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Feline who helped after hurricane gets new owner, new job, new life
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The times, they are a-changing for Lawrence County animals.
NEW CASTLE, Pa. — In post-Hurricane Katrina Mississippi, there were some awfully big rats.
But they didn’t deter a cat named Bob Dylan from doing his job.
It was Bob’s job to keep the rats and mice from overrunning the Hurricane relief volunteer camp where Neshannock Township resident Dick Craig stayed in July and August 2006 in Gautier, Miss.
“I saw Bob in the kitchen one day in attack mode,” said Craig, who was working there as the assistant camp manager. “I thought, ‘He’s after a mouse.’”
“I came back 45 minutes later and he had killed a rat as big as him.”
Bob’s not really a lightweight, either, as far as cats go — he’s all of 12 pounds. And he was making himself useful at the camp, where volunteers from all over the country were staying to help in the rebuilding of communities that were devastated by the August 2005 hurricane.
A college girl named Becky was managing the camp, said Craig. She had gone to an animal shelter in a town across the river from Gautier to adopt a cat for rodent control.
She came back with the stubby-tailed, mixed-breed orange tabby, and, being a Bob Dylan fan, that’s what she named him, said Craig.
Turned loose on patrol in the camp, he had found a home — at least a temporary one. No one at the shelter knew for sure if he had ever had an owner or if he’d been a stray before the storm hit, Craig said. A veterinarian who’d checked him out estimated he was probably about 8 months old. His tail, which is only about 3 inches long, was likely that way from birth, the vet decided. It didn’t look as if Bob had been in any kind of an accident.
The week that Craig got to the camp, Becky wanted a weekend off. She had been working seven weeks straight with no time off, so she asked Craig to take over for her while she took a rest, he said.
He agreed, and it was during that weekend that Bob and Craig would become more than just passing acquaintances in the camp.
“Saturday night, it started raining like heck,” said Craig. He heard a noise at the door of his trailer.
When he opened the door, there was Bob, sitting on a step just inches above rising water.
Craig’s wife, Anna, was on the phone with him at the time.
“She said, ‘Don’t let that cat in the trailer,’ cause she knew what would happen,” Craig said.
But he did let Bob in. “And that was the beginning of our relationship.”
Bob slept inside with Craig every night after that, and liked to spend a good deal of time in his air-conditioned trailer to escape the Mississippi summer heat.
Before he left in mid-August, Craig asked Becky what would become of Bob when the camp closed down in September.
“She said, ‘I don’t know. He might have to go back to the pound,’” Craig said.
The morning he started his drive back to Pennsylvania, Craig called his wife.
“I said, ‘Well, we’re on our way,’” he said. “She said, “‘What do you mean, we?’”
Bob now lives with the Craigs and their three other cats at their home on Northview Drive in Neshannock.
Mellow and friendly, he’ll hang out and socialize with visitors.
He spends a lot of his time sleeping or watching the birds from the screen porch.
But even though he has no more rats to chase, his life isn’t all play and no work. He does have another job — he’s a poster cat for the Lawrence County Animal Relief Fund.
Craig also volunteers for the fund as it looks for as many helping hands as it can get.
When Lawrence County dog owners get their notices for license renewals in the mail, they’ll see Bob’s picture on a flier that will be included. The flier will ask for donations for LC-ARF, and those donations will go toward helping homeless and abused animals. Eventually, the county hopes to hire a full-time humane agent with money from the fund, county officials have said. That will entail raising a great deal of money for salary and benefits, says county Treasurer Richard Rapone, who spearheaded ARF’s formation this summer.
Sounds like a big job. But, lying in the middle of Craig’s dining room table with his eyes half-open and his best friend sitting nearby, Bob still appears undeterred.