Animal House A writer, his wife, and the joys and sorrows of creatures under foot.

In my home office, a lonely file cabinet squats among the surrounding bookcases. A receptacle for bank statements, tax returns, appliance warranties, insurance policies, and their dull ilk, it houses a prosaic accounting of a typical middle-class life. When I periodically organize the teetering stacks of paper that pile on a daily basis—transferring what is pertinent from messy desk to tidy drawers, purging what is now irrelevant—suppressed resentment over an outsized bill sometimes flares, but mostly the ritual proves an exercise in tedium, producing only boredom.

Not always, however, for squeezed between the receipts and proofs of purchase hangs a bulging, absurdly overstuffed folder that prompts a far more emotionally fraught response whenever I open it and read the contents. Simply—and misleadingly—labeled “Dog Bills,” the folder’s stiff yellow cardboard appears to hold items similar in kind to its neighbors: rabies certificates, veterinarian bills, pet-adoption documents. But what it actually contains are memories, both welcome and unwanted.

Serving as an incantatory roster of the dead, the folder conjures a crowded graveyard of ghosts, reanimating the spirits of the animals who have brought my wife and me immeasurable joy and insupportable grief over the 34 years of our marriage. Shuffling through the vaccination and microchip records, reading the myriad names, I sometimes smile with nostalgic fondness, but more often my eyes mist as I am reminded of the multitudes we have loved but lost.

And when I say “multitudes”—as in countless—the exaggeration is only slight.

The total number of dogs who have shared our house, a lucky 13, perhaps will not seem outlandish, especially given that five were sneakily re-homed with relatives. For most of our time together, we held the line at three dogs—a challenging but generally manageable pack—and as we have entered our 60s, fearing the inevitable creep of senescence, the count has been whittled to one. Sounds reasonable, you say. Move along. Nothing odd or untoward to see here.

Ah, but the cats.

By my conservative count, 131 cats—the number is not a typo—have happily scarfed our food, prowled our rooms, shared our bed, or resided on our exurban acreage. Although a dozen or so lived with us only fleetingly—a week, a month—we claimed all of them as our own. Vaccinated, microchipped, and sterilized as a matter of routine, they were also carefully named and fully embraced, becoming official members of a sprawling and often squabbling family.

And have I mentioned our pig?

• • •

I can feel your judgment. The opprobrium is all too familiar.

The enormity of our cumulative cat population—131!—inevitably elicits an appalled stare or disbelieving gasp. When we reluctantly share information about the clowder’s epic size, most people react with bemusement and curiosity, but some silently—and, on occasion, explicitly—question our mental health.

Because my wife, Ledy VanKavage, and I are childless, those inclined toward amateur psychology often speculate that we are filling a void, using a superabundance of pets to (over)compensate for the absence of children. If our own circle of friends serves as an anecdotal indicator, it is true that folks with more than the “normal” complement of companion animals generally lack kids, and many (if not most) are single women rather than unattached men or couples. But even conceding that a certain percentage of inveterate pet-collectors qualify as wannabe parents, that is emphatically not the case with us. Perhaps unusually, neither Ledy nor I felt an overwhelming urge to procreate; we were immune to that supposedly deep-seated need to propagate the species, to continue the family line. Although technically open to the possibility of children, we did not regard reproduction as somehow essential to our relationship, and when Ledy’s biological clock began ticking inexorably down, we never once contemplated climbing on the sperm-testing, egg-freezing, in-vitro-fertilizing treadmill of contemporary medicine. For whatever reason, no parental instinct ever developed.

From her childhood, however, Ledy displayed an intense empathy for animals. She was not a pint-sized misanthrope—she made and played with friends in typical kid fashion—but Ledy formed her closest bond with a scrappy, fiercely devoted pit-bull-terrier mix named Boody, and that tight connection to animals has never loosened. Beginning as a volunteer activist just out of law school, Ledy has now spent more than three decades not just taking in dozens of homeless pets but also lobbying politically on behalf of all companion animals.

In 1985, when Ledy became aware that the Madison County, Ill., animal-control facility was selling the vast majority of dogs and cats in their “care” to research labs—a practice known as pound seizure—she quickly helped organize a coalition of citizen advocates to press the county board to end the sales. The first of several meetings were held in the cramped living room of our Collinsville, Ill., bungalow, and after several months of smartly calibrated rabble-rousing, public pressure forced the county to stop profiteering by consigning former pets to a grim life of permanent confinement, unpleasant experimentation, and premature death.

That campaign was just the first short leg in a still-continuing marathon for Ledy. Because the county’s pound reunited only a relative handful of animals with their owners and adopted out an insignificant fraction of the pets in their runs and cages, thousands would now die annually in its gas chamber unless a humane alternative was offered. Recognizing that need, the core members of the Madison County Coalition Against Pound Seizure, led by Ledy, filed the necessary papers with the Illinois secretary of state and the IRS to incorporate as a 501(c)3 nonprofit. The newly minted Madison County Humane Society then negotiated with the county board to run the pound’s adoption program by leasing space in the facility. Far too many animals still were euthanized by the county, but in the frequently contentious years of the humane society’s residence in the pound, many hundreds were spared and found new homes.

This arrangement with the county was always regarded as a stopgap, a marriage of convenience, and the arranged relationship between animal-control wardens and humane-society employees never quite warmed, with the emotional temperature often plunging to sub-zero. The long-term goal was a separate facility, which would vastly expand (and improve) the animal housing and allow for increased adoptions, but the humane society’s board of directors—with, yes, Ledy as president for most of its first decade—consisted entirely of the well-meaning, not the well-heeled, so the necessary fundraising stretched over nine frustrating years. Despite the challenges, including a fractious zoning dispute, the humane society eventually opened the doors of its own building—on a plot adjacent to the county’s pound—in September 1995. Two years later, the organization assumed a new name, the Metro East Humane Society (MEHS), to reflect the increasing scope of its service and influence.

During Ledy’s long tenure with MEHS, she spearheaded other battles on behalf of the area’s dogs and cats, including prolonged but ultimately successful struggles to change the euthanasia practices in the animal-control facilities of both Madison County and neighboring St. Clair County, forcing them to abandon barbarous gas chambers, with their slow, agonizing deaths, in favor of comparatively humane lethal injections. Expanding her reach beyond the local, she also became ever more involved with a large array of progressive humane organizations in both Missouri and Illinois.

All of that tireless and highly effective volunteer activity caught the attention of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), and in 1999 Ledy abandoned her amateur status and assumed a full-time role as an advocate for companion animals. Working as a lobbyist for the ASPCA, she helped pass humane legislation in multiple states, including more than 20 animal-welfare bills in Illinois alone. In 2009, Ledy joined Best Friends Animal Society, an organization based in isolated Kanab, Utah, but with an impressive national reach. As Best Friends’ senior legislative attorney, Ledy now concentrates most of her efforts on two nationwide initiatives: ending breed discrimination against pit-bull terriers and other unfairly demonized dogs, and protecting community cats through the promotion of trap-neuter-vaccinate-return.

•  •  •

At this point, you are surely thinking: “Enough with your wife’s résumé! What about those 13 dogs and 131 cats? And where’s that pig?”

I have emphasized Ledy’s accomplishments because the personal and the professional cannot be untangled in our lives: The staggering number of pets we have taken into our home directly reflects her tireless and frankly obsessive work on behalf of animals. I have perhaps underplayed my own part in this drama—I am a  co-founder of MEHS, serving on the board for 17 years, with multiple terms as president—but in animal matters Ledy is undeniably the instigator. I am merely the reluctant but pliable enabler.

To illustrate my subservient status, let me relate an origin story: the adoption of our first pet as a couple.

When we met, Ledy had recently lost one of her two dogs, the strangely named Muneigh (pronounced Mooneye). In those days of youthful irresponsibility, Ledy often allowed her dogs to maraud unfettered through the neighborhood, and Muneigh one day failed to return. Her remaining dog, the massive Dreidel, was a contrary, dumb-as-a-stone Newfoundland. Dreidel’s terrifyingly intense reaction to thunderstorms—she once chewed through a door’s wood frame, hurling herself through the glass to escape the apparently maddening confines of the house—would soon require her relocation to a farm (not a euphemism in this rare case), where she could live without constraint. For the moment, however, Dreidel was still resident and, from Ledy’s viewpoint, in need of a canine companion.

On the hunt for a new pup, Ledy opted to involve me in the process, and I attached some real significance to that decision. After meeting during Ledy’s first semester of law school—just before Thanksgiving in 1981—we had dated for only a few months when the seriousness of the relationship became clear. I did not propose till late the following spring—and we delayed marrying until August 1983 because of our mutual poverty—but both Ledy and I sensed early on the direction we were likely headed, and selecting a dog together appeared to signal a major step down that path.

I was particularly concerned with proving my pet-choosing mettle because I knew that a person’s attitude toward creatures, both wild and domestic, served as an in-or-out litmus test for Ledy. At some point on our first date, with seeming casualness, she asked me: “If you were an animal, what would you be and why?” I instinctively knew that this was not just kindling to spark a conversation: My answer would actually matter. So I stalled, insisting that I needed to give the question sufficient thought. On our next date, after a week of fretful mulling, I finally revealed my choice: a spectacled bear. Though I knew virtually nothing about the animal, I had long admired the slightly shaggy, sweet-faced bear on my visits to the St. Louis Zoo, and the “spectacled” part of its name appealed because I had only recently started wearing glasses and remained hyper-conscious of them. Ledy was impressed. She tended to dismiss men who identified with the usual signifiers of machismo—the lion, the eagle—and she appreciated that I had given her query a considered response.

But, as it turned out, I need not have worried. Ledy never intended to share any control over the adoption, and she had already visited the Collinsville Animal Shelter and pre-selected a puppy. Informed that my menial task was simply to hold the dog while Ledy drove, I trailed dutifully behind as we entered the pound. Strolling over to a run filled with puppies, Ledy pointed at the dog she had chosen: a little guy who had been rolled in excrement by his bullying littermates. Ostensibly a black Lab, the pup instead looked brown, covered nose to tail tip in feces. Aware that I would be cradling this funky beast for several miles, I gently suggested that the other puppies—essentially identical but blessedly poop-free—sure looked cute. “How about that fella?” I nudged. Ledy was unmoved—no one else would do—and after the paperwork was finished, I was handed the rank, wiggling critter and told to maintain firm control of him on the ride home.

As it turned out, once he had been delivered to the bathtub and scrubbed clean, the pup’s adorable nature was revealed, and Ledy even welcomed my participation in his naming—a ritual we would repeat hundreds of times in the coming decades. Dubbed Trotsky, he grew into a lovable but vexing escape artist, persistently jumping over or burrowing under fences to seek roistering kids with whom to play. (Unlike Ledy and I, Trotsky pined unrequitedly for children.) Although often exasperating, Trotsky was an irresistible sweetheart, and he lived with us for 14 gratifying but eventful years.

That future, of course, was still unknowable on the day of Trotsky’s arrival, but I was dead-certain that one indelible lesson had been learned: Where animals were concerned, Ledy would always decide. After raising a wan, ineffectual objection, I would grudgingly concede and proceed to clean up whatever mess resulted.

Do I need to tell you who tends to the cats’ six litter boxes every morning?

I thought not.

•  •  •

Early in our lengthy engagement, during Ledy’s second year of law school, we again visited Collinsville Animal Control in search of a dog. Ledy specifically requested the pound’s most needy and pathetic resident, and a scraggly, Benji-style terrier—soon named Keaton—joined the human-canine pack cozily denned in our small house. When Ledy and I married, Trotsky and Keaton comprised our nascent family—members so essential that, after a friend fetched them to the reception, the pair cameoed in a few wedding pictures.

Although the future addition of more dogs was envisioned—primarily by Ledy—cats honestly never figured in our plans. I had grown up almost entirely petless: My two siblings and I would haul an occasional “free to good home” puppy into the house in hopes of winning over my dog-opposed parents, but they never yielded, and we made do with a tiny, pitiable parade of turtles and mice. I received my periodic dog fix at the homes of friends, but with the sole exception of one of our next-door neighbors, almost no one we knew kept cats. And despite Ledy’s capacious embrace of all things animal—her undergraduate major was zoology—cats also remained largely alien to her experience. As a child, Ledy was in fact given a kitty, whom she clutched possessively to her chest and refused to put down, but a violent case of the hives erupted—she was allergic—and the cat was quickly dispatched to an unknown fate.

So we never sought cats. Cats found us.

The first—the seed that started an unchecked, kudzu-like sprawl—appeared during an arctic stretch of winter during our initial year of marriage. When we discovered a black cat trying to escape the sub-zero weather in our detached, unheated garage, rather than shoo away the frozen refugee, we plucked her from the outbuilding’s dirt floor and awkwardly hauled the squalling, squirming cat into the warmth of the house. She then regally assumed permanent residence.

Disney arguably ranked as the worst starter cat imaginable. Although she had lustrous, silkily soft fur, Disney seldom allowed petting—a single stroke was generally all she would tolerate before baring teeth and hissing with menace. She had clearly once been owned—all four paws were declawed, which somewhat diminished her threat—but Disney lacked people skills: She may have appreciated the roof and food, but our presence was barely tolerated.

Others might have been offended by Disney’s feline impersonation of Larry David, but we took a perverse delight in her curmudgeonly behavior, finding it more amusing than off-putting. With Disney having prised the door, a half-dozen more cats strolled through it over the next several years.

A few months after Disney’s arrival, while on a soda run to a nearby liquor store, I encountered a young, hungry brown tabby who scurried up to me and meowed seductively. Smitten, I tossed her into the car with a surprised Trotsky, who was riding shotgun, and brought home our second cat. To this day, Renoir—who lived to an ancient 21—remains my only contribution to the household menagerie, and Ledy soon reasserted her pet-acquiring authority by beginning to adopt no-room-at-the-inn cats from the newly formed and space-limited Madison County Humane Society. Those arrivals joined a pair of recent canine additions: Darwin, the first of our six (and counting) pit bulls, and Orson, a lanky, buff-colored stray who was running the neighborhood.

•  •  •

Four years in, our animal family had grown to just shy of a dozen, but the population bomb did not truly detonate until we purchased our current home on Collinsville’s outskirts: a nearly three-acre spread fronted by a creek and surrounded on three sides by woods and farmland. After moving there in December 1986, Ledy and I realized early in the following spring that we had squatters on the property: a colony of stray and feral cats, soon to be supplemented by a fresh litter of five kittens.

That discovery started our ongoing adventures in trap-neuter-return—known by the acronym TNR in the cat-nabbing trade. (Ledy, you may recall, now lobbies for the practice’s widespread adoption.) Aware that cats reproduce at a dizzying rate, we feared that the colony would mushroom if its members were not expeditiously spayed or neutered, so we set about corralling them. A few of the friendlier cats were easily handled, but most eyed us with studied wariness and stayed distant. Not yet equipped with humane traps—I doubt we even knew they existed—Ledy and I scattered food and hovered nearby when the cats wandered up to chow down. When one tucked into its meal with sufficient focus, we would lunge and make a flailing grab. A succession of bloodied hands and claw-raked arms resulted, but over several months we successfully sterilized them all.

Or so we foolishly thought. In truth, we had only established a breakfront for the first wave of cats, and a tsunami was to follow.

As the seasons passed, the forested plot behind our house provided a seemingly inexhaustible supply of strays, with new cats forever springing up in whack-a-mole fashion. More surreally, about seven years ago, the same woods disgorged a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. (Yes, the pig!) Left to forage for himself by distant and irresponsible neighbors, the pig had meandered over to our digs and found the steady supply of cat food to his liking. Ho Chi, as we waggishly called him, became our semi-permanent lodger, snoozing in massive mud wallows of his own making. When his ostensible owners abandoned him entirely by moving, we assumed the pig’s full-time care. Now more than 300 pounds, half-blind, and almost entirely deaf, Ho Chi lives in plush comfort in a built-to-order lean-to stuffed with straw.

Ho Chi notably excepted, cats and the occasional dog were our primary stock-in-trade, and the supply was not limited by the property’s boundaries. Our deep entanglement with the humane society ensured that Ledy had endless opportunity to take in the last-chance, hard-luck cases otherwise bound for euthanasia. She also developed an uncanny, almost superhuman ability to sense and spot abandoned dogs and cats as they scurried down sidewalks, crossed streets, crouched in fields and parking lots, or darted into abandoned buildings. Once a target wandered into her sights, Ledy locked on till she had tracked and bagged it, with dogs sweetly coaxed into her arms and cats cunningly lured into her traps.

With this steady influx of animals, our numbers skied to stratospheric heights in only a few years: At the population’s apex, an intimidating (if non-reproducing) swarm of 60 kitties—from untouchable ferals to sweet-tempered lap cats—roamed the house and property, the rubber flaps of our dog and cat doors swinging with metronomic regularity.

This was an admittedly worrisome juncture in our lives, but I should emphasize that we never crossed over into hoarder territory. Our house always remained clean—within understandable limits—and because the animals could freely access the outdoors and hole up in any room on three floors, visitors typically encountered only the most sociable of our cats. True hoarders—and we dealt with a few in our humane-society days—suffer from a Trumpian delusion: “I alone can fix it.” Believing that only they can properly tend to their vast collections of dogs and cats, hoarders refuse to give up control, tenaciously holding onto their animals as they starve, squat in filth, and suffer from untreated injuries and diseases. One sad case—a woman who somehow squeezed 88 dogs and 39 cats, most in cages, into her mobile home—would not even allow death to take her animals away: When the humane investigators and police officers raided the trailer, dead puppies and kittens were stored in the refrigerator’s crisper drawer under a side of bacon. I cannot deny that our own animal-besotted existence will strike many as borderline lunatic, but at least no one needs to fear what they will find when poking through our fridge.

Still, if Ledy and I escape a diagnosis of clinical insanity, our animal numbers do stupefy. Full confession: I cheated in citing 131 as our cat count because that figure—massive as it is—encompasses only the pets we actually remember. When I burrow further into the “Dog Bills” folder mentioned above, I find paper traces of another 50 or so cats. Although many of these kits received names, the rest were generically identified by the vet clinic as “wild cat” or “feral,” making an accurate total impossible but further ballooning our already plump sum.

Leaving behind spay/neuter records but no lasting mental imprints, these phantom cats flitted momentarily through our lives, disappearing on release and, somewhat alarmingly, vanishing from our consciousness. But if those 50 cats are long gone and now forgotten, the other animals who have filled our house remain firmly anchored in our minds.

•  •  •

Those hundreds of dogs and cats, despite their omnipresence, do not supplant family members and friends in our lives: We enjoy the company of people—critters, even the most loquacious of parrots, are limited conversationalists—and recognize the isolating dangers of an entirely animal-centric existence (the ghastly contents of the hoarder’s single-wide trailer serve as sobering evidence of that threat).

But our pets provide welcome respite from the complicated, often opaque demands of other human beings. They certainly express needs—yowling plaintively by empty food bowls, pushing head under dangling hand in an insistent bid for attention—but always with refreshingly unambiguous directness. And their affection similarly lacks compromise. Animals offer us pure distillations of love—and I do not hesitate to use that anthropomorphizing term—by curling into laps or leaning into legs, prancing with unalloyed excitement on our entry, and demonstrating their pleasure in our company with contented purrs, showers of licks, and deeply soulful stares. In a household as large as ours, the depth of relationships varies—some former strays remain forever wary and aloof—but especially tenacious bonds form with particular animals. Telluride, a pudgy black-and-white cat rescued from a well-trafficked state highway after a car shattered his pelvis like glass, is permanently Velcroed to Ledy, sleeping every night by her pillow, a paw often placed gently on her cheek.

Self-interest clearly does not motivate our care for animals, but we also benefit from a pragmatic perspective: Science suggests that playing with and petting cats and dogs appear to lower blood pressure and reduce stress by releasing the hormone oxytocin. Human interactions, to understate the case, seldom yield the same tonic results.

Not all of the thoughts are pleasant: Catch me in one of my darker moods, and I will loudly grouse. When slogging through the day’s pet chores—an hour-and-a-half of litter-sifting, feeding and watering, and medicating—or calculating the cost of the month’s vet visits and pet-food purchases, I can find the animals an oppressive burden. Through hard experience, I have also learned to accommodate myself to a general household entropy—it is unwise to become attached to any object, piece of furniture, or floor covering—and the low-level disorder that is our steady state sometimes escalates into a full-blown chaos.

What is more challenging, living with so many pets means dealing, again and again and again, with their deaths. With a dismaying regularity, the losses climb higher, but the coping never grows easier. Because we allow the cats the freedom to go outdoors—given our numbers, keeping them safely sequestered inside was never a realistic option—a few also annually go missing. The uncertainty of their destiny, in some ways, creates more distress than the finality of death. However long the odds—coyotes maintain a constant presence on the property—we persist in posting “Missing Cat” signs and calling out the names of the disappeared. Occasionally, our hope proves warranted. One of our early untouchable ferals, Avery, was among the first cats swallowed by the woods, and after a time we abandoned any prospect of her return. But three years later, Avery strolled down the hill with tail up in greeting. Now tame and pettable, she had clearly found another home. The reunion, however, was a tease: After a day, Avery scampered back to her new owners and was never again seen.

Avery’s story sustains us when yet another kitty fails to surface, but such absences are seldom temporary. After enough months pass, we reluctantly scratch through a name, and the cat list shortens. As I write, Smudge—a black-and-white tuxedo who is part of a litter known as the Ninjas for their deadly stealth—has been gone for four long months. Because she survived a previous walkabout, we have not added a funereal black line to that list, but the pen is hovering.

Natural attrition has now winnowed our family to a single pit bull—the charming Karma, a rescue from a major dog-fighting bust—and a scant 18 cats (Smudge still included). The ever-multiplying deaths and disappearances have exacted a psychic toll, but Ledy and I remain willing to pay that price in exchange for the ferocious and unconditional love we receive in return.

In fact, just last week, another cat walked through the door opened by Disney those many years ago. Cooder, an orange, one-eyed Tom with a personality as big as his melon-sized head, is currently No. 18 on the list, his name still un-alphabetized and written in pencil.

Four Paws Sake—the humane group that saved Cooder and persuaded us to adopt him—has not yet provided his paperwork. But when it arrives, I will tuck the vet and adoption records into that fat yellow folder, and years from now, when I examine them, they will summon Cooder’s memory.

And I will cry.