Last Updated on May 29, 2026 by admin
Ninety-seven cats came out of one trailer in Hampden County, Massachusetts.
The first one in the carrier was a six-year-old dilute calico they are calling Clover.
The trailer is in Wales, a town of about seventeen hundred people in the southeast corner of the county. The Sheriff’s Office had been doing wellness checks on a homeowner there for about a year. There were complaints from neighbors about the smell, which was not new, and about a single cat sitting on the roof at all hours, which was. The roof cat is now in the Westfield Regional Animal Shelter’s intake room, where she does not yet have a name and where a volunteer named Rosa Halverstedt has been hand-feeding her warmed Fancy Feast in fifteen-minute increments because her teeth are not in a state where she can chew anything bigger than a pinky-tip portion.
The homeowner is sixty-one. She is not being charged. She has, according to the Sheriff’s Office statement, signed all ninety-seven cats over voluntarily and has been moved by adult protective services to a sister’s home in Holyoke.
Clover was the first cat out because Clover walked into the carrier. She walked in like she had been waiting for the carrier. She walked in, the intake report says, with her tail up.
The intake report — which the shelter’s director, Margaret Tully, posted to the shelter’s Facebook page in a four-photo carousel last Wednesday night — describes Clover as: female, dilute calico, intact, approx. 6 years, weight 6 lbs 1 oz, BCS 3/9, eyes clear, ears clear, dental grade 2 (mild), URI negative, FIV/FeLV negative, microchip negative. Notes: walked into carrier without prompting. Sat. Looked back through the cage door. Did not vocalize.
Margaret has been the director at Westfield Regional for eleven years. She has overseen the intake of two prior hoarding cases — a forty-two-cat trailer in Russell in 2021 and a sixty-eight-cat split-level in West Springfield in 2023. She says, in the same Facebook post, that Clover is the first cat in her career who has walked into the carrier like she was the one in charge of the operation.
The other ninety-six are not so easy.
Twenty-four are in URI isolation, breathing through humidifiers and being syringe-fed antibiotic suspensions. Eleven are pregnant. Nine are kittens under six weeks, two litters too young to thrive without their mothers, who are also at Westfield Regional in adjoining kennels. Three are seniors over fifteen, two of whom are likely terminal — one with renal failure, one with a mass on the spleen that Margaret has not yet decided how to handle. The remaining forty-eight are a mix of feral and semi-feral adolescents and young adults who will need foster placements with experienced cat handlers before they can even be evaluated for adoption.
Westfield Regional is not equipped to hold ninety-seven cats. Westfield Regional is, on a good day, equipped to hold twenty-six.
Coalition partners across western Massachusetts have stepped in: Dakin Humane Society in Springfield (taking nineteen), Berkshire Humane in Pittsfield (taking eleven), TJO Animals in Worcester (taking eight), Forever Paws in Fall River (taking six). The MSPCA in Boston has agreed to take the two splenic mass and renal failure seniors for end-of-life hospice. The pregnant queens are being placed with experienced foster homes in the Westfield, Springfield, and Northampton areas through a coordinated foster network Margaret built over the last seventy-two hours by calling every contact in her phone, twice.
Clover is still at Westfield Regional. She has a kennel of her own now — the volunteers moved her because she has, on day three, decided she does not appreciate sharing the intake counter with seventeen other cats. She sleeps in a folded fleece. She watches the door. She has not yet been listed for adoption because Margaret says: I want to see who she picks. I think she is going to pick. I think this one knows.
If you are in western Massachusetts and you have ever thought, even once, about a six-year-old dilute calico who walked into a carrier with her tail up, Westfield Regional Animal Shelter is at 178 Apremont Way in Westfield. Their adoption hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
You do not need to bring anything. Clover already brought everything. She brought herself.