by Pete Schulte
Editor in Chief
For close to a year, a college visitor had called various locations on campus home. While she found places to sleep and often received food from strangers as they walked by the Galileo parking garage, her time on the streets has come to an end thanks to a college staff member.
Krystal Anton, recycling and waste minimization coordinator for the Center for Sustainability, learned someone had been living on campus for close to a year. After joining a group feeding the guest, she decided enough was enough. Anton brought a kennel to work with plans to capture the little black cat everyone had been so kind to.
“I didn’t want her to get pregnant, and I didn’t want her to get run over, so I started working with her … so she would let me touch her,” Anton said. “That took about three weeks. Then, one morning after the weekend, I went out there and she was really, really hungry. I put food down, and she dropped her guard, and I just grabbed her. I’d been carrying a cat carrier in my car for, like, two months, just in case. We were both completely surprised that it worked out.”
Anton’s goal was initially to take the cat to the vet, get her checked out and find her a new home. She took care of the cat’s ear mites and worms, and got her spayed.
“I was just going to wait until the stitches came out from her spay [to adopt her out], but it’s a love story,” Anton laughed. “She’s completely adorable. She has been staying in my guest bathroom. She’s perfectly happy in there. She sleeps in the sink — we have a bed set up in the sink. But she is super affectionate. She doesn’t like to be held, but if you take her into your lap and sit down, she’s fine. Recently, I ran into the deep cuddle bed thing, which is kind of like a cat pocket. She’ll go in there, and I can carry her around the house in that thing. I put her on the kitchen counter and she watches me make dinner, and then I take her in the living room and she sits on the couch. She reaches out of the pocket and she touches me.”
Instead of finding a new home for her, Anton found herself helping a new friend settle into her new home with Anton’s current cat and two dogs. While she had planned on getting another cat eventually and naming it Mosbius, this wasn’t to be for the quiet black stray, who landed the name Cricket.
“She’s very quiet, but when she does make a noise, it’s like this little chirping noise, and she likes to hide under things, so Cricket seemed a more applicable name,” Anton smiled.
According to Anton, a variety of faculty and staff members have been gracious enough to donate food to Cricket, something Anton is very thankful for. Mary Anne Matos, student, who had seen Cricket a number of times and stopped to pet her, is glad the cat went to a good home.
“I’m really happy, especially after knowing she had a bunch of mites and worms and stuff like that, that she was getting taken care of because I know outdoor cats don’t always live very long. It’s nice that she has a nice comfy home,” Matos said.