A colony of feral cats trapped inside an abandoned day car have been hauntingly meowing out for help – but activists claim they’ve been told the felines have already been evacuated.
A squad of volunteer rescuers has corralled three of the felines during two separate moments they were allowed access into the shuttered childcare center at the Sheepshead Bay New York City Housing Authority complex’s childcare center.
The rescues came after NYCHA insisted there were no kitties locked inside the closed center, activists said.
“Basically, they don’t care about the cats,” said Olga Hudyno, who has worked as a trap-and-release rescuer for five years under her organization Midwood Cats. “They just wouldn’t open the doors, they wouldn’t do it for us. Their main idea is that, ‘there are no cats inside.’ We saw them. We heard them.”
The back-and-forth began on July 25, when a regular cat feeder noticed that the center’s gated windows had been tightened and holes at the base of the building had been filled to stop the felines from slipping in and out.
But there were still feral animals inside when they closed everything up.
As many as 13 cats were trapped in the Beachbrook Therapeutic Nursery School, which has been shut down for the past two years, and were screaming to be released.
The cats were left without any exit points, food or water, and were trapped during a sweltering heat wave, the activists told The Post.
“It was horrible. It was horrible,” said Miriam Melendez, a 20-year-old Sheepshead Bay resident whose windows overlook the nursery. “They just kept crying, it was constant. There was nothing we could do, and they couldn’t get out.”
NYCHA allegedly told the rescuers that they wouldn’t be able to access the nursery because it was being leased to a private tenant, but then did an about-face and revealed their intent to “smoke them out” — a practice that is widely discouraged as cruel for deterring felines.
The housing agency finally began taking action after social media videos of the trapped cats sparked widespread rage.
NYCHA confirmed to The Post that it had gained access to the building on Monday after coordinating with the site operator and had “located and safely removed two live, unharmed cats.”
“NYCHA has also installed a video monitoring camera for additional observation,” spokesperson Michael Horgan said, adding that the staff had continued to place food and water inside.
“The Authority, in coordination with the relevant and responsible city agencies, continues to monitor the space and conduct regular searches to locate and safely remove any cats that enter the location.”
NYCHA officials allegedly told the rescuers several times that cats had been cleared out, but tenants and activists continued to hear cries and see the felines begging at the windows.
“Every day they’ve been saying, ‘no more cats.’ I begged to go inside, they wouldn’t let me go inside,” said Suzanne Hernandez of Strays in Our City, who said she received multiple videos of cats still inside from concerned tenants who alleged that “NYCHA was lying.”
“This could have been over in a day if they let us in to help.”
The activists took matters into their own hands and, with permission from the nursery operator, finally entered the site on two occasions since Wednesday, both times leaving traps. They have caught three cats since.
They believe at least three others are still inside hiding in the dilapidated center’s crevices, vents and cat-made tunnels — a tuxedo and two tabby cats seen in videos have not yet been recovered, they said.
The rescuers feel confident that the story is close to having a happy ending this time around, but emphasized the incident is just a microcosm of the animal abuse within NYCHA complexes.
“It’s a systematic issue. It did not just happen this past week. NYCHA, it’s a nightmare,” said Hudyno.
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