Fur flies over fate of Hemingway's cats

Los Angeles: Animal welfare officials are demanding that cats that have roamed Ernest Hemingway's Florida home for decades be subject to laws that would require them to be locked up at night.

Nearly 50 "free range" felines, some descendants of the author's pet cat Snowball, have had the run of the Hemingway House and Museum in Key West for generations.

The animals are fed organic cat food and visited regularly by a vet. The cats have long been part of the museum and petted by the 300,000 tourists who visit each year.

Performance clause

But now the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants to classify the cats as performers, akin to animals in a zoo or circus, and require the museum to obtain an animal exhibition licence.

This would require staff to "protect" the cats from contact with visitors and lock them in cages after their daily "performance" ended when the house closed at 5pm, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"Our cats do not do tricks. They don't do flips and jump through hoops. They're our pets," Jacque Sands, the manager of the museum, told the newspaper. "They own us. We don't own them."

Complaint

The dispute originated with a complaint from two former members of the Florida Keys Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who said the cat population of the house was excessive.

They reported the museum to the USDA and a four-year legal battle ensued, pitting the museum against enforcers of the 1966 Animal Welfare Act.

Michael Morawski, the museum's chief executive, said he had been ordered to get a costly licence for the cats or face fines and also instructed to install an electric fence with a 15-foot mesh to stop the cats from getting out.

"It's absolutely ludicrous," he said. "Why does our 6-foot wall not count as containment?"