By Tori Marlan
Many of her neighbors there were elderly, and as she got to know them, she became increasingly concerned for their welfare. “Several of them had very serious problems,” Binder recalls. “They should have been in some kind of retirement home or assisted-living situation. But they all said, ‘What would happen to my animals?’” So she began helping them walk their dogs and change their cats’ litter boxes.
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She developed a close friendship with one neighbor, an arthritic woman who had been feeding stray animals for 30 years. Eventually it became too difficult for the woman to bend over to put out food, and one fateful day in 1983 she called Binder, distraught. “There’s a little white ball of fur under my back stairs,” she said. “What am I going to do?”
Binder was dumbfounded. She’d believed that her work with the elderly and the animals was a direct application of her religious teachings–she was caring for God’s creatures, after all. But the church didn’t see it that way. “According to the theology, if you’re not a human or an angel you don’t count,” Binder says. “Animals are below people, and they were put on earth to serve people. Well, I don’t believe that at all. It says in the Bible that God created all things in his image and likeness, and certainly all living things reflect the image of God. Cats speak to us so much–of gentleness, of patience, of loyalty, of caring, of needing one another, of cooperating.”
Her own home is a cat’s paradise. Though the animals roam freely on both floors of the house, the upstairs is completely given over to carpeted climbing structures and cages for the new, sick, and nursing. The backyard also belongs to the cats: Binder built them a large screen house, which they enter via a ramp connected to the sunporch. The sunporch used to be Binder’s office, but now it houses bulk bins of cat food and litter, cat dishes, and seven litter boxes. There are also litter boxes in the bedrooms and the dining room; there are nine along the west wall of an alcove upstairs, which Binder refers to as the “necessary room.” Binder’s bookshelf is lined with such titles as Cat Angels, Ways of Drawing Cats, What Is a Cat?, and Tales to Read Aloud to Your Cat.
Even so, the money goes fast. Binder’s vet bills average $1,000 a month–she has a standing appointment every Tuesday at the Arlington Cat Clinic in Arlington Heights, which has allowed her to run up a tab that now hovers around $2,000. Food and litter, when they’re not donated, also average a grand a month. When the occasional caller wants to take a cat off her hands, she asks for an adoption fee of about $100 as reimbursement for the cat’s initial vaccinations, flea bath, feline leukemia and FIV tests, and spaying or neutering. But if she feels sure the person will give the cat a good home, she’ll often take whatever they offer.
