Manor Rd. man devoted to his cats

[attach]7196[/attach]Dennis Cbulka is on the porch when 10 Toronto Fire officials and a team of police officers arrive at 313 Manor Rd. East. The arrival of such a large group of uniformed officers is a familiar sight to the townhouse’s coowner and sole resident.

Peering through his taped-up yellow glasses, his tangled grey beard making him look older than his 63 years, Cbulka steps down from the porch where he’s slept with his dozen or so cats every night since Fire Services declared his home a hoarding-related fire hazard and boarded up the front door.

Officials have been coming back periodically since that day in March 2012 to inspect his home. As they do on this visit, they conclude he hasn’t cleared out enough refuse for it to be safely habitable. He curses the officers now, as he usually does, ordering them off his property.

The fire officials and police eventually leave, and Cbulka goes back to living on his porch, surrounded by tall stacks of boxes, newspapers, scratching posts, pet carriers and his beloved cats.

Cbulka has always lived at 313 Manor Rd. East. When his mother died in 2004 she left the townhouse and a substantial savings account to him and a sister he says he hadn’t seen in more than a decade. The sister tried to sell the property, he says, but as co-executor of their mother’s estate he refused. He continued living in the house without incident until 2009 or 2010 (he can’t remember which), he says, when a team from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre took him away for three days to assess his mental health.

He was discharged.

Cbulka tells the Town Crier he was already spending much of his time outside, even while he could freely enter and exit the house. He was keeping watch over his cats, in case people were trapping them.

[attach]7197[/attach]Toronto Animal Services volunteers and even a police officer have tried helping Cbulka reduce the number of cats he owns, often by offering to bring them to veterinarians for spaying or neutering. He refuses each time.

“It’s not natural,” he says, insisting that spayed or neutered cats gain weight and seem less healthy than other cats. “If it was a natural thing, Mother Nature would look after it, okay?”

Cbulka is angry at people who have trapped the cats and brought them to shelters. Some have ended up adopted before he could pay the licensing fees to get them back, he said.

Retired teacher Gillian Armstrong, a member of Spay Central Toronto activist group, says she first visited “poor Dennis” in August, and offered to leave her driver’s licence as a guarantee that she would return with his cats once they had been spayed or neutered.

Cbulka repeatedly calls her a thief, insisting that she stole two of his kittens. He scoffs at her explanation: that they were likely
victims of raccoons.

He doesn’t say where his first cat came from, but Armstrong says he told her it was “a poor, exhausted, elderly female,” owned by his mother.

Since Fire Services boarded up the entrance to his house, leaving only a cat door, Cbulka has piled his extra possessions in the porch, front yard and beside the house. He uses a bicycle to get around, borrows a neighbour’s cellphone when he needs to make calls and washes himself in the public washroom at a nearby park.

He spends much of his time and money taking care of his cats: grooming them and feeding them hot dogs. He played with them throughout each of the interviews with this reporter.

Dr. Stephen Avery, a veterinarian with Davisville Park and Leslieville animal hospitals, where Cbulka has brought his cats, says that “from what I’ve seen, he appears to be a good pet owner.”

“He’s always done everything recommended given the situation,” Avery says. “And he’s never had an issue with costs or pursuing treatments.”

While Avery would prefer if Cbulka’s cats were spayed and neutered, “there are some people out there that choose not to, for a variety of reasons,” he says, adding that he has to “respect the wishes of the owners.”

Occasionally Fire Services lets Cbulka into his house, he says, giving him the opportunity to collect the cats who enter but don’t
make it out.

“They do way more harm than I do, okay?” he says of Fire Services while showing the visiting reporter a box of dead kittens. “What am I going to do — burn down the whole block? “There’s no pilot light, there’s no gas to the house, the electricity was cut off by the fire department, okay? Yet they boarded it up, killed all those little kittens and allowed me to freeze out here for an entire winter.”

According to a Thursday, Aug. 15 letter, Fire Services will remove the boards from his home when a 1-metre area has been cleared from the house’s entrance and exits. A green dumpster sits in his driveway waiting for anything he wants to throw
out, but as of Saturday, Nov. 9 it remained empty.

Asked why he hasn’t removed any of the boxes from his porch, Cbulka says they’re full of food. “Where else am I supposed
to keep it?” he asks.

And then he starts to feed his cats, by shaking a bag of milk.