THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Amelia, the white kitten who was so filthy she appeared gray

By David McElroy · June 5, 2011

On a warm July evening almost 11 years ago, I had just left a cheap steak joint in Birmingham after a meal. I was about to get into my car when I heard a small sound. I was in a hurry, so I almost didn’t check it out. Eleven years later, I’m glad I did.

The sound I’d heard was a very small and very weak “meow.” There was a scared and hungry kitten underneath the car parked next to me. I got down on the ground to look. Very tentatively, two scared and hesitant eyes looked back at me from just around the edge of a tire. There was no way the kitten behind those terrified eyes was going to intentionally let me get anywhere close to her.

It took a few minutes of trial and error before I even got a look at the body of this filthy kitten. I could tell she had oil or grease on her face, but I judged her body — in the semi-darkness — to be gray and black. She wouldn’t let me get anywhere near her.

As I kept trying to coax her out, the people who owned the car came out of the restaurant to leave. Although they were mildly interested that there was a kitten under their car, all they wanted to do was leave. As they got into the car, the kitten scrambled up into the engine compartment, but I couldn’t tell where. I pointed down under the car, trying to get the attention of the man to, who was driving. He briefly looked at me and then looked away, as though he decided it was easier if he just didn’t notice.

As he started to move the car, the kitten came darting out, so I knew she was safe, even if I wasn’t sure where she ran. The other people drove off and I was left alone in a dark parking lot.

At that point, the smart thing probably would have been to move on. I’d tried to get to the kitten, but she obviously wasn’t going to let me. And now I didn’t even know where she was. I was torn. But then I heard her tiny “meow” once again.

It turned out that she had run under another car not far away from me. She knew I was still there — and she was watching me with wary eyes as she barely peeked out from underneath her new hiding place.

Since I’d just left a restaurant, I decided that food scraps might be my best chance to catch her. Even if I couldn’t catch her, I could at least give her a bit of food. So I went back inside the restaurant and found the woman who had been my server earlier. She was kind enough to let me take some meat scraps from a table that hadn’t yet been cleaned. I headed back outside with my bait.

With the first few bites, I just let the kitten eat. It was clear that she was very hungry, because it seemed more accurate to say that she inhaled the food than chewed it. As she ate the bites, she kept her eyes on me at first, but as I gave her more, she started to let her guard down. It was then that I was able to grab her by the scruff of her greasy and dirty body.

After I got her into the car, I let her loose to hide, because I didn’t have a pet carrier with me. She was strangely quiet and still on the way to my house. She willingly allowed me to pick her up to ride in my arms into the house. Other than trips to the vet, she’s never left since.

The upper picture on the right is from that first night, but that picture is from after she was cleaned up. It didn’t occur to me to take any pictures until after I had bathed her twice and she had eaten as much as she could stand. It took days to get everything off, but that dirty little kitten quickly adjusted to a life in a house with plenty of other cats and dogs. She’s turned out to be one of the most affectionate cats I’ve been around. Now that Henry is gone, she’s the biggest lap time cat I have.

The lower picture of the two smaller ones (above on the right) is from about six weeks ago, the day tornadoes hit parts of Alabama. It’s the best comparison I could find to the way she was sitting in the earlier shot.

The name wasn’t that difficult in her case. Since the kitten was so far away from any residential areas when I found her, I decided she must be an explorer kitty of some sort who had wandered away in search of something new, so I named her for aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. My only rule for her is that if she ever flies, she can’t fly over the Pacific Ocean.

Editor’s note: If you enjoyed meeting Amelia, you might enjoy previous posts about Henry, Lucy, Charlotte and Emily.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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