The Mini Town That's Home to 500 Cats

Craig Grant has constructed scale buildings for his feline friends on his 25-acre cat sanctuary called the Caboodle Ranch.

The pampered pussies have colourful houses, a police station, a city hall, a Wal*Mart and even a boating lake.



But amazingly, the Florida resident started out by not even liking the animals.

He explains: "I was renting a two bedroom condo by the beach with my son. Then my son moved out on his own for the first time.

"He left his cat, Pepper, with me because he couldn't take it with him. I didn't like cats but I agreed to keep him.



"I wasn't used to being alone and I guess Pepper wasn't either. We slowly began to get along."

Just as Craig was getting used to the company of one cat, he discovered Pepper was pregnant.

He says: "I thought, 'Oh great, now what?'. She had five kittens. I wanted to give them away because I didn't want my beautiful home destroyed, but my son told me they had to stay with their mother for 8 weeks.



"Over that time I learned that every cat had his own unique personality and it wasn't long before the kittens were swinging from my curtains. I didn't care. Something had changed... I didn't want to give them up."

Craig soon realised he would have to move out of his condo as he was drawing complaints from his neighbours. More shockingly he says: "I found a B.B. (bullet) lodged in the side of one of my cats and another was bitten by a pitbull that I know was set loose on purpose. Something had to be done."



He was able to find a rural area in Madison, Florida and began taking in more four-legged friends. He says: "I had taken in abandoned and stray cats from the neighbourhood and areas that I work as a contractor. I had 22 cats by the spring of 2004."

Since then the numbers of residents has grown into the hundreds as Craig has taken on strays and cats he finds in animal shelters.

He explains: "Caboodle Ranch is now a permanent sanctuary for cats who have been kicked around by heartless people. Some almost starved to death, some of them are wounded strays. I've seen many locked in cages for months in animal shelters and have taken in some of those too.



"Cats should be able to roam free, and at Caboodle Ranch, that's what they do. We are in the middle of 100 acres of wildlife. The cats follow me through the nature trails that I put in and maintain, they climb in tree forts that I've built and hide in underground dens I've dug for them."

Craig has all the cats spayed or neutered and ensures all shots are up to date. He funds everything himself and with the help of donations, even travelling the 250 miles round-trip from work many times a week to keep the sanctuary going. He has to put in 14-plus hours a day and sometimes gets help from occasional volunteers.

But visitors to the Caboodle Ranch shouldn't think they can drive away with a new pet as none of the cats are up for adoption.

Craig explains: "The reason the cats are there in the first place is that there were not enough homes. The cats at the ranch have their forever home now. We prefer people adopt cats from humane societies, animal control etc, where those cats are on death row and are in desperate need to be saved."

He Might Be an Alien

Gifford Florida

That thing in Dennis Schaller’s back yard off 45th Street looks like: A. A scaled-down version of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon from “Star Wars.” B. An Airstream trailer on steroids. C. A DeLorean sports car from the early ’80s on some really serious steroids. D. Absolutely nothing else at all.

“Most people think it’s a spaceship,” Schaller said of his silver creation that measures 56 feet long, 20 feet wide and 17 feet tall. “It was originally designed to be a hovercraft. Now it looks like it’s going to end up as a houseboat. I won’t live long enough to get enough money to make it a hovercraft — not unless I went back to work full time; and then I wouldn’t have the time to work on it.”

Given Schaller’s background, the spaceship guess isn’t so far-fetched. Schaller started building rockets when he was a kid. He made a solid-fuel jet engine in high school shop class and, at age 15, took first place in the engineering division of the 1960 Georgia State Science Fair for a rocket he’d built. He was a rocket engine mechanic in the Air Force before becoming an electrical engineer with North American Aviation, where he worked on several Apollo missions, including the Apollo 11 craft that landed on the moon, and the early Space Shuttle program. He’s lived in Gifford since 1989. That’s about the time he started working on his hovercraft/houseboat.

“It’s been a 20-year project,” the 65-year-old Schaller said. “So far.” At the center of the craft is a travel trailer Schaller found in the woods in Fellsmere and bought for $100. “I put a deck around the trailer, then a roof on the deck,” he said, “and then, well, it just kind of took off. Unfortunately, my dreams are bigger than my life is long and my pockets are deep.”

The vessel, for lack of a better word, is a mixture of the practical and the fanciful. The front door, for example, opens hydraulically like the alien spacecraft from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “Not being a rich man, I’ve had to build a lot of it out of junk,” he said, noting the lifeboat is made from a former acid dipping vat from the Piper Aircraft plant in Vero Beach and an old satellite dish. Schaller said he’d like to float the boat in Lake Okeechobee. “I’ve got two more years to go if I keep working steady every day,” Schaller said. “Of course, I’ve been saying ‘two more years’ for about 10 years now.”

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2009/aug/30/20-year-old-dream-taking-shape-in-back-yard/