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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It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

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