Lovable Ollie Finds a Home at Manchester International Airport After Workers and Vendors Come to His Aid

"Air crews give him a feed early in the morning and staff from the airport and its service partners look after him throughout the day. He's a big talking point around here. Everybody likes him."
-- Bob Molloy

No one is quite certain where Ollie came from before he arrived at Manchester International Airport. He could have gotten lost in transit, wandered in on his own, or been cruelly dumped there by a traveler unwilling to continue to care for him.

When he was first spotted by workers at the facility he was scraggly-looking and had lost most of his left ear in either some sort of fracas or accident. The officials could have taken the easy way out by calling in Animal Control which would have promptly trapped and killed the ginger tomcat. (See photos above and below.)

Instead they fell in love with him and decided to care for him. Now, he has all the food and water that he needs and even a cat box in which to sleep that has been appendaged to the side of the administrative office in Olympia House.

"Air crews give him a feed early in the morning and staff from the airport and its service partners look after him throughout the day," Bob Molloy of Olympia House told the Manchester Evening News on November 20th. (See "World Fame for Airport Cat.") "He's a big talking point around here. Everybody likes him."

Molloy's coworker, Hazel Williams concurs. "He's a very special cat and a lucky one, too." Retailer Jane Barber, who brings him biscuits, describes him simply as a "lovable cat."

He is in fact so popular that a sandwich delivery man even feeds him and workers come in on their days off in order to ensure that he has food and water. Thanks to having his own page of Facebook, he also receives food parcels from as far away as Paris, New York, and Chicago.

Manchester International's kind and considerate care of Ollie stands in stark contrast to JFK's ongoing roundup and systematic slaughter of its cats. (See Cat Defender post of November 5, 2007 entitled "Port Authority Gives JFK's Long-Term Resident Felines the Boot and Rescue Groups Are Too Impotent to Save Them.")

It is conceivable that officials at Angleterre's fourth busiest airport would be considerably less sympathetic if they, like JFK, were dealing with dozens of homeless cats as opposed to only Ollie; nonetheless, the Port Authority's (PA) failure to recognize the inalienable right of all cats to go on living is inexcusable. Humane solution are readily available but the brutes at the PA are only interested in killing cats.

Named in honor of Olympia House, Ollie has enriched the lives of everyone who works at the airport and that is a sentiment that is without doubt shared by the caretakers of JFK's cats. Regrettably, the PA has instituted a feeding ban on those cats remaining at the Queens facility and is threatening to have violators prosecuted. (See Queens Chronicle, November 21, 2007, "Rallying Animal Activists: Change Cat Policy at JFK!")

Photos: Manchester Evening News.