three cats who were all affected in different ways by the earthquakes, but the one who caused the most stress was their adopted stray, 6-and-a-half-year-old Mr Splitty.
To begin with, Mr Splitty was just an occasional visitor to Diane and Jaemie's home. But one day, about a year before the earthquakes, he turned up looking very much the worse for wear: he had weeping abscesses on his leg and some of his fur was missing. Diane took him to the vet for treatment, and Mr Splitty has lived with them ever since. He quickly made himself at home and whenever the pantry door was opened he'd be there "lickity split". That became his name before it was shortened to Mr Splitty.
Unsettled by the September earthquake, Mr Splitty took off, though returned after a few days. However, in February things were much worse, and Diane believed he had taken off for good. During the big shake, Mr Splitty had narrowly missed being buried under the chimney as it toppled, and masonry had crashed down around him as he made his escape.
It was an ad she placed online that saw her reunited with Mr Splitty almost three weeks later.
When he got home, his spirit was broken and he was distraught. It took months before he was comfortable being inside. He began over-grooming, to the extent that his back legs were bare and he started losing weight. He would take off every time there was an aftershock. Every time, he would return to the intermediate school where he had been found hiding in the broken foundations.
To try to break the habit, Diane and Jaemie began to send Mr Splitty to a cattery whenever he became extremely anxious. Diane likes to think of it as a short stint in the country, and the cat always seemed to return home more relaxed. Three years on, after several "trips to the country", Mr Splitty has finally started to show signs of readjusting. He has gained weight and stopped over-grooming.
Mr Splitty.
Laura and Ian were living in the badly affected area of Bromley when their world was turned upside down in February 2011. Not only did they have the earthquakes to contend with, but they both lost their jobs in the aftermath as well. So they made the tough decision to leave Christchurch and move to Melbourne.
Part of the agonising was about Memnoch: they couldn't leave him behind. He was a part of their family and would have to go with them. So they made arrangements with friends to look after him while they got settled in Melbourne. They dropped him at their friends' house a couple of days before leaving so they could help settle him.
But Memnoch was set on an adventure of his own and managed to escape. Despite countless searches and placing ads, the cat couldn't be found and Laura and Ian went to Melbourne, distraught.
After a year they decided to return to Christchurch and settled in a new home. They took the "lost" ads off the internet and resigned themselves to the fact that Memnoch was never coming home. Four more months passed, when, out of the blue, in September 2013, Laura got a telephone call from the after-hours vet. Someone had handed in a cat, and the microchip revealed it was Memnoch.
The vet warned her to expect big changes in Memnoch's personality; it was likely that he would be a little feral after spending 22 months alone in the Red Zone. It turned out that someone had taken him to the vet because his collar had become trapped around one of his legs, causing severe wounds. The vet had to cut out the infected skin and stitch the wound to allow it to heal. Memnoch's fur was also in terrible condition, which is what
made the vet think he'd been out in the wild for a long time.
Once home, Memnoch took only a little time to settle in. He was a bit insecure at first, especially if Ian and Laura went out, but after six months of care he was back to his old self.
Memnoch.
GinGin's story is a tale of two cities and spans more than two years. The ginger tomcat is the much-loved pet of Antoinette, who rescued him when he was only 4 weeks old, and has cared for him ever since. Well, almost.
At the time of the February earthquake, Antoinette was working with a cat rescue charity, fostering animals until new homes could be found for them. GinGin shared his home with 18 other cats at the time. After the earthquakes struck, it was increasingly difficult to find homes for the cats given people were trying to pick up their own lives.
The Wellington-based charity Helping You Help Animals (HUHA) sent people to Christchurch to help ease the strain on local charities. They took animals that needed homes back to Wellington to be re-homed there. HUHA visited Antoinette's property and collected all of her cats. GinGin went too, because Antoinette felt that it was better for him to leave the shaky city as he was displaying signs of stress. She immediately regretted letting him go, so she got in touch with HUHA - only to learn that GinGin had been taken to a foster home but had run away, and the foster carer had had no luck in finding him. Antoinette had looked after GinGin since he was tiny, and she couldn't bear the thought of him being on his own. She booked herself on the next flight to Wellington.
There, she printed more than 1000 flyers, and the local newspaper ran a story with the headline "GinGin's GoneGone". Armed with hope and a lot of determination, Antoinette went to the area where GinGin had disappeared and went door to door, asking if anyone had seen him. She searched the nearby bush areas, hoping to spot him, but with no luck. After 10 days, she had to return home alone. Two and a half years went by, but Antoinette kept her "lost" ads on Trade Me, holding on to the slim hope that he would be found.
It was October 1 last year when Antoinette got a telephone call from HUHA. Someone had brought a cat to them after seeing her ad. HUHA had scanned for a microchip and confirmed that it was GinGin. He was put on a flight to Christchurch that day and Antoinette headed straight to the airport to collect him.
The only lasting effects seem to be that he is still very jumpy around loud noises, and wary of visitors, preferring to hide under the bed until they leave.
GinGin.
Thomas lost her home to red zoning, and went missing from her owner, Gail, for 16 months. At the time of the February earthquake, she was living with Gail near the Avon River. Gail's home came through the earthquake relatively unscathed, with only superficial damage, but the same could not be said for the suburb.
Damage around the riverside areas was terrible, and the earthquake authorities declared the land unsuitable to live on, and red-zoned it. Gail and Thomas had no choice but to leave and move to a different suburb.
Thomas managed to escape after just two days and didn't return. Gail regularly visited her old home to collect the mail, and one day, weeks later, she spotted Thomas crawling through a gap in the fence. She was astonished that Thomas had travelled almost five kilometres just to get back to her old house. Taking her back home, she escaped once again but this time there was no quick reunion. Sixteen months passed without Gail seeing or hearing anything of Thomas. She got in touch with redzonecats, a charity that was feeding and trapping cats in these devastated and abandoned areas in the hope of finding their owners. They visited Gail's old house and set a trap to catch Thomas. There were a large number of stray cats in the area, so they had to be cunning in order to catch the right cat. Mobile cameras and a cellphone were placed beside the trap. Each time the wrong cat entered the trap, the cellphone would ring to startle the cat so that it would run away. Eventually they caught Thomas.
This time she settled quickly and, fortunately, seemed to lose interest in leaving the new house.
Thomas.
Following the earthquake on February 22 2011, the city centre was in chaos, with people having to evacuate their properties and find other places to live. Several days after the big shake, Puku showed up at a house with new people moving in. It was hard to ignore such a striking silver tabby with his beautiful markings, and the new owners made him welcome, assuming his owners had gone, leaving him behind.
However, he didn't get on well with the other cats at the house and after placing ads online to find his owners proved fruitless, Puku was taken to the Snuggle Inn cattery. Owner Noeline immediately fell in love. She simply couldn't believe that no one had come forward to collect Puku, so she put her own ads online to find his owners but no one came forward. In the meantime, Puku needed plenty of love and care. He was very timid and would jump at any loud noises.
The cattery is on a rural property and Puku loves it, spending his days hunting rabbits or stretched out across the counter in the cattery reception area.
Puku.
Quake Cats by Craig Bullock (Random House Books $39.99) is out now.
A live cook-off featured ox heart, wapiti, wild boar and plenty of edible wildlife.