By Todd C. Elliott
Some people are called to serve their fellow human beings. Some are also called to serve their fellow feline beings.
For the past three years, Barbara Bazzell made a daily detour behind Cancun Mexican Restaurant on Ryan Street. She carried food and water instead of fanfare, and waiting for her beneath a narrow thicket of bamboo was a collection of abandoned and feral cats that had made the area their home.
They became known affectionately as the Cancun Kitties. And Barbara, 74, became their person.
Like clockwork, the cats begin to lounge about the Cancun parking lot every morning at about 7:30 am. By then, they know Barbara is coming.
But feeding the cats was only the beginning.
Working alongside Hobo Hotel for Cats, Barbara became involved in identifying feral cats in the colony that could be included in the organization’s Trap-Neuter-Return, or TNR, program. The cats are trapped, spayed or neutered, given needed medical attention, flea treatments and rabies vaccinations, and then returned to the territory they already know.
Barbara Bazzell during one of her past daily detours to tend to the cats behind Cancun Mexican Restaurant.
“How it all started was I had just come out of knee surgery and it was my first outing going out since the surgery,” Barbara says. I went to Cancun Mexican Restaurant, and that’s when ‘Little Boy,’ a little black cat with so much personality, came out to greet me. I could tell that he was hungry. I thought how I eat every day and I drink water every day and that these cats may not, and they didn’t deserve this. So, I went home that night after dinner and came back with a plate of dry cat food. And I haven’t stopped since then.”
Little Boy was the first of the Cancun Kitties to receive a name from Barbara. But this group of cats was certainly not her first rodeo. Barbara has spent much of her life caring for wayward animals and people who found themselves without a place to call home.
For three years, roughly two dozen feral cats behind a Lake Charles restaurant could count on somebody showing up.
Barbara doesn’t make weather an excuse.
“I go to them whether it’s raining, whether it’s snowing or too hot — whatever it is, I am there, because I have the support of Hobo Hotel for Cats, and my volunteers like Sally and Chelsea that help me when I can’t be there to do for the cats,” said Barbara. “This is not all about me. It’s about people dumping cats. And not fixing animals.”
That last part may be the most important. Because the Cancun Kitties aren’t really the problem. They are the evidence of one.
Every feral cat colony begins somewhere. Sometimes it starts with an unfixed house cat that gets loose. Sometimes it begins when somebody decides they no longer want a pet and leaves it behind. Before long, one cat becomes several, and several become a colony.
“The cats come and go; some come back later on, depending on conditions, but basically, the colony is thriving,” said Barbara. “At any given time, an average of 18 Cancun Kitties live behind the restaurant Currently, only one male has not been fixed. And honestly, we couldn’t do it without the volunteer efforts of some retired veterinarians, who spay and neuter at no cost. This isn’t my first action. But it’s the first with the kind of support that I’m getting with Hobo Hotel.
“I used to feed homeless people and animals in California, and homeless people and animals in Texas and Louisiana. I’m just scared of the homeless people today. I’m not scared of these cats.”
But Barbara has left Lake Charles.
On July 31, after three years of showing up, Barbara made one final trip behind Cancun. She put out one last meal, said goodbye to the cats that had become woven into the fabric of her daily life, climbed into her vehicle, and began the long drive west to Arizona to be closer to family.
But she didn’t abandon the Cancun Kitties. She left them in capable hands. A dedicated group of volunteers, who learned the routine and the responsibility from Barbara herself, has pledged to continue feeding and caring for the colony.
Barbara said that while she has left the Cancun Kitties in the capable hands of her volunteers, there is still a problem at the back of Cancun that has nothing to do with the cats themselves. It has to do with people.
“There are people that sneak in and try to feed the cats by dumping food on the ground, thinking that they are helping the cats, and it just kind of angers the owners of Cancun,” said Barbara. “Because this is their business. That’s why I go in at 8 am before his business opens, so that the cats have cleared out by the time his lunch crowd comes. I do this out of respect.”
That respect has been mutual.
Barbara chatting with Esteban
“Steve” Himel, owner of Cancun.
Esteban “Steve” Himel and his wife, Linda, have sanctioned Barbara’s efforts to feed and water the cats behind their restaurant. For Linda, however, the Cancun Kitties aren’t simply a recent phenomenon.
“Well, (this group of) cats has been ongoing for at least 10 to 12 years,” said Linda. “Miss Barbara and several people come and feed them and play with them and enjoy them. Some of our customers bring their kids out here to see the cats. I’ve had a few customers over the years sit in their cars with fishing poles and (try to) get an interaction with the cats by casting little cat toys on a fishing line and reeling them in. Because the cats don’t let you go to them; the cats usually run away, afraid. But some people have come and played with them for that long.
“We love the Cancun Kitties. And I am always grateful when someone takes them to fix them and then they get adopted out by a local family. It makes you feel so good.”
Hobo Hotel for Cats has spent more than two decades dealing with the problem that begins when a cat is abandoned and multiplies when nobody intervenes. But not every cat wandering around a neighborhood is feral.
“We provide a program for feral cats, not tame cats,” said a Hobo Hotel for Cats representative. “Because people think that feral cats are just stray cats. And we can only intervene with ones that are not tame. They have to go into a trap. We have done, with our TNR (Trap, neuter, return) program over the years over 3,000 cats. So, it is definitely part of a solution that we’ve been at for over 26 years. We do adoptions as well as TNR.
“Dumping cats is just horrible. Often, the cats are thrown out of a moving truck or a car. Once cats know that there is food involved, a colony will grow. Unless you do TNR. But if you do utilize our TNR program, and get all the cats fixed, the colony will stabilize.
“I personally feed three feral cat colonies, but every cat I feed has been fixed. I feed them. I fix them. That should be the rule. Feeding them is only the beginning of a good deed. That needs to continue with getting them fixed, because if they are not fixed, they will continue to reproduce at an alarming rate.”
And therein lies the real story of the Cancun Kitties. It is about what happens when somebody sees a problem and decides that somebody ought to do something about it.
Behind Cancun Mexican Restaurant, beneath the bamboo and beside an old ladder that became a hurricane escape route, a colony of cats has found something most abandoned animals never get: Someone who stayed.
Because Barbara stayed, others have decided to stay, too. For the Cancun Kitties, that might be the greatest piece of good fortune they’ve ever had.
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