Ully to the Rescue of Bandung’s Unwanted

Jakarta Globe, Yuli Krisna, May 25, 2014

Yulita Rosa Rangkuti has a love or cats that consumes her life — and
most of the space in her home. (JG Photos/Yuli Krisna)

It’s an unassuming home, like any of the others here at Bandung’s Sapta Taruna housing estate, until you get close enough to hear the cats — more than a dozen of them.

Every morning, homeowner Yulita Rosa Rangkuti and her husband Anwar Siswadi go through a daily routine that revolves around the 20 cats and kittens that inhabit the 36-square-meter home, one of just a handful of “cat orphanages” in the country.

Anwar prepares the food for the felines: boiled chicken heads, diced and tossed with an assortment of vegetables. The cats are then divided before they can begin chowing down, based on how fast they can finish their meals.

“If you put them all together, the cats that finish faster will start eating the food of the slower-eating cats,” Anwar says.

While her husband tends to the meals, Yulita, better known as Ully, cleans out the cardboard boxes that the cats sometimes sleep in. There’s only one cage in the house, and it’s used only to isolate the cats that tend to pick fights with others.

But that rarely happens, Ully says, and most of the time the cats are free to roam the house and the front and back yards.

With so many sharp claws in the house, Ully and Anwar try to have as little furniture as possible. There are only three rooms in the tiny house; one has been converted into a nursery for cats with newborn kittens. Another room functions as a quarantine area to isolate cats with contagious diseases. The third room is Ully and Anwar’s bedroom.

Ully says she began keeping cats as pets when she was in university. Over time, what started out as a hobby turned into an obsession to rescue abandoned cats.

She soon realized that cat owners in Indonesia often threw away newborn kittens because they didn’t want to have to raise more pets. Often the kittens die, deprived of their mother’s milk and unable to look for their own food. There are also older cats, abandoned by their owners after falling ill or losing limbs in accidents, and cats that are physically abused by their owners.

“I feel sorry for them. What makes it particularly bad is that these animals are voiceless. They can’t fight for their rights as living being. They have a right to a decent life,” Ully says. “If no one rescued, them they would surely die.”

Ully reckons she has rescued hundreds of cats since her university days. “I once rescued a Persian cat that was suffering from hemorrhoids. The cat was abandoned by its owner at an empty house,” she says.

Before long, Ully and Anwar’s rented house became an unofficial cat orphanage, funded entirely by the couple. Ully says they spend more than Rp 1.5 million, or $130, every month on food alone — and that’s before the vitamins, medicine and trips to the veterinarian.

But Ully says she has plans for an even bigger orphanage someday, serving as a center where people can go to hand over cats they no longer want. She also wants a place where individual rescuers like her can gather and share information.

“I want all these individual rescuers to work together and manage [the center] together on things like finding funding solutions and handling administrative duties,” she says.

This being Indonesia, it didn’t take long for Ully to meet up with like-minded cat lovers — online, of course, through the Facebook group page for the Bandung Domestic Cat Club, or PKDB, which connects not only cat lovers and rescuers but also people keen to make a change for the better in the felines’ lives.

One such person is Hunaida, who has been a member of the group since 2012. A student at the Bandung Institute of Technology, or ITB, Hunaida is currently nursing 10 abandoned cats while also getting her friends to take part in activities like “street feeding,” where volunteers meet every week to feed stray cats in a given part of the city.

There’s also a “cat sterilization day,” a regularly scheduled event for the PKDB, which offers cat owners with a cheap way to sterilize their cats to prevent overpopulation and reduce the number of strays and abandoned cats.

Ully takes pride in her work, not only in saving cats but also getting others to share her passion. She says that before Anwar met her, he wasn’t a cat person.

“When he asked me to marry him I told him that he had to accept my cats as well,” she says.

But soon after they wed in 2008, Anwar asked her to stop bringing home more abandoned cats.

Ully says she tried, but it was hard for her to see abandoned or unwanted cats and kittens and not do something to help them. Soon she was filled with remorse.

“I could never stop thinking about [the cats] if I just left them where they were,” she says. “The least I could do is to observe them. Were they able to feed themselves? Were they safe where they were?”

Just as she felt she could no longer take the torment, Anwar stepped in — although not to say she could start bringing cats home again.

“It was him who showed up with an unwanted cat,” Ully says, laughing and pointing at Anwar.

And so the benevolent cycle of rescuing cats was continued, and a new believer was born.