Cat’s wanderlust means fine for Glencoe owner
BY IRV LEAVITT ileavitt@pioneerlocal.com February 6, 2012 5:30PM
Mia the cat safely inside her Vernon Avenue home on Feb. 2 | Joel Lerner~Sun-Times Media
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Updated: March 10, 2012 8:31AM
Mia the cat is an envious little beast. Her master, Glencoe’s Steve Black, says he has seen that part of her personality on a few occasions this winter when she’s looking out their front-room window.
“What really gets her mad is when she sees other cats out there,” he said last week of the cat that’s shared his family’s home since 2008. “She starts hissing and meowing and trying to go through the window.”
It wasn’t always like that. Used to be, Mia had the run of the neighborhood.
No more. She’s been grounded. That’s because being picked up twice by the coppers has cost Black $335, and he never thought keeping a cat would be that expensive.
Last June, she got out during a big rainstorm. That incident cost $50 for a cat-at-large fine, plus $27 a day for five days boarding. Then, last fall, he was told two middle-school girls found his cat near his house, and they helpfully carried it three blocks to the public safety department. Charge: $100 fine, plus $50 for “a few minutes” of impounding.
The fines, he learned, double for each successive offense, until they reach $750.
Now he’s worried that Mia will sneak out, and run up another bill.
“They say keep the cat in the house,” he said. “You can try, but cats have a way of getting out.
“It’s not feasible to keep a cat in the house. If you have a cat that wants to get out, it will get out.”
Black says he knows now that he and his family might have shut down Mia’s I’m-a-cat-and-I gotta-get-out urges from the beginning, if they had realized what was at stake, and brought her up as a house cat.
“We hadn’t had a cat before,” he said. “We’ve been living in the village since ‘97, and we had a dog. We knew that dogs weren’t supposed to be let loose. But I never thought it was the same for cats.
“She wanted to go out, we let her out. She roamed around and came back.”
Black was championed at a recent Glencoe Village Board meeting by Joe Keefe, a humor writer and former stand-up comic who doubles as a Glencoe Trustee.
Keefe identified 12-pound Mia as “a terrifying menace to our community, threatening to make Glencoe an even more cuddly and lovable place.”
He noted that all pets are banned from roaming within Glencoe, and suggested that some might be exempted, or at least the penalties be reduced.
At his request, the village is now undergoing a review of the ordinance.
It is not, however, an unusual one in this area, according to Mike Volling, Glencoe’s chief of public safety. He said in preliminary research, his staff found high fines, stretching to $750, are the local rule and not the exception.
The general purpose for including cats in such ordinances are manifold. One is to prevent the wanton chewing of birdies, a favorite kitty sport. Another is to slow the spread of rabies.
Yet another is to slow the spread of feral cats, though that would not seem to involve Mia.
Humans stole her ability to generate more cats long before they took her freedom.
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