Two feral cats are as good as dead this winter — because the city keeps forcing a Washington Heights landlord to tear down their shelter, the animals’ caretakers told The Post.
Tina Pedraza says her niece Brenda, 51, and mom Liette, 86, have been caring for alley cats Mama and Sunny for years, leaving out food daily and building them a modest shelter for when it gets cold outside the family’s West 180th Street building.
But Department of Health inspectors say the accommodations attract rats, and hit landlord Michael Vinocur with a $300 ticket for “food and furniture” in June.
Vinocur tossed out the cat shelter and Pedraza replaced it — a game of cat and mouse that has gone on for months.
Now the Pedrazas are worried the cats won’t survive the winter.
“They’re not disposable diapers for God’s sake — they’re living breathing beings! It’s just not right. Especially with the cold. They need [to be] in their box,” Tina Pedraza said.
Officials with the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals Feral Cat Initiative say shelters are crucial for cats to survive the city’s coldest months.
“Winter shelters are lifesaving things,” said the group’s education director, Kathleen O’Malley. “If cats don’t have a basement to go into, a purpose-built cat shelter will keep them from freezing. However, it is a property owner’s legal right to refuse to give permission to a cat caretaker to place shelters on their property.”
Vinocur says the Pedrazas were leaving a mess of cat-food cans and he was just following the city’s orders.
“It was gross. It didn’t seem worth antagonizing them over, and finally when the city instructed us to remove it, we removed it,” he said. “If the city were to give us written reassurance that they will not again cite us for the condition, we could reconsider.”
The Guardian Angels nonprofit offered to pay the fine, but Vinocur refused, saying Angels honcho Curtis Sliwa should find better things to worry about. “He supposed to be this vigilante fighting crime and he’s worried about cats,” Vinocur said.
Normally, there’s no law against leaving out cat shelters or food, according to city health officials — but the Pedrazas’ neighborhood is so rat-infested that the city has targeted it for special enforcement under its Rat Indexing program, officials said.“The building was cited in July during a follow-up inspection following a failed inspection in June. The inspector noted food sufficient to attract and sustain a swarm of rats and cited the property for those conditions,” Department of Health spokesman Michael Lanza said.
The building has passed 13 of 15 rat inspections since 2010. The only failing marks came in June and July over the cat shelter, according to the city’s Rat Information Portal.
Pedraza says Mama and Sunny take care of rodents just fine.
“This [building] is the only one that doesn’t have a rat problem, because of the cats,” she said.