Furry felines center of controversy at county fairgrounds
Two feral cats sit in the sun outside a barn at the Washington County Fairgrounds earlier this month.
Several boxes filled with straw provide shelter for cats at the Washington County Fairgrounds.
Feral cats sit in the sun and eat and drink at the Washington County Fairgrounds earlier this month. Feeding stations and shelters are set up for cats living on the grounds by volunteer group Pet Search.
Cats eat and drink in a stall at the Washington County Fairgrounds earlier this month.
A feral cat at the Washington County Fairgrounds earlier this month
The cat population at the Washington County Fairgrounds has become a topic of controversy, but resolution of a simmering problem may be in sight.
The county-owned fairgrounds in Arden, Chartiers Township, has long been a dumping ground for unwanted pets, and since the 1990s, a handful of volunteers from a group known as Pet Search have been feeding, vaccinating and providing shelters for felines and having them spayed and neutered.
Cats aren’t the only animals living on the grounds. The fair board rents stall space to horse owners year-round with the provision that the equines must vacate stalls during the annual county fair in August.
But the Arden area includes a host of properties with various uses: light industrial, a landfill, the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, patio homes, agricultural acreage, suburbia and the Washington County Health Center.
And where once there were forests and farm fields, wild animals remain long after the character of their habitat has changed. A family of skunks twice sashayed through the midway this past summer, causing fairgoers to scatter. Raccoons crashed a private social function at the fairgrounds. And opossums have appeared with some regularity, along with mice and rats.
The availability of food has been identified as a factor in the presence of wildlife at the fairgrounds, and the fair board was ready to post the grounds with signs warning visitors not to dump cats or feed them. But the posting has been put on hold until the fair board can meet to discuss possible solutions with the volunteers who have been caring for the cats.
Washington County Commission Vice Chairman Diana Irey Vaughan, who said Thursday she has gotten “more inquiries and comments about the cats than on (property) reassessment,” sees as a potential solution the relocation of cats to other county-owned property.
“I’m hopeful they’ll be able to find another area close by,” she said. “We are the landlord. We don’t have the authority to say, ‘We’re changing this lease.’ We do have more property than what is being utilized by the fair board in that area.”
Sherry Knight, who with her husband founded the Pet Search organization, estimated there were hundreds of cats at the fairgrounds in the 1990s when a tenant contacted her with concerns that the felines were going to be eradicated by poisoning. Knight said without the cats, the fairgrounds would have “a rodent problem that was astronomical.” She asked for a year to deal with a problem that was not of her making, but was given three months.
Knight said in a phone interview that she found homes for 75 kittens and about the same number of adult cats that were comfortable with humans. Feral cats are so skittish that they flee when approached. She trapped 10 to 20 cats per week to have them spayed, neutered and vaccinated at no expense to county taxpayers or the fair board. Once the population was reduced, Pet Search has continued to care for fairground cats through what she called a homeless-cat-management team.
“This has been continuous since I first stepped in,” she said. “There are individuals from the community who have been feeding those cats over the years.” She estimated the current population at 40 to 60 felines.
“I’ve not spoken openly about this situation because I don’t want people to say, ‘I can dump my cats there.'” She said she has requested video surveillance from the fair board but was told her group would have to bear the cost. She estimated her group has already donated between $7,000 and $9,000 annually toward its fairground feline project.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot of money to some people, but for something nobody has laid claim to, it’s been a lot of blood, sweat and tears,” she said. “I understand the fair board doesn’t want the cats there. I will come up with volunteers and traps. I just need a place to release them. I will gladly relocate as many cats as I can, but I can’t make the cats magically disappear. I didn’t put them there.”
The group has set up feeding stations and shelters. Others she called “Good Samaritans” who are not associated with Pet Search and its efforts feed the cats on their own.
Fair board President Jay Bayer said last week he’s personally witnessed from the confines of the fair office someone driving to the fairgrounds 10 minutes before dark, dumping food and leaving.
Bayer said there’s a misconception among the public “that the fairgrounds sits idle 50 to 51 weeks.” It is a venue for weddings and receptions, banquets, sales of high-end cookware, fundraising cash bashes and speciality shows featuring seasonal crafts, gems and minerals, firearms and reptiles.
“Most of our events take place at night,” Bayer said. Constables on duty at one event heard a woman screaming and they first thought she was reacting to a nefarious person. It turned out to be an encounter with a raccoon and a skunk that were too close for comfort.
“The main issue right now is health and safety,” Bayer said. “We’ve all grown up with cats in our barns. We have to protect the safety and health of everything that goes on at the fair.”
High-priced racehorses boarding at the fairgrounds are required to be up-to-date with vaccinations, health screenings and veterinary certificates, as are bovines, swine, rabbits and poultry brought to the fair to compete with their peers.
A spraying skunk or rabid raccoon or opossum biting a fairgoer would keep people away from events in droves.
Raccoons seem to have wreaked the most havoc.
“During fair week it can be hard to control because you have garbage everywhere,” Bayer said, but normally wild animals seem to have lost their natural fear of humans.
The owner of a camper stored at the fairgrounds reported that a family of raccoons destroyed his vehicle. “It got bad enough this year that we decided not to store any RVs,” Bayer said.
About a month before the most recent fair, Bayer noticed something had gnawed through a wall and electrical wiring in the wool room of the lamb barn. He said he found “raccoon feces a foot thick” beneath the broken wires. Participants who were planning to show lambs at the fair agreed to repaint the wool room and while they were on the premises, a group of raccoons meandered in.
A few nights before the fair, Bayer said he shined a spotlight in a area behind the hog and dairy barns, illuminating “70 to 80 sets of eyes. Ninety percent were raccoons, of course.”
“How do we know what all these animals carry?”