Cats at Hotel Grim face uncertain future amid renovation plans

A cat hangs outside the Hotel Grim in downtown Texarkana.
A cat hangs outside the Hotel Grim in downtown Texarkana.

For the cats who live there, renovation of the Hotel Grim would mean eviction-but not adoption.
As real estate developers and the city of Texarkana, Texas, get closer than ever before to reclaiming the once-luxurious, now-derelict hotel, its feline occupants face finding new homes elsewhere, anywhere except indoors with people.
What seems like dozens of feral cats, of all stripes and sizes, claim their territory in and around the Grim, visible day and night tussling with each other on the surrounding sidewalk, prowling an adjacent vacant lot and lounging on the building's windowsills.
The city and developer Jim Sari are close to securing public and private financing that would fund redeveloping the Grim into an apartment building with retail space on the ground floor. But before any work can begin, the building's new owners would have to deal with the cats.
"Rehoming them would be very difficult," said Jan Needham Price, founding president of Stray Cat Alliance Texarkana. The group advocates for unwanted cats in the city, finding foster and permanent homes for many. "Personally and professionally, I think they should leave them alone."
Cats like the Grim's-"city kitties," Price calls them-have never been socialized to living with humans, so they would be unsuitable as pets for anyone, she said. And besides, living downtown they provide the community a valuable, if unnoticed, service: rodent control.
Price recalled Texarkana's extreme rodent infestation of the late 1960s, which earned the Twin Cities a different nickname, Rat Capital of America. Rats reportedly attacked people in their homes, and the Texas-side health department hunted the rodents in an old hearse with "Rat Patrol" painted on the side, a 1969 CBS News television report, available on YouTube, shows.
Lack of city garbage-collection services caused that problem, so it would probably never get that bad again. However, Price said, without the Hotel Grim's cats and others like them constantly hunting mice and rats, a significant increase in the rodent population would endanger public health. It comes down to a simple choice,
she said.
"Which would you rather have, cats or rodents?"
If anything beyond shooing away the cats is to be done with them, Price recommends a trap, neuter/spay and return operation similar to one SCAT undertook on the Arkansas side. In that case, traps would capture the cats, veterinarians would prevent them from reproducing, and volunteers would return them to their urban habitat.
SCAT also has a "barn cat" program that finds unsocialized cats homes in places like warehouses and nurseries where people need rodent control. But that program is far too limited to accommodate all the cats that live in the Grim, Price said.
In any case, after the Hotel Grim's new owners clear out the cats, they should expect return visits from nostalgic, four-footed former residents, she said.
"They'll be back. There's just no way to completely eradicate an area of cats."

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