Dusk is the best time to catch them, Petra Gearhart tells me as we drive into the abandoned Holiday Mobile Home Park off Interbay Boulevard in South Tampa. Her Isuzu truck bounces over the park's potholes, causing the stash of metal cages in the back to clang noisily together. As she nears one of the many dilapidated trailers, her headlights illuminate a few pairs of glowing eyes peeking out from under the homes.
Careful not to scare the creatures, she stops her truck, steps out and grabs two cages. She flips open two tuna cans and sets them inside the 2-by-4 enclosures, outfitted with a weight trigger. It takes only seconds for Gearhart's prey to creep from the shadows into the waning light. We stand motionless as they carefully move closer to the traps. Sometimes the process can take hours, Gearhart says, but tonight we're lucky: The animals' hunger overpowers their fear. A grey female steps in with one foot, then another, then her back foot and — CLANG!
Gearhart, South Tampa's foremost cat trapper, has her first feline of the night.
After scattering for a moment, the cats reappear. All of them look emaciated, most appear inbred. A pregnant grey female swipes at another black female, protecting her metal coop. The two cats screech, claw and scatter, only to return seconds later. I feel as if I'm stuck in some feline version of Gummo.
Gearhart puts out more cages and, one by one, the cats fall for the fishy treats. Except for the larger grey tabby. He bats at the tuna cans from outside the cages, but never dares go in. An aggressive male, he seems to be the leader of this brood of females. Instead of fighting to get him in a cage, Gearhart chooses to leave him.
"You have to use a little bit of caution with trapping," she says. "You don't know what kind of diseases that cat has. I can't risk getting hurt."
After spotting three kittens playing on a trailer's porch, Gearhart knocks on the door. Some of the residents of this park haven't left yet and she doesn't want to steal anybody's pets. An older woman cautiously steps out and, after greetings, says she has no claim to the cats. They belonged to another woman who left a month prior.
Gearhart asks if she can take the kittens. The woman obliges without really knowing where they're going. She isn't the only one who's uncertain.
"You can trap them, but then what?" Gearhart asks as she loads the seventh, and last, cat of the night in her truck.
Gearhart has been trapping cats for nine years, employing the sometimes-controversial method known as TNR: Trap-Neuter-Release. Proponents claim it's the best way to control cat populations without euthanasia, which they say would only allow another less stable cat colony to move in.
But the recent rise in trailer park development provides a new challenge for cat advocates: Once a park is marked for demolition, the animals cannot be returned.
"Usually what I do is come out, trap them, get them fixed and put them back," she says. "Here, I can't put them back."
In the last eight months, Gearhart has trapped up to 30 cats a month in four South Tampa trailer parks. Such parks have become massive feline breeding grounds, thanks to callous individuals who abandon their cats when they move and elderly residents who feed strays. As the parks empty, scores of pets are left to fend for themselves.
It's a situation that Dr. Mary Kessler Key, co-founder and president of No More Homeless Pets, is seeing more regularly.
"It's come to really much more of a head in the past eight years or so," the 20-year Tampa resident says, "and now it's rampant … There's this feeling that animals are very disposable."
But Gearhart, who does not represent any organization and buys trapping supplies herself, is trying to make some dent in the problem.
Earlier in the year, the South Tampa resident worked for several weeks trapping cats in a Gandy Boulevard trailer park and returning them. That particular park isn't under big development's gun yet, but Gearhart says it's just a matter of time. That's not counting another trouble spot, the Interbay Trailer Park down the road from Holiday that will close next month.
"It's just overwhelming," she says. "You try to go to the biggest fire first."
Right now that fire's smoldering at Holiday.
A few days later, Gearhart pays another visit to the park — this time during the day, without traps — and counts 12 cats spread out among three trailers. She knows there could be three or four times as many.
Even in the midmorning sunlight, the park looks ominous, its devastation recalling scenes of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Gutted trailers sit in large puddles, spilling out their insulation like intestines; graffiti threatens trespassers and curses the powers that be; looters drive through every hour, taking out bed frames, glass windows and anything not completely destroyed. Trailer by trailer, the cats are being pushed to the back of the park, while the rest of it crumbles.
"I guess this is it — the final stages," Gearhart says as we roll past a black cat sitting on the porch of trailer #319-6. The cat darts under the trailer, past a Hustler magazine discarded on the ground.
"I can't think of any good solution at this point," Gearhart says, tears welling in her eyes. "The best thing I can do is fix them so this next summer there won't be as many kittens."
Gearhart is feeling trapped herself. Her apartment complex will only allow her one cat. She knows every no-kill shelter is already bursting with strays and won't take anymore. Even the kittens, almost always considered adoptable, are being turned away. Most people who want a cat already have three. And you can't just dump cats anywhere, even if they are feral. For the first time in her trapping career, she does not know what to do. And she only has a limited time to find a solution: Sept. 18 is the deadline for everyone to be out of the park.
"Once the bulldozers come in and flatten everything, I'm sure [the cats] will be on their own."
Gearhart says the park's management told her they plan to call Hillsborough County's Animal Services to come in and trap the animals. But that would mean sure death to a group of cats already suffering from human callousness.
"Holiday trailer park is one of my worst-case scenario situations," she says. "There doesn't seem to be any solutions."
Recently, Gearhart received some good news: 10th Life Sanctuary, a kind of cat nature preserve in rural Clewiston, agreed to take 11 cats from the trailer park for free. It's a big deal, since they usually charge $400 per cat for lifetime care. So last week, she drove the nearly 200 miles through winding back roads of palm scrub forest with the incessantly meowing 11 cats in her truck. Her voiced cracked with hope; maybe some good would come out of this after all. In just the last few weeks, counting these 11 cats, she has trapped and placed 26. "But there's probably just as many still there," she laments.
Still, it's a start.
This article appears in Sep 13-19, 2006.